Tag Archives: motive

Motive, Spring 2020

The Future of Human Nature: Drawing the Line Between Genetic Enhancements and Genetic Therapy

BY ASHER JOY

In a Tortoiseshell: In this excerpt of her essay on genetic enhancement and therapy, Asher Joy exemplifies how to create a motivated thesis by engaging in a complex, scientific debate. Drawing on interdisciplinary sources, Asher adds her own contribution to the debate at hand by pointing out a particular issue with the discourse surrounding genetic modifications and discusses the implications of such an error. Continue reading →

Motive, Spring 2020

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.

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Tortoise Tuesday: Motive in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose

BY Writing Center

If you, like me, are finding that you have way too much time on your hands for the foreseeable future, you might be consoled just a little by finally having time to read all the books you never get around to on campus. In between baking, sleeping, and half-hearted thesis editing, I’ve been re-reading Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose – which, at over 500 pages, I wouldn’t have bothered starting at school. The book is a medieval murder mystery that purports to be a translation of an account by a medieval monk called Adso of Melk. As Eco brings Adso and his world to life, he also gives the monk an explicit, if incomplete, motive for his writing:

“Having reached the end of my poor sinner’s life, my hair now white, I grow old as the world does […] confined now with my heavy, ailing body in this cell in the dear monastery of Melk, I prepare to leave on this parchment my testimony as to the wondrous and terrible events that I happened to observe in my youth, now repeating all that I saw and heard, without venturing to seek a design, as if to leave to those who will come after (if the Antichrist has not come first) signs of signs, so that the prayer of deciphering may be exercised on them.” (Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver)

Adso seems to be stuck at a stage that’s familiar to many of us: he knows that he has something interesting to talk about, but he hasn’t quite articulated what it is. Early in the writing process, developing a motive can feel like what Adso calls “the prayer of deciphering,” the step that he describes but leaves undone. He has his evidence (his eyewitness account of “wondrous and terrible events”), and throughout the novel, he even engages in analysis, but he stops short of connecting that analysis to a broader motive for his writing.

Humility might be a virtue for a medieval monk, but in your own writing, you don’t need to leave your motive “to those who will come after.” Once you have your text, your data, or, as in Adso’s case, your corpses of horribly murdered monks, the next step is often the hardest and most important in the writing process: asking yourself, “So what?” What new understanding does your analysis reveal? How do you shed light on a concept that was previously unexamined, incomplete, or incorrect? Once you’ve answered that question, you’ll know why your writing matters, and your reader will know why they should care enough to read it. Assuming, of course, that the Antichrist doesn’t come before your R3 is due.

— Rosamond van Wingerden ’20

Works Cited

Eco, Umberto, and William Weaver. The Name of the Rose. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

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Tortoise Tuesday: Motivating Moves in Longform Journalism

BY Writing Center

Polly Murray, in the 1960s and ’70s, was a mother of four with an old house on several acres in Lyme, Connecticut. In the summer, her kids built forts in the woods; they ice-skated on frozen cow ponds in the winter. The Murrays had an idyllic life in the country. They also had enormous rashes, strange joint swellings, and recurrent fevers.

[…]

Soon, though, Murray started to hear other stories like hers. Her area, it appeared, had a cluster of juvenile-rheumatoid-arthritis cases. She called the state’s health department and met with Dr. Allen Steere, a rheumatologist doing a fellowship at Yale. He pored over her pages of notes. On the car ride home, Murray wept with joy: Steere didn’t have any answers, but he had listened. He wanted to find out what was wrong. By 1976, the condition Murray had observed had become known as Lyme disease.

“Lyme disease was a disease born of advocacy,” Dr. Paul Auwaerter told me. Auwaerter, whose lab focuses on Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, is the clinical director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Back in the ’70s, Murray and her fellow Connecticut mothers had to fight for attention. Their experience left behind a powerful legacy, Auwaerter said, a sense that perhaps “the medical establishment didn’t really listen initially or were trying to be dismissive.”

Decades after Polly Murray kept her diary of symptoms, the spirit of advocacy associated with Lyme disease endures. But while Murray’s efforts were ultimately vindicated by medical science, a new fight — for the recognition of something known as “chronic Lyme,” which can encompass a vast range of symptoms and need not be linked to any tick bite — has grown into a phenomenon often untethered from scientific method or peer review. The chronic-Lyme community has a new agenda, one that was visible at last fall’s Global Lyme Alliance Gala in New York, where supporters gathered at Cipriani heard a speech from Real Housewife of Beverly Hills Yolanda Hadid.
[From https://www.thecut.com/2019/07/what-happens-when-lyme-disease-becomes-an-identity.html]

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Longform journalistic piece are, as their name suggests, long. The ones I am talking about take at least half an hour to read and are often crafted non-linearly, requiring the reader to pay attention, actually exert him or herself, as opposed to needing only a cursory browse the way a news story or a short opinion piece might. Writers, for their part, can spend months, even years, researching, reporting, and writing these pieces.

Because the topics are generally out of the public view, the title may not be immediately motiving to a reader. So the onus on the writer to keep the reader engaged, to have them read from start to finish with the attention such a piece requires, becomes crucial within the first several paragraphs in a way that makes it unique from other forms of journalism.

One of my favorite articles from this summer is by Molly Fischer. The article is called “Maybe It’s Lyme. What happens when illness becomes an identity?” The article was sent to me by a friend, so despite knowing nothing about the topic, I decided to start it anyway. I think it does a phenomenal job of introduction by suffusing it with motive—with what makes the topic at hand interesting, with why the reader should continue reading.

Immediately we are taken with an idyll and its strange, pathological underbelly, a mystery that needs an answer. And even where one is given at the end of the second paragraph cited, we find that that answer is itself the starting point that has since burgeoned into many more questions. By giving the history of the discovery of Lyme disease, the author is able to not only define her most central term but to contextualize it especially as its definition is repeatedly challenged and complicated. In this way, Fischer is able to use her key term to further motivate her article, carefully and seamlessly integrating her instantiations of the two lexicon terms.

— Tess Solomon ’21

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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

Spring 2019

Motive

BY Writing Center

Motive, Spring 2019

The Literariness of Political Texts

BY SOPHIE EVANS

In a Tortoiseshell: In this paper about the Palestinian Declaration of Independence of 1988, Sophie Evans’ original use of key terms — “the literariness of political texts” — allows her to flip the current scholarly discourse — what Edward Said calls “the worldliness of literary texts” — on its head. In the first few paragraphs of her introduction, Sophie constructs motive by orienting readers as to how the literariness of the Declaration, written by a prominent Palestinian poet, has been overlooked. She then argues for why and how her close reading of the literariness of political texts can be brought to bear on Palestinian history and even its political situation today.

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Motive, Spring 2019

Trust but Verify: Analysis of Flawed Trust Beliefs for Tor and a Passive Routing Attack

BY Nicholas Schmeller

In a Tortoiseshell: In a paper that exposes a potential weakness of Tor, a supposedly secure and private internet browsing protocol, Nicholas Schmeller positions nontechnical readers to appreciate the significance of his work by effectively presenting motive. By presenting the necessary technical jargon in an easily digestible manner in combination with the inclusion of practical illustrations, Nicholas ensures that all readers can grasp the complication resulting from the fact that, although an agent’s information is secure while in transit under the Tor protocol, said information is vulnerable at the very beginning and end of its virtual journey.

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Scope and Motive in “More Beautiful, More Terrible”: Finding Lexicon Terms in Class Readings

BY Writing Center

This semester I picked up a new technique of looking for lexicon terms in assigned readings in an attempt to make them a bit more entertaining. More importantly, this newfound habit has given me opportunity to see how lexicon terms are implemented in real scholarly writing.

To give just one example, one of the most interesting instances of motive I found from my readings for AAS235 was in More Beautiful, More Terrible, written by Princeton Professor of African American Studies, Imani Perry. Perry writes in her introductory chapter:

…the “postracial” discourse reflects both anxiety and confusion about what race means and doesn’t mean now. In order to answer these questions, we must approach the enterprise with great rigor and sophistication.

…

Those are tall orders. My ambition in this book is much smaller. This book seeks to pursue a very specific question, which nevertheless demands a complex body of information and analysis: how does a nation that proclaims racial equality create people who act in ways that sustain racial inequality? I suppose a second question is pursued, too: what can we do about it? (Perry, 2-3)

I particularly appreciated these two paragraphs from Perry’s introduction because they have very specific purposes in laying down the foundation for the rest of her work. In the first paragraph from the excerpt, Perry orients the reader by providing context on the goals of the broader field. In the second paragraph, Perry clearly introduces and explicitly states her motive for her research in question form.

The most critical move Perry makes in these two paragraphs is narrowing her scope. Instead of tackling the expansive question of “what race means and doesn’t mean”, a question that motivates an entire field of research, she chooses to focus in a more specific question: “how does a nation that proclaims racial equality create people who act in ways that sustain racial inequality?” Perry demonstrates that even a skilled writer, setting out to construct a text of significant length, has to think about the scope of his or her work and focus in on a specific relationship to explore. In the specific field of racial studies, Perry utilizes the same lexicon terms and techniques that we learn in Writing Seminar.

While applying Writing Seminar knowledge to your upper level classes may initially pose a challenge, the best way to overcome that challenge is to learn by example: read good writing and look for the ways in which leading scholars use lexicon terms in their own work. Conveniently, with an abundance of good writing at your disposal, assigned to you for your classes, why not start learning from more than just the content?

–Ellie Shapiro ’21

Works Cited

Perry, Imani. More Beautiful and More Terrible: the Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States. New York University Press, 2011.

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Orienting in Roxane Gay’s Memoir Hunger

BY Writing Center

To tell you the story of my body, do I tell you how much I weighed at my heaviest? Do I tell you that number, the shameful truth of it always strangling me? At my heaviest, I weighed 577lb, or over 41st, at 6ft 3in. That is a staggering number, but at one point, that was the truth of my body. […] I began eating to change my body. I was willful in this. Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it. I ate because I thought that if my body became repulsive, I could keep men away. Of all the things I wish I knew then that I know now, I wish I had known I could talk to my parents and get help, and turn to something other than food.

Today, I am a fat woman. I don’t think I am ugly. I don’t hate myself in the way society would have me hate myself, but I hate how the world all too often responds to this body. It would be easy to pretend I am just fine with my body as it is. I’m a feminist and I know that it is important to resist unreasonable standards for how my body should look. […]

My body is a cage of my own making. I have been trying to figure a way out of it for more than 20 years.

Roxane Gay’s 2017 autobiography Hunger is appropriately subtitled A Memoir of (My) Body. Gay’s body, which, by her own description, is morbidly obese, is a memoir in itself: a record of the trauma she experienced when she was gang-raped at the age of twelve. After the assault, Gay deliberately ate in an attempt to make herself “repulsive” to men, turning her body into a protective fortress.

In this short excerpt from her introduction, Gay both orients the reader to what appears to be the defining theme of her memoir – her weight – and makes clear that her motive is not what it appears to be. Her obesity will not be the focus of this book. Although much of the memoir is concerned with the effects on Gay’s weight on her life – strangers taking food out of her shopping cart; the humiliation and discomfort of struggling to fit into airplane seats; a boyfriend encouraging her later development of bulimia nervosa because she is at least “working on her problem” – her weight is always secondary. It is a result of one trauma and the cause of another.

Gay makes this distinction in the first pages of her memoir. By posing what appears to be a rhetorical question (“Do I tell you that number?”) but then defiantly answering it (“that was the truth of my body”), she subverts the reader’s expectations. Although the truth of her highest weight may be “shameful” to her, she refuses to hide it, simply because the number itself is not central to her story. Gay initially seems to make her weight the focus of her introduction, but by sharing, not withholding, this “shameful,” “strangling,” “staggering” information, she strips it of its importance. Most memoirs like hers present a glamorous image of “overcoming” obesity; as Gay demonstrates in this introduction, this is not her motive. Her weight itself has never been the problem.

— Rosamond van Wingerden ’20

Source: Adapted excerpt from Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, by Roxane Gay (Harper: 2017)