Teaching Students to Remain Authentic
No matter what personal experience students present in their writing, we need to ensure an authentic and rhetorically appropriate voice. As Kolln explains, “Clearly, it’s the rhetorical situation--the topic, the purpose, and the audience--that determines the tone” (108). One way to develop the writer’s voice, according to Kolln, is through metaphors. This comparison, in addition to being aligned with the rhetorical situation, should make “the reader stop and think about the topic in a new way” (120).
Therefore, another engagment opportunity for students includes listing out the metaphors they come across in the text. The close reading needed, the attention to detail, will contribute to their insights about how a writer structures a text. Again, instead of completing an inventory for the entire essay, students can focus on one section and even count the number of sentences between each metaphor to uncover another structural element.
In Coates’s essay, we encounter metaphors such as these:
“To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease.”
“But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can protect you only with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or succeeded at something much darker.”
“There the boy stood, with the gun brandished, which he slowly untucked, tucked, then untucked once more, and in his small eyes I saw a surging rage that could, in an instant, erase my body.”
“That year I felt myself to be drowning in the news reports of murder.”
“I was aware that these murders very often did not land upon the intended targets but fell upon great-aunts, PTA mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful children—fell upon them random and relentless, like great sheets of rain.”
Through this exercise, students can begin to articulate how one metaphor connects to the next and to others. I might ask students (after they identify the specific metaphor and the two elements being compared) to explain how “to be naked before the elements of the world” connects to “the club of criminal justice” and the possibility of having his body erased which has some connection to “drowing in the news” and murders that fall “like great sheets of rain.”
This could take us to a dark place. But it’s a real place for so many young men of color. Understanding the structure of this piece can lead young people of all backgrounds to profoundly understand race relations in this country and move beyond the superficial response I got from students: “Yeah, there’s racism. We know.”
Ultimately, we want students to understand that they should present their nonfiction, as Zinsser explains, “with vigor, clarity, and humanity” (99).
But not everything needs to remain somber.
In Lars Eighner’s “On Dumpster Diving,” we experience the reality of someone who describes himself as a “scavenger” (14) who considers this “a sound and honorable niche” even though he recognizes he “would naturally prefer to live the comfortable, consumer life, perhaps--and only perhaps--as a slightly less wasteful consumer” (14) because of what he learned scavenging.
Eighner presents the experience of being homeless and suriving on what others throw away not only in a light-hearted way but in an expert one. His writing quickly takes readers to the second question of “What does it reveal?” as we begin to understand--in this context--he is the expert, we are the naïve ones.
In addition to the learning experiences mentioned above, students can engage with the structure of this text by considering the shifts in the writer’s tone. The elements of humor embeddded in the cohesion, repetition, logos, ethos, and pathos can be highlighted. In some cases, the writer inserts casual expertise as when he educates us that “most forms of food poisioning seldom do lasting harm to a healthy person, but botulism is almost certainly fatal and often the first symptom is death” (15). Other times, the writer interjects a more developed use of humor as in the entire paragraph where he describes his dog Lizbeth’s “pas de bourée” when she notices fire ants by a dumpster as they scavange.
After students identify the uses of humor--in this or any other essay with humor--they can examine what the essay reveals and why this matters by, first, illustrating a few of the humorous passages. Then, they copy the sentence or sentences from the essay that describe the situation humorously. After that, they write their own serious caption of the illustration without the humor.
Finally, they can compare and contrast the rhetorical affect of using humor or not. They will hopefully uncover how the humor in Eighner more effectively encourages contemplation of the writer’s public point against middle-class consumerism. The humor builds the writer’s credibility and increases the reader’s engagement because it’s not a lecture. Instead of running the risk of grossing out readers with the situations scavengers experience, the writer decreases the level of discomfort with humor. While students will probably not accept the scavenger lifestyle, they’ll begin to understand how to contemplate the implications of consumerism.
Students can begin to understand what Zinsser says about humor allowing us to “help us look at far older problems of the heart, the home, the family, the job and all the other frustrations of just getting from morning to night” (212). But, Zinsser cautions us not to “strain for laughs; humor is built on surprise, and you can only surprise the reader so often” (213).
A good exercise for any text that incorporates humor is to revisit the the classic rhetorical triangle. What’s the relationship between the writer and the subject? In Eighner’s essay, he lives this reality. What’s the relationship between the subject and the reader? Most students have probably not experienced scavenging as a way of survival. Still, we need to be sensitive to the realities of students who might have. What’s the relationship between the reader and writer? Can we trust the writer? The experiences Eighner presents should help students find the writer trustworthy. Finally, what’s the subtext? What change does the writer want to promote? Here, Eighner wants us to reconsider consumerism. That’s a well-grounded, socially responsible request.
“On Dumpster Diving” also opens up opportunities to help students examine the structure of humor when it fails. Responses to the questions above should help students understand why some topics should not be joked about.
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