While writing can often be tedious and, worse than tedious, a process that stops all together when you feel like you have writers block, I have been learning this quarter to trust the process. And while that phrase has an inescapably vague quality to it (which I am learning to avoid this quarter), the process is actually tangible and even formulaic at times. That is what is interesting about writing and what makes the tedium worth it; if you follow the process diligently, often times the formula produces an idea that is an interesting whole that transcends the sum of its parts. In this portfolio introduction, I will be first talking about one small but crucial skill, internal transitions. In addition to internal transitions, I will be delving into my analysis skills which serve as the heart of the entire RA project. Then I will be analyzing I was able to improve my topic sentences by focusing more on argument and less on description, and finally I will explain how I have been able to elevate my quote integration strategy so I am carefully threading my evidence into my own concepts rather than forcing the reader to do that work on their own. After we conquered the RA essay, I focused on reapplying these same skills and building some more skill sets include.......

           Internal transitions are a crucial skill because they ultimately create the structural unity of the paragraph at the sentence level, and without them, the reader will face a string of disconnected pieces of evidence that they then will be forced to connect on their own. I have learned this quarter that even though transitions between pieces of evidence are often hard to create, there are fundamental principles we have to use; we want to use our topic sentence concept and not the plot to create the internal transition, and we want to be as specific as possible about whether the next piece of evidence is similar to or different from the preceding piece of evidence.  Consider the following internal transition and the comment John left in the margin:

My internal transition here focuses on plot with the phrase "as the truth comes out," which just indicates a general unfolding of events in the novel, and in addition to the general plot reference, I also struggled with specificity and the internal transition also uses the phrase "negatively affected her" which is still too vague. Something interesting that I have learned this quarter is how often we will gesture toward an idea without actually articulating it, just as I did here: saying something negatively affected Chris does not actually say what the effect is. In order to revise this internal transition, I had to consider what the main idea was for previous pieces of evidence was, which was how Regan has transformed into something subhuman and essentially is in a state of madness. It is her devolution from her normal self to something "insane" that essentially causes Chris' desire to hide her condition as "normal" people will not understand what is going on with her daughter, so I decided to use the causal relationship in my internal transition which I revised to the following. 

Regan's subhuman insanity is not merely a psychological burden because it is difficult to cope with on its own, but it causes Chris to compound the pain by keeping it as a secret from others like Karras even though they can help her remedy the crisis. 

Here I used a core concept from my topic sentence in my internal transition: secret. This idea of hiding pain is the foundation of my topic sentence, and so here I used that concept to anchor the connection back to my central idea. I also avoided any plot references and created a connection through the word "causes," which establishes a specific connection; I learned in class that this connection is often characterized by similarity or difference, but it can be any unique relationship even the idea that one thing causes another. So here in this paragraph I not only pointed out the fact that Chris is secretive but answered WHY she is secretive which gives my argument even more depth. 

            While internal transitions serve a crucial structural function and create the unity of a paragraph as a whole, that whole needs a spark, and I have learned this quarter that analysis is the central momentum center of the paragraph and that persuasive analysis clings to the language from the text rather than my general impression of the text. This process is difficult as we often drop a quote and move immediately forward without really digging into specific words as the rhetorical choices the author makes that ultimately create a bigger meaning and impression for the reader. But this impression is always created at the sentence level. Below is one example of analysis from my draft, and you can see I was still struggling with vague language and finding a way to really dig into Blatty's word choices. 

In this analysis example from the second piece of evidence in the paragraph, I did pick key words which was a great start, but I struggled attaching those word choices to a compelling effect on the audience. I isolated the phrase "quavering anxiety," but I then connected it to "physical and emotional effects" which is a broad and vague term. I have leaned this quarter that "the deadly plurals" can show up anywhere and everywhere, and here effects is a deadly plural that kills my argumentative momentum. I also did not clearly connect this analysis to my core topic sentence idea of how Chris keeps her crisis a secret, and so I improved this analysis by both getting more specific and connecting that specific analysis to my core topic sentence idea. 

By using the phrase "husky dead whisper," Blatty is showing the audience how even though she is inside her home, Chris whispers as though someone could possibly hear her even though that is impossible, emphasizing that her own fear is not just of the condition but the the fear of a social audience who might find out about the condition and Burke's murder. 

In this improved analysis, I avoided the more general phrase "physical and emotional effects" and instead showed how Blatty's on word choice "whisper" shows the audience that Chris' true fear is social exposure. This connection between word choice and audience effect was also much more closely connected to my core topic sentence claim about the nature of secret keeping as the key cause of psychological pain, and this revised analysis showed that secret keeping habit at the sentence level. 

         Internal transitions and analysis constitute the core foundation of the inside of the paragraph, but I also learned how topic sentences must have an argumentative claim that  is faithfully and specifically built from this core foundation so that the structure of the argument remains strong. In the previous two examples, I mapped out internal transition and analysis revision, and after I completed these revisions I realized that my previous topic sentence no longer even fit the changes. My original topic sentence was: 

One fundamental structural issue with this version of my topic sentence was how I jumped into evidence and key word analysis, when in the topic sentence itself we first need and concept and argument that will give meaning and structure to the analysis, so I had put the cart before the horse so to speak. I did however have a very productive argumentative insight in the phrase "secrets hurt Chris," so as I revised I used the phrase to build a pivot outward toward the concept of secret keeping itself and combined that with my anchor to the novel (Chris' secret keeping). The revised topic sentence was: 

By showing a causal link between Chris' vigorous attempt to keep Regan's abnormal condition a secret and how that habit of hiding compounds her pain, Blatty argues that hiding a trying and taxing burden actually makes it worse as the concealment leads to shame. 

This topic sentence clearly has a pivot outward highlighted in yellow: the argumentative claim that secret keeping itself is causing shame and pain is the key moment where I take what I am observing in the novel and show how it is a vehicle for Blatty to persuade his audience of a message that is not literally tied to possession, demons, or anything particularly supernatural. I also used a key concept word, "abnormal," that I then repeated in my revised quote integration for the first piece of evidence.

              My first piece of evidence is not yet about the secret keeping behavior that Chris demonstrates, so my audience might start to feel like my first quote is off topic. I have learned how important it is that this fit between the topic sentence and first piece of evidence is a tight one; if there is not a clear and direct connection, the structural integrity starts to unravel. In the original quote integration, I only referred to plot and was not able to integrate a meaningful connection to the concept in my topic sentence as can be seen below: 

As Regan is once again having one of her episodes, the ‘demon’ discloses to Chris what Regan has done to Burke. As Chris realized what the demon was saying she “blinked at the mad-staring, grinning face, at the cracked, parched lips and foxlike eyes [and] she screamed until she fainted” (216).

The phrase highlighted in yellow is exclusively describing the plot moment in the book; if I lifted this sentence in yellow no one would have any idea what the core topic sentence claim is even about. And so as I revised, I used the concept of normalcy which we set up in the topic sentence, so my reader is already aware that Chris' secret keeping is built on the problem that Regan has reached an abnormal state that she is ashamed to let anyone see or know about.

When Blatty describes Regan's physical qualities, he emphasizes her inhuman traits that make her seem insane and lacking any connection to what we would consider 'normal,' writing that she  “blinked at the mad-staring, grinning face, at the cracked, parched lips and foxlike eyes [and] she screamed until she fainted” (216).

In this revised example of quote integration, I have repeated a key concept word from my topic sentence, "normal," and so now my audience can understand immediately that even though this quote is not yet about Chris and her secret keeping behavior, I am actually laying the argumentative foundation for why she keeps the secret, thus making this a persuasive example of effective quote integration. I have in the past considered quote integration as just the simple and mechanical step of getting the author's words stitched into my own work in a clear and grammatical fashion, but I am learning now that quote integration does itself involve distinct argumentative steps, namely using the concept as a frame so the audience already understands its significance before I dig down into the analysis of key words. 

In this quote, we can see that I actually set up my attempt to make the audience feel empathy with the phrase in yellow asserting that it is difficult to feel sorry for anyone in the documentary. This gesture to empathy is extremely weak and not persuasive at all, because I am literally coaching my audience to feel nothing for "anyone" in the film. In addition to literally stating empathy is almost impossible while trying to help my audience empathize, I used rhetorical understatement multiple times, most notably saying that "maybe" we can empathize with the workers, which also undermines the persuasive aspect of the statement. I also learned how rhetorical understatement harms persuasion in an academic genre such as in the rhetorical analysis (RA) project. When I say "maybe Blatty's message is that," or "his word choice could possibly mean that fear is conquerable," I am actually suggesting to my audience that my idea is possibly untrue and therefore the persuasion is compromised. Rhetorical understatement is everywhere; saying "he is a great guy" and "he seems like a great guy" are different statements with different effects on the audience, with the second opening the door to the idea that the appearance of greatness is only a veneer for something less awesome. In my RIP project draft I continued understating my case for empathizing with the workers by repeating the word little multiple times (seen in blue above), and so when I revised I deleted the first sentence that made empathy seem impossible and revised the understatement, too: 

“except for the laborers who worked around the clock and never got paid, [and] who got little screen time,even less consideration, and no chance to have their voice heard."

"It is impossible to feel anything but disgust for Billy and the other Festival organizers who skated past their failure while still living in their penthouses. We see Billy yucking it up in his beautiful New York apartment with a broad grin on his face while he starts his next scam, but the film never lets us meet the laborers who worked around the clock and never got paid, and who got little screen time, even less consideration, and no chance to have their voice heard. It is not only easy to feel for their plight, but we must; I contacted one employee who lost their apartment after receiving no income for 8 weeks because of the Fyre Festival, and Maryanne Rolle said simply: "It changed my life." While we all got to be entertained by this mediocre movie for 90 minutes, others suffered a setback that will take a significant amount of time to recover from." 

In this third draft of my project, I literally took the opposite approach from the first draft, and the yellow highlighted portion shows just how I went from saying empathy was hard to easy and absolutely necessary. I did not just help my audience empathize, but I also gave them a guilt trip and implied that there is a moral imperative to experience this empathy. I also used the phrase in blue, "we all got to be entertained" to reinforce this guilt, highlighting our comfy position on the couch laughing at something stupid while other people suffered. As I worked through my RIP project, I learned that pathos is a delicate rhetorical approach, and these revisions to my project show my evolving ability to incorporate this skill of building pathos into my work.

Now to conclude: Emphasize the skills you covered in the order they appear. The reason we do this is to improve structure. Clear, specific, and sequenced key words creates strong organization. After a brief recap of the skills we covered in the Portfolio Introduction, walk it out. Think beyond this class. Look ahead. What do you want to keep working on? Have you already noticed yourself applying these skills in other classes or areas of life? Get creative. Move the goals of 39B out of our class and into the world here.