Revision: Developing More Context for Situation

Context

• Background information

• Vital considerations for looking at the facts/actions/examples (such as, how have things changed, or what caused those changes)

• ***Imagine an ignorant reader

• What does a person who has not read what you did or does not think like you not know about your subject that will help them grasp a person's actions, etc.

• ***What are you assuming? Sometimes when we write our first thoughts/drafts, we take a lot of content for granted and we don't reflect upon things that are small but significant to our own understanding of a subject...

• For instance, with our first drafts of Essay 1, many of us ignored important facts in making our claims:

• Beah and his friends are children in the middle of a war
• Beah and his friends are without their parents and other family
• Government and its role in peoples' lives
• Causes of action. Before the action.

• In short, almost every writer discussed a lot of how Beah was in the moment he made immoral choices, but not many contrasted those acts with what caused them, what informed those decisions.

• Look at "the whole picture" (the whole story) when making claims. Each passage you cite is connected to the larger story, the larger person being analyzed. When you write about a scene from early in the text, you need to consider and use appropriately the knowledge you have from the end of the text. You also have to consider any information that comes earlier in the text. Good logic dictates a holistic point of view.

In Revision: Restructure at least two of your body paragraphs (BP) by consciously implementing at least one of the following in each BP.  Which pattern should, in part, be decided by your Point. Then, the Reasons and Examples are ordered more tightly by the following patterns used:

Contrast (or comparison)

• For instance, contrast a specific Beah theft with that of an example outside the text. How are they different in circumstances, and how does that decide morality?

Cause and Effect

• For instance, what are a few things that cause Beah's extreme hunger? You can't just say he was  about to die--you have to describe and cite specific events that help shape Beah's mindset

Before and After

• For instance, what was Beah like during and after he was rehabilitated? What does he confess to his readers? 

Classify

• For instance, what are levels of hardships? What are levels of hunger? What defines those levels? Or, to go another route: are their classes of moral decisions, and what are the characteristics of each class? You as the writer can create those classifications--give us boxes to see the action within each. 

Analogy

• For instance, what are similar situations and characteristics for which a reader might understand the foreign concept of war? What's a possibly lesser situation you are familiar with that equates to decisions made by those in war?