Yesterday’s class focused on a review of the sample student essay and annotated bibliography “The King of Storytelling,” an exercise that should continue to serve as a guide for you as you develop and revise your own essay and bibliography.
The notes that follow address points of content and form, some that we addressed in class, others that we didn’t. As you continue your own research and writing, revisit these notes.
Content
- The essay’s introduction does fulfill its basic requirements: It addresses the writer’s purpose for compiling it, clarifies what drives the research and what interests the writer in the subject, and also states what questions the writer seeks to answer.
- The body paragraphs of the essay do include a minimum of two quotations from two of the five sources; however, the student does not mention all of the sources in the body pargraphs. In the introduction, he lists the five sources, but two of them are simply referred to as “two other articles” (par 1).
- The student misses the opportunity to draw on lines from “Strawberry Spring” as examples of the writing strategies that King recommends. In the third and fourth paragraphs, the student mentions King’s advice to avoid using adverbs that end in ly and to avoid passive voice but offers examples of neither.
Consider again the examples that I projected on the screen:
- “‘He got another one,'” someone said to me, his face pallid with excitement” (273).
- “He got another one,” someone said excitedly.
The first sentence, which is King’s, is more effective than the second one because the ly-ending adverb “excitedly,” which modifies the verb “said,” contributes virtually nothing to the story or to the reader’s experience of it. “Excitedly” is abstract; it isn’t something readers can see. They can, however, see a “face pallid with excitement” (273), an image that indicates that the speaker’s heightened state of emotion isn’t all together pleasant since “pallid” is a paleness associated with illness.
- Springheel Jack . . . “I saw those two words in the paper this morning” (269).
- Springheel Jack . . . Those two words in the paper this morning were seen.
- Springheel Jack . . . Those two words in the paper this morning were seen by me.
The first sentence, which is King’s, is more effective than the second and third ones because it is written in active voice. Because the narrator is performing the action in the sentence, seeing the words in the paper, readers are looking over his shoulder, seeing the news story for themeslves. In the second sentence, no one performs the action. In the third, the narrator is present but is the recipient of the action. Both the second and the third sentences distance the reader from the narrator, making them passive observers of a passive narrator.
Including such examples would enable the student to enhance his essay in several ways: (1) he would demonstrate his understanding of active voice, passive voice, and ineffectual ly-ending adverbs, (2) he would illustrate how King draws on his own writing advice in his fiction, and (3) he would synthesize information from a secondary source (Marc Hye-Knudsen’s “How Stephen King Writes and Why”) with information from a primary one (Stephen King’s “Strawberry Spring”).
Such enhancements are always the products of revision. Only after rereading your sources and annotating them can you begin to see how they complement one another.
Form
The parenthetical citations include only the author’s last name, and in some cases only part of the last name. The only quotation that should not be followed by a parenthetical citation is the one from the student’s interview with his classmate.
The bibliographic information for two of the three scholarly sources is incomplete and the entries are marred by errors of mechanics and style.
- Wherever the parenthetical citation (Knudsen) appears, the student should have replaced it with a (Hye-Knudsen 8) or (Hye-Knudsen, par. 12), depending on whether the source is paginated. Additionally, if the words are actually Stephen King’s, the student should attribute those words to him with a parenthetical citation for an indirect quotation: (King qtd. in Hye-Knudsen 8) or (King qtd. in Hye-Knudsen, par. 12).
- Neither the bibliographic entry for Brown’s article or Hye-Knudsen’s includes the title of the journal where the article was published. The absence of the titles coupled with the absence of page or paragraph numbers in the parenthetical citations may lead readers to wonder whether the student actually accessed and read the articles or simply read abstracts or excerpts. More troubling than the omission of the journal names are the references to Brown’s short article as a book. No careful examination of a text would lead the reader to conclude that it’s a full-length book if it’s only a few pages long.
Next Up
Tomorrow you will have the class period to continue your research and writing. Although you will be working on your laptops and tablets, you will still be required to submit a handwritten exercise at the end of the class period. It will consist of a bibliographic entry for a source that is not one of the articles distributed in class; in other words, one that you have located on your own. To ensure that you have ample time to complete your bibliographic entry–including the publication information, the summary, the commentary, and the author’s credentials–give yourself a head start by completing part of the entry before Wednesday.
Some of you have probably located an additional source on your own and drafted a bibliographic entry for it. If that’s the case, you will simply have to transcribe it for tomorrow’s exercise, which means that you will be able to devote class time to locating, reading, and/or taking notes on additional sources.
Jane Lucas 