Welcome to Succinct Obfuscation! I began this blog for an earlier class on digital relations and am recycling it for English 450.
Assignment 1: On Pre-Writing
I actually learned the most about pre-writing from my A.P. history teached in my junior and senior years of high school because his duty was to prepare us, not necessarily good English students, to write three rapid-fire essays in an hour and a half after a grueling standardized test. My past English teachers has given us standard pre-writing instructions that I still use for longer papers, typically tiered lists working downward with Roman numerals.
But this teacher taught us what remains to this day my favorite system of quickly and efficiently plotting an essay. I have used his method as a starter for long papers and routinely in times writes in every conceivable class. He times us, two or three times a week, with mock prompts and asked us for our best outline in three minutes. Everything we wanted to touch on, laid out in a basic list outline. The items we came up with were very big-picture, which was hugely helpful. The minutia came later, as we wrote the actual paper and the original, sketchy structure kept the paper from seeming too stream of conscious.
This method works well for me when I am stuck or suffering from writer's block because it ignores the finer points my other teachers stressed, like specific commentary on my points, in favor of a broad, skeleton outline that helps me to organize my thoughts. Once those thoughts are down on paper it becomes much easier to separate and organize my other ideas around them and then the entire essay seems to simply fall into place.
I like this method best because it is the most simple explanation I have encountered for organizing your ideas, probably because this teacher didn't expect us to like writing, or want to hear more about style and format. He wanted to give us the simplest possible tool for essay construction and because of its simplicity it has served me well ever since.
Question from the assigned reading:
What aspect of love as a motivator makes it a less deliberate fault to be lead astray? Why is it that if Helen abandoned her country for love she is still less at fault than if she left for another, equally deliberate reason? Obviously even in love she made a decision to run away with with Paris (as opposed to the rape-and-kidnap theory), so what makes her betrayal less stinging if it was done with love?
