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Tortoise Tuesday: Orientation and Key Terms in Bombshell

BY Writing Center

I recently saw the movie Bombshell, a dramatization of the events surrounding the charges of sexual harassment raised by several woman against former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. As I watched Bombshell, I was struck by how the filmmakers used techniques like orienting and key term definition to structure the film.

The opening sequence of Bombshell, narrated by then-anchor Megyn Kelly (played by Charlize Theron), orients viewers to the world of Fox News as represented in the film. Kelly guides viewers around the building, pointing out the different studios and teams at work. Kelly uses a visual aid, a model of the skyscraper in which the studios are located; certain floors on the model light up as she explains what is located on each floor. This sequence orients the audience to the structure of Fox News, just as a good writer orients readers by forecasting the paper’s structure and laying the groundwork for the “world” (of arguments, scholars, texts, etc.) to be explored in the paper.

In addition to orienting us to Fox News through Kelly’s tour and commentary, this opening sequence defines several key terms that appear later in the movie. For example, Kelly tells viewers that “the second floor” means Ailes, as the CEO’s office is located there. This key term definition primes the audience for later scenes when employees are told “the second floor is calling” or “the second floor wants to see you.”

Importantly, orientation and key term definition in Bombshell are not limited to the first scene. Over the course of the movie, as new characters are introduced, their names and roles (such as “Fox news anchor” or “wife of Roger Ailes”) appear on the screen beneath them. This strategy of visibly identifying characters as they appear mirrors another strategy of good writing: knowing how to orient throughout a paper. Not every key term, source, or scholar needs to be defined and introduced during the first paragraph of an essay. Good writers are able to discern which concepts need to be introduced first, in the opening paragraph, and which can be introduced as the paper goes on, in the context of the larger argument.

Bombshell orients viewers and defines key terms strategically at the opening of the film and as the movie progresses. As you consider how best to orient readers to your writing, consider the following tactics:

Forecast the structure of the paper
Introduce the most important aspects of the “world” at the start of the paper
Use a visual aid if helpful
Define key terms clearly
Decide which orienting and defining must occur in the first paragraphs and which can occur later in the context of the paper

–Paige Allen ’21

News

Tortoise Tuesday: Methodology in Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s Letter Regarding the Future of Google

BY Writing Center

On December 3 2019, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin shocked the technology sector by resigning from their roles as CEO and President of Alphabet, Google’s parent holding company, respectively. Such an immense and symbolic change in leadership at one of the largest companies in the world could very well raise significant concerns regarding the future of the company among employees and the general public. However, Page and Brin excellently frame this change as the natural and necessary next step in Google’s evolution in a joint blog post announcing the leadership change by employing a methodology that draws heavily upon many of the company’s founding documents.

Immediately at the beginning of the post, Page and Brin present an excerpt of their first founders’ letter to highlight Google’s mission, core service and company values, and they proceed to argue that these core tenets have persisted throughout the company’s history and continue to do so. In so doing, the two technology visionaries abstract the company’s livelihood from their personal involvement with the company; while Google originally depended on Page and Brin to shape the company, the initial roadmap created by the two founders has continued to shape company over the years. This continuity is inherent to Google’s mission as a company and not directly tied to Page or Brin.

Having drawn a distinction between the involvement of the founders within the company and the company’s livelihood, Page and Brin go on to present an excerpt from a second founders’ letter that compares the evolution of Google to that of a human being. The founders eloquently argue that the company has reached young adulthood and that it is time for them to “assume the role of proud parents.” By drawing a comparison between the change in leadership and the natural life cycle of a human, Page and Brin frame a seemingly monumental shift in company history as a natural occurrence, arguably a non-event. This is further compounded by the extension of a metaphor originally created 15 years ago. Through this methodology, Page and Brin reassure Google employees and the general public that the company is well poised to continue to execute its mission and that their resignation is the natural next phase in Google’s progress as a company.

— Nick Johnson ’20

Excerpt from Blog Post:

Our very first founders’ letter in our 2004 S-1 began:

“Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one. Throughout Google’s evolution as a privately held company, we have managed Google differently. We have also emphasized an atmosphere of creativity and challenge, which has helped us provide unbiased, accurate and free access to information for those who rely on us around the world.”

We believe those central tenets are still true today. The company is not conventional and continues to make ambitious bets on new technology, especially with our Alphabet structure. Creativity and challenge remain as ever-present as before, if not more so, and are increasingly applied to a variety of fields such as machine learning, energy efficiency and transportation. Nonetheless, Google’s core service—providing unbiased, accurate, and free access to information—remains at the heart of the company.

[…]

Our second founders’ letter began:

“Google was born in 1998. If it were a person, it would have started elementary school late last summer (around August 19), and today it would have just about finished the first grade.”

Today, in 2019, if the company was a person, it would be a young adult of 21 and it would be time to leave the roost. While it has been a tremendous privilege to be deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the company for so long, we believe it’s time to assume the role of proud parents—offering advice and love, but not daily nagging!

News

Motive at the Thanksgiving Dinner Table

BY Writing Center

Ah Thanksgiving, a time to overindulge in turkey and stuffing, celebrate what you are thankful for with loved ones, and inevitably find yourself trapped in some politically-charged conversations with that one relative you see twice a year who insists on starting a dinner-table debate. As someone who usually prefers to remain on the observing side of these arguments, I had ample time at my family’s Thanksgiving dinner table to observe the lexicon at play.

And, with the lexicon in mind, I noticed the following: some of the discussions (which somewhat quickly and frequently become debates) feel productive, engaging, and meaningful, where different people at the table are interested in hearing the ideas of others and expressing their own counterpoints or concessions to those ideas. Other discussions feel draining and pointless with the same two people going back and forth in circles while the rest of the table exchanges annoyed glances, waiting for the conversation to move elsewhere.

So what is the key differentiating factor at play? I think it has to do with motive, namely whether the person initiating the argument is doing so just for the sake of argument or whether they have a convincing case for why everyone at the table should be interested in and care about that discussion. In other words, just as is the case when we engage in a scholarly debate when we write, the person who wants to start a debate at the dinner table has to consider and defend the “so what” of the debate they want everyone to engage in for it to become a meaningful, dynamic discussion.

When my Uncle mockingly said to me, “Hmmm let me guess; you’re either voting for Warren or Bernie,” he was just trying to be snarky. He was asking me to engage in an argument without giving me any reason to care about engaging with him. On the other hand, when my cousin pointed out how strange it was that we were troubled while watching a documentary about the consequences of meat consumption but then were content to feast on an array of animal products, everyone became interested in arguing the proper way to explain or solve this tension. My uncle posed an argument to me that had no motive; my cousin posed a puzzle to our dinner table that encouraged people to come together to offer solutions. And in turn, the former conversation ended quickly without any interesting sharing of ideas, while the latter conversation evolved into an exciting, meaningful debate.

–Danielle Hoffman ’20

News

Constructing a Scholarly Narrative with Incomplete Information

BY Writing Center

It sometimes happens during the research process that I come to a point where I think I know what I should propose or argue, but I can’t see how to prove or disprove it. This happens fairly often when I’m writing papers in the humanities, but even more so when I am trying to solve a problem in mathematics. In fact, I ran into this issue while trying to prove one of the claims on my most recent math assignment. The goal was to prove the following claim:

(I include the claim for completeness, but it’s not terribly important.) My first step was to reduce the claim to a statement that seemed easier:

which I was able to do just by using the information given in the problem. After that, I was able to get nearly three-quarters of the way through the proof just using the given information. Then I ran into something I knew should work, but wasn’t able to verify:

A screenshot of a cell phone

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Because I already knew what I was trying to prove, I was able to use the assumptions I described above to complete the problem (more or less). There was still a hole in my argument, but I was able to construct a solid “scholarly narrative” for the problem (that is, finish the proof) by carefully delineating what I understood and where my understanding went off a cliff. Writing out exactly what I thought was wrong also told me what I needed to learn the next time I worked on the topic — effectively, it told me what further research I needed to do. So, even though I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, I was still able to decide what I would need before I made a second pass over the problem.

There are, of course, several caveats to what I have said thus far. First, in this case, I knew that my overall claim was correct, so I was confident I should be able to jump over the hole in my reasoning and complete my argument. In general scholarly writing, we don’t know with certainty that our thesis is correct, so a question like the one above could throw the entire premise of the argument into doubt. The second caveat is that clearly, my argument couldn’t have been called “complete” while containing the excerpt above. Since there was a hole in my argument, I hadn’t really proved anything yet. Indeed, the kind of serious gap in understanding displayed above was only permissible because the homework assignment was the equivalent of an early draft.

But despite these two cautionary notes, annotating incomplete arguments as I do above has often proved helpful (and necessary) for me in both mathematics and the humanities. By whittling down the “unknown” part of the problem to a single nugget that we are not equipped to attack with our current tools, we mark the bounds of our own knowledge, and in doing so, lay the groundwork needed to push those bounds even further than before.

–Isabella Khan ’21

News

Tortoise Tuesday: The Evidence-Based Argument in Salt Fat Acid Heat

BY Writing Center

Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat is just one of many cooking shows available for binge watching on Netflix’s online streaming platform. Nosrat’s approach, however, stands out—unlike many shows, which simply display certain recipes or exotic cuisines, Salt Fat Acid Heat aims to teach viewers the basic principles of cooking. Based on Nosrat’s cookbook of the same name, Salt Fat Acid Heat is a cooking show with a methodology, evidence-based approach, and thesis, which shines through in the title of the show itself. Nosrat claims that by understanding these four basic elements of food, viewers will not only gain an intuitive sense of good cooking, but they will know a bit more about what makes cuisines from around the world so delicious.

At first glance, Nosrat’s methodology appears very similar to other travel-based cooking shows. She visits one country in each episode, focusing on a specific element of cuisine: “Salt” brings her to Japan, “Fat” to Italy, and “Acid” to Mexico. Along the way, however, Nosrat’s approach is uniquely shaped by her thoughtful accumulation of evidence. In Japan, she visits a salt vendor, a traditional soy sauce manufacturer, and a woman who makes her own miso at home. She explains to her viewers how the differences between types of salt can make certain dishes, flavors, or types of seafood shine in Japanese cooking. When discussing how fat is an essential component of good food, Nosrat focuses on how olive oil shapes Italian cuisine. She briefly mentions, however, how different choices have shaped other cuisines—food in the American South uses a lot of animal fat, for instance, while French food is defined by the flavor of butter. Her discussion of acid is particularly illuminating, because this is an element of cooking that’s particularly hard for most people to pinpoint. Nosrat starts the episode in a fruit market in Mexico. She shops for different types of citrus, which is the most immediate association people have with acidity. Over the course of the episode, however, Nosrat shows how other elements of Mexican food like sour cream, vinegary salsa, and honey also provide a delicious acidic zing that can transform a dish. Nosrat’s evidence-based approach allows her viewers to follow her reasoning and intuitively understand her claims.

In the final installment of the show, “Heat,” Nosrat develops the evidence she’s accumulated in her travels into her final thesis about intuitive and informed cooking. She returns home to California in this episode, combining her travel experiences with her Iranian roots and time spent as a chef at Chez Panisse. Nosrat cooks a variety of dishes, including short ribs, steak, fava bean and roasted vegetable salad, and tag dig rice. Each of these meals combines her learnings about salt, fat, and acid with her final element of applying heat—the very essence of cooking. This episode serves as Nosrat’s thesis, demonstrating that with an intuitive sense of these flavors and elements, anyone can learn to be a great cook. Her argument brings simplicity and elegance to the often-intimidating realm of gourmet food.

— Caroline Bailey ’20

News

The Lexicon in Sappho’s “Ode to Aphrodite”

BY Writing Center

Pretty much every frosh, even those of us who ended up loving Writing Sem, has complained about it at some point. All those different types of motive start to get confusing, and if you find yourself scrambling to finish a D2 at three in the morning, you might wonder whether it’s worth it. But what if the lexicon isn’t just a tool to present your argument clearly and convincingly to readers in any discipline – what if it could help you enlist divine support to win over the object of your unrequited love?

That’s what the ancient Greek poet Sappho does in the poem known as the “Ode to Aphrodite.” The text isn’t just a lament for the girl Sappho loves; it’s also a well-structured argument to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, whose help Sappho hopes to enlist. (The speaker in the poem is explicitly identified as Sappho herself.) As she moves through her argument, Sappho deftly employs each part of the writing lexicon to get the goddess on her side.

Sappho begins by praising the goddess in the first stanza, her introduction. The description isn’t necessary for Aphrodite herself, who knows, after all, that she’s immortal, sits on a golden throne, and weaves wiles. Instead, this first stanza is Sappho’s chance to orient the situation for her listeners by introducing the main figures (like key terms) in her poem: the all-powerful Aphrodite and the helpless Sappho. In the final two lines of the first stanza, Sappho moves from orienting to the motive of her ode. Aphrodite has the power to help her, and Sappho’s supplication is motivated by the stark difference between their positions.

Sappho then states her thesis clearly at the beginning of the second stanza. Just as a good paper will present the thesis in the introduction, Sappho makes sure that we – and Aphrodite – know what she wants: “but come here.” Once she’s established her motive and thesis, Sappho begins to ply the goddess with evidence, pointing out that she’s helped her with unrequited love in the past. She links this evidence explicitly to her thesis in the second stanza: “come here, if ever before [you did the same thing].” When Sappho says “come to me now, too,” she’s analyzing her evidence to support her thesis. The seventh and final stanza acts as her conclusion, where Sappho reiterates her thesis and leaves Aphrodite to make her choice.

— Rosamond van Wingerden ’20

Sappho Fragment 1, “Ode to Aphrodite” (my translation):

Immortal Aphrodite on your golden throne,
daughter of Zeus, wile-weaver, I beg you,
don’t crush my spirit, queen,
with anguish and pain:

but come here, if ever before,
hearing my cries from far away,
you left your father’s golden house
and came here

with your chariot yoked, and beautiful
quick-winged birds led you over the dark earth,
fluttering their fast wings down from heaven
through midair.

Soon they arrived, and you, blessed one,
with a smile on your immortal face,
asked me what had happened now and
why I had called you

and what I wanted more than anything to happen
in my crazy heart. “Whom should I persuade now
to love you? Who, oh Sappho, is
doing you wrong?

For if she runs now, soon she’ll follow,
and if she won’t accept gifts, soon she’ll give them,
and if she doesn’t love now, soon she’ll love you,
even reluctantly.”

Come to me now, too, and free me from cruel
cares, and do what my heart longs to
see done, and you yourself
be my ally.

News

Workouts and the Lexicon

BY Writing Center

In my eternal attempt to get in shape, I recently started attending a group fitness class at Dillon Gym called BODYPUMP. Written by the fitness company Les Mills, BODYPUMP is a strength-training class in which you use a barbell and plates to tone specific muscle groups. The workout is choreographed to upbeat music, where each song is paired with a major muscle group in the body. During one track, we might do different kinds of squats to target our glutes, and in another we might do chest presses and push-ups to work our chest muscles. We do hundreds of reps, until our entire bodies are sore and shaky, but stronger.

While doing all those reps, I started thinking about workout classes like BODYPUMP and how they relate to the Lexicon. They are choreographed just like essays are written, so we can analyze them with the same concepts. They have, for example, theses and motives. BODYPUMP’s mission or thesis is to build strength and tone muscles so that attendees become healthier. Workouts can have structure built around the muscles in the body, like BODYPUMP does, or on skills or techniques that are being used, such as karate or boxing. One might think of individual moves—squats, chest presses, push-ups, etc.—as evidence, since these are what must be manipulated for the workout to achieve its goal (or support its thesis). Our reps of these moves are like our analysis, since they are how we enact our moves (or interpret our evidence). Lastly, specific kinds of reps are the key terms of workouts. For example, in BODYPUMP we have a rep which consists of a move done quickly twice in a row followed by the same move done slowly with pulses. We perform this kind of rep with all our moves—squats, deadlifts and rows, chest presses, etc.—and it marks our maximum effort level for each muscle group. Like key terms, it is versatile, gives each of our tracks a focus, and helps the workout feel cohesive.

Next time you are at the gym, think about how you structure your workout to achieve your health goals. Maybe you’ll find that your “evidence” is not varied enough, or that you aren’t doing enough “analysis.” And if you don’t even know where to start, try out a class like BODYPUMP and let them structure your workout for you. I hope to see you there!

— Leina Thurn, ’20

News

Tortoise Tuesday: Ms. Magenta-Vest and How to Make a Good Argument in a Pinch

BY Writing Center

It takes a certain amount of panache to walk up to an airline counter and request a ticket for a flight departing in less than twenty minutes; probably more than most of us possess. The girl I saw make such a request had panache to spare, supplemented in no small part by a magnificently fluffy magenta vest and a silver and red pom-pom hat that would have made an alpaca jealous. It didn’t hurt that she used her full business voice and seemed to know exactly what she wanted. In fact, though judging by her clothes and the stickers on her roller-bag, Ms. Magenta-Vest was probably no more than nineteen, she accomplished her considerable feat by affecting the composure and unflinching politeness of a much older woman. She made her request clearly and using few words; while she was extremely specific about which flight she wanted and what she was going to do with her bags, she seemed deliberately vague about other things, for instance where she wanted to sit on the plane.

I don’t think the man behind the counter really intended to give Ms. Magenta-Vest the ticket at first, no matter how much she was willing to pay for it. But she kept asking for nearly three minutes, rephrasing her request first one way, then another, varying its words without changing its sentiment or her clear, polite tone. I can’t imagine it must have been easy for her to remain so calm even as she watched the minutes tick by before her flight took off. Indeed, as soon as she had her ticket in hand and had seen her roller-bag safely tagged and sent away, she turned tail and ran headlong down the concourse towards the TSA checkpoint, her quilted paisley handbag bouncing along at her side. And yet, so long as she was engaged in her game of bargaining, she retained her air of unflappable calm.

There is perhaps a lesson to be taken from how Ms. Magenta-Vest argued her case, one which can be applied to arguments of any kind, on paper as much as in person. First, remember who you are talking to and what tone will best convince them of your point. If Ms. Magenta-Vest had spoken like an average nineteen year-old, whether blustering at the airline agent or acting as anxious as she quite possibly was, the agent would probably have denied her request without a second thought. It was by assuming an air of respectability and composure that she brought the agent to her side from the very first. Likewise, when we write, we frame our argument in terms that other scholars are familiar with in order to signal to them that we are capable of engaging with them on their own terms. We thus earn their respect before we even properly begin our argument. We use the language of scholarship to buy credibility that we might never have if we wrote as informally as we speak.

It is equally important to take care in defining the scope of one’s argument. If Ms. Magenta-Vest had been as specific about where she wanted to sit as she was about where she was about the flight she wanted, it is likely that the agent would have denied her request altogether, arguing (probably quite rightly) that what she was asking was impossible. But by choosing her battles with care, and being very clear from the first about what she was not asking for, she headed off most of the agent’s objections before they arose. Similarly, if we try to argue everything at once in an essay, we are sure to fail, and our argument will invariably be dismissed without further thought. But if we are willing to argue only a well-delineated point, one within the scope of our own capabilities, we are far more likely to succeed. This is not to say we cannot make piercing insights in our writing, occasionally asking the audience to accept the nearly impossible as possible, just as Ms. Magenta-Vest did to such great effect. Only, such requests had best be occasional, ideally a single part in a well-worked-out argument, introduced with suitable formality, or else it is likely they will fail to achieve the desired effect.

And of course, it helps to have a certain amount of panache. I don’t know if Ms. Magenta-Vest made her flight, but I suspect she did. If she could talk her way to a ticket with less than half an hour to spare, I have full confidence that, with her neon-and-paisley ensemble to buoy her confidence, she could talk her way to the front of a TSA line in no time. While in any argument it’s important to know who you’re talking to and know your scope, it never hurts to pack a little something extra, preferably in bright colors, just to seal the deal.

–Isabella Khan ’21

Key Terms, Spring 2019

Improving BAHAMAS: Reducing Selection Effects Bias in Bayesian Hierarchical Supernova Cosmological Inference

BY Writing Center

In a Tortoiseshell: In this excerpt from his Junior Paper on supernova detection, T. Lukas Mäkinen uses key terms to effectively scaffold his discussion of a new technique for minimizing biases in samples of detected supernovae. By maintaining a clear focus and providing a sequence of consistent and well-defined key terms, Lukas provides the reader with a framework through which to understand the technical contents of his paper, allowing even a lay reader to finish the paper with a strong impression of Lukas’s work and its significance.

Continue reading →

Spring 2019

Motive

BY Writing Center

Motive begins with a question or a problem. This can be in the form of a gap in the evidence, a puzzling passage, or a new phenomenon. Thus, motive is the driving force behind an essay’s line of inquiry or argument. It is the question to which the author hopes to provide an answer.

Without a strong motive, it is difficult for readers to grasp the reason for a certain paper’s existence. Even the most brilliant points can seem meaningless without an understanding of the posed question. Even then, motive must extend beyond just this initial question. The motive of a paper has to be compelling enough to imbue readers with a sense of that paper’s significance. It ultimately helps answer the question, “Why does it all matter?” It helps readers understand not only why a paper was written but also why they should care that the paper was written at all.