Dear Conservative Friend (Confederate History)

Dear Conservative Friend,

So I hear that the governor of Virginia has declared April to be “Confederate History Month.”  In this, Virginia joins several other states in an official celebration of Southern heritage peculiarly centered on the most inhospitable and least charming half-decade of that region’s complex history.  Virginia’s declaration was notable for its omission of any mention of slavery.  Pundits on both sides of the cultural divide were predictably incensed.  You can imagine.

I’m sure you’ve been shaking your head at knee-jerk Yankee liberals who find any praise of the Confederacy to be anathema.  As a matter of fact, I’m right there with you.  There’s a lot to respect in the drama of the Civil War, and on both sides—obviously, or people wouldn’t be so drawn to it.  No one who reads much about the period can come away without admiring aspects of the Southern effort during those darkest days of American history.

It may be hard for some conservatives to believe this, but even liberals value things like honor, valor, and fortitude.  Those are the first qualities of the first thing we think of when think of the Confederacy, which is the Confederate Army.  In these virtues it was without peer.  There has never been a military force—perhaps never a large organization of any kind—so ably led and so willing to endure so much.  We will argue about the reasons why this army was in the field, but there is no getting around the fact that (mutatis mutandis) it is surely the most committed and most skilled fighting force the world has ever seen.

And my northern friends are too quick to reject the Confederate military out of hand as a weapon devoted to the defense of slavery.   It’s pretty well-established that the average Southern soldier seldom had slavery on his mind, and certainly not as his primary motive for fighting.  Southern citizens cast their lot with secession and found their home states invaded by what was then (spiritually but also legally, from their POV) a foreign foe.  The Southern soldier fought for home and family, motivated mainly by a desire to turn back the invader and to be, as Jeff Davis famously put it, Left Alone.

But the mistake too many people make is to take the skill and honor shown on the battlefield by Lee and Jackson and the rest as a microcosm of the Confederacy itself.  It’s easy to do; Shelby Foote did it for three thousand magnificent pages.  Focusing on dramatic battles and colorful leaders takes us away from precisely the issue that is at the heart of the whole secession crisis, and the one that the Virginia declaration so stupidly overlooked.  Jeff Davis wanted to be left alone, but he and his fellow secessionists were never so self-deluding to pretend that the crisis at hand was anything but centered around slavery.

Indeed, they welcomed the focus.  Consider the words of the Confederacy’s first Vice President, Alexander Stephens, in his “Cornerstone Speech” on March 21, 1861, when it was all getting started:

“The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. …

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Stephens goes on for some 5,000 words, but the gist is here:  the Confederacy was to be a new nation designed, from the ground up, to preserve the supremacy of white men and sidestep America’s creeping tendency towards equality.  There are still those today who try to argue that Southern secession was about abstract constitutional principles, States’ Rights and whatnot.  Stephens, Davis, and the rest of them never made that mistake.

The only Right that mattered enough to force some States’ secession was the right to maintain slavery.  This had been the issue for decades—there had been near-secession crises before, always about the extension of slavery to new territories or the right of northern states to restrict Southern travelers’ human property.  The break of 1861 came in direct response to the election of Abraham Lincoln, who was widely regarded as an abolitionist candidate.  Secession was all but accomplished even before he took office, all in anticipation of the actions it was feared he would take to limit the spread and maintenance of slavery.  Southerners saw in the new President a bogeyman of their own greatest anxiety, the loss of a way of life based on the subjugation of one part of mankind by another.

And this is the other place where apologists for the Confederacy get it grandly wrong:  the idea that secession was a legitimately democratic choice made by some Americans in pursuit of their own vision of liberty.  I’ve several times been in discussions where apologists asserted that that vast majority of Southerners supported secession, and that therefore it should have been allowed to pass peacefully.  “Vast majority” is the misnomer here, for close to half (some 47 or 48%) of all human beings living in the secession states were themselves held in slavery.  The choice for secession was made by a much smaller number of people—albeit the ones with political power.  Indeed, not even all white Southerners supported secession, and a great deal of effort was made to sell poorer, non-aristocratic Southerners on the big break as the remedy for the coming changes that would force them to treat blacks as their human equals.

And then, the war.  In some ways the war saved the Southern cause by giving it a narrative of heroism nicely removed from the narrative of human bondage that stood behind it all.  As I said, it’s still possible to admire the courage and the honor shown in that struggle they understood by different lights, and even to understand that the people involved understood it by different lights.  What is not possible is to believe that they were actually right. 

April 12 is the anniversary of Fort Sumter, with its sesquicentennial next year.  In the present political climate, it possible to worry that someone—some new Timothy McVeigh or John Wilkes Booth, some neo-Confederate partisan—is going to take the occasion for something very stupid.  I certainly hope not.  Among other offenses, it would be a crime against the decency of men 150 years ago who, while wrong, at least did not squander the wisdom of hindsight.

I don’t hate the South.  I love it.  I'm a Southerner with long roots; my ancestors to a man wore gray.  I’ve read my Foote and my D.S. Freeman, and most of the rest.  I know the South, and I know the War better than most Southerners.  I love the South, and I know the South was wrong.

And it doesn’t matter that they believed they were right.  Who doesn’t, after all?  We can admire their tenacity and their aplomb, admire their beards even, but we cannot look back longingly and take their valor to excuse the moral stain and physical horrors of slavery.  They did believe they were right.  They were brave and honorable.  Salute them, but don’t forget that we, for all our modern decadence, do know better.  No amount of nostalgia can erase the fact of our national sin, and it doesn’t matter that it took a bloody war to win this knowledge.  Even had it come with something worse—a harsher war, a longer Reconstruction—we would be fools to pretend to honor the past by willfully forgetting its crimes.

A Life in Literature

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A Life in Literature

Most of us have a list of books that have somehow changed us.  Some of us have lists of books that we ourselves have changed, often with scissors or an open flame.  To have been a reader of a whole bunch of books means that any list of the most influential can never be complete, but it can be useful to single out a few for comment.  Herewith I offer a brief consideration of some titles that have affected me.  These are books that I came to live deep inside, like a basement dweller, just as they came to live inside me, like a parasite.

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The SF novel Dune was one of the first.  While Herbert’s peculiar brand of Jungian psychohistory is only two or three steps up from Scientology, the novel’s other Big Ideas are definitely heady, invigorating stuff for the young first-time reader.  I credit the novel with two central and significant realizations.  One of these is the power of language to shape political reality.  I don’t mean Frank Herbert’s language, which is notable only for its vast superiority to Brian Herbert’s language.  Rather, Dune is a novel where characters themselves are always using language to do that very thing (shape political reality, I mean), mainly by deciphering subtle body language or speaking secret codes known only to two or three other people.  It’s like they all majored in semiotics before getting addicted to spice and hatching plans to bring down their particular far-future Byzantio-Caliphate.

The other important takeaway from Dune is a stark and cynical appreciation of the ideological basis and function of religious belief.  This is a novel where the faiths of billions are manipulated like so much silly putty—apparently with complete endorsement and approval of the novel’s author, protagonist, and fanbase.  It had a significant effect on this adolescent reader, anyway, although this may owe something to the fact that the lead character is a thirteen-year-old boy named Paul who happens to be the Messiah.

I came to crime and detective fiction late, and I believe I may have done it backwards:  I started with James Ellroy.  American Tabloid and L.A. Confidential opened my eyes to an entirely new mode of fiction that was gritty, violent, amorally ungrammatical, and unabashedly sentence fragmenty.  Ellroy’s motto is “America was never innocent,” which I believe must be substantially true, at least if it has been behaving anything like people in a James Ellroy novel.  Whatever the case, the patterns of one’s first major writer in a genre shape one’s fundamental expectations to a remarkable degree, and this was definitely true of Ellroy.  So much so, in fact, that when I finally got around to classic crime writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, I assumed that it must have been thematically significant when the characters did not actually shoot heroin before fucking.

In a more literary vein, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment affected me very strongly, as I came upon the novel at just the right time.  Like the novel’s protagonist, Raskolnikov, I was a morally tortured university student living alone in a tiny room little bigger than my bed.  Like him, I was chronically short of funds.  Like him, I had only one friend, who was (as in the novel) kind of a dork.  Like Raskolnikov, I came to believe that the murder of a Russian pawnbroker was not only ethically defensible but would also make me a lot more like Napoleon.  There were differences, of course.  I never actually murdered my Russian pawnbroker because I lived in Atlanta, and the only two pawnbrokers I could find were Serbian and from New Orleans, respectively.  Also, prostitutes would not date me.

It’s a remarkable fact that the majority of English majors get their start with T.S. Eliot’s long poem “The Waste Land.”  Perhaps this is due to the work’s wide range of allusion, running from Homer to scripture to bawdy vaudeville.  Perhaps it is the poem’s modernist, experimental style of making language new.  Perhaps it is because Eliot’s own footnotes basically write the term paper for you.

It is difficult to overestimate the effect of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom on today’s white Southern reader, particularly if that reader was never asked to read As I Lay Dying in high school.  The novel’s densely allusive, poetic, biblical style was both an awakening and a challenge to one’s assumptions about American literature.  Here was a novel that complicated the received conventional wisdom of southern race relations.  Here was a novel that explored rage and mistrust as positive virtues.  Here was a novel that richly rewarded one’s extensive knowledge of Civil War trivia.  Yet it all came at the cost of soul-searching guilt.  “I don’t hate the South.  I don’t!” wails sensitive young Quentin Compson at the novel’s close, a sentiment not shared by many readers after the novel’s 300 densely Faulknerian pages.  The only thing that kept me from jumping out of my own window at the end of the book (as the author hints that Quentin does) is the fact that I was not, like that protagonist, attending Harvard at the time.  It is one of my favorite novels.

It is my firm conviction that Moby Dick is not only America’s finest and most insightful novel of whale-hunting, but also her finest and most insightful novel of whale-gutting.  And it takes a certain gutsy Americanness to launch your whale novel with two hundred pages of anecdotes, parables, allusions, and character building before the first whale is even spotted, let alone caught, flayed, deblubbered, and rendered into those casks of whale oil by which nighttime nineteenth-century readers would be able to see the text of Moby Dick in the first place.  You may rest assured that Melville was keenly aware of this irony.  By not reading this book by whalelight yourself, you are already missing out on something, um, seminal in the American literary experience.

I cannot recall reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, although it is possible that I am mistakenly remembering not reading Remembrance of Things Past.

I have watched the rise of the memoir over the past decade with great trepidation, for I feel that it can only lead to more writing in which people talk about themselves instead of something interesting.  A predominance of memoir puts us all in grave danger of forgetting why novels were invented in the first place:  the fact that, while accounts of real life may be uplifting and inspiring, real-life dialogue is nearly always dead boring.  Thus it is that novels are to be preferred to memoirs, particularly those with the author photo on the front.  (It should be noted that a Nazi-killing exception exists to the rule of superiority, in that memoirs of Nazi-killing are always preferable to novels of the same.  This is because scientific criticism has identified a correlation between memoirs of Nazi killing and actual dead Nazis, while no such correlation exists for fiction.  This is especially true when the author is an existentialist.)

Like everyone, I eventually went to graduate school to pursue a doctorate in English literature.  At the time, post-structuralism seemed important.  Very important.  Already the first stirrings of post-post-structuralism were beginning, however, and this was also very important.  (I never did quite get a handle on what structuralism was or had been, but I assume that it, too, had once been very important.)  An education in such things naturally involved consuming a great deal of prose so important as to be nearly unreadable at the time and completely unmemorable now.  I do recall a fondness for Michel Foucault, or at least a fondness for reading about Foucault.  Of Foucault’s critical generation, now only Harold Bloom is left, and he only talks about Harold Bloom, even when he is talking about Shakespeare.  In the end, I narrowly escaped being run over by a laundry truck while leaving an S&M brothel on the way to obscuring my collaboration with Vichy authorities during 1941 and 1942.

My particular field of study was English Renaissance literature; specifically, the seventeenth-century English religious lyric; more specifically, six or seven poems by John Donne.  I also put time into Shakespeare (for who doesn’t?) and John Milton (perhaps out of guilt at the brevity of my Donne collection).  Let it never be said that studying the literary past in all its literary richness does not lend a new perspective on modern life.  I learned a terrific amount about the history of literature, and about how people once did not know that they had psychology in them, and that the world-ending antichrist spoken of in Revelations was in fact (this is proven by the very diligent scholarship of the period)  Philip II of Spain.

The most influential book of my life has been the Bible, particularly in the King James Version (also known as the 1611 Authorized Version or the Not Catholic Version).  In the American suburban milieu of my youth, of course, we cottoned to more modern and more accurate translations, but none of them approach the King James for sheer literary majesty.  Indeed, had the KJV never been produced, most literature in English wouldn’t know what to sound like, and we would have to watch BBC miniseries in which vicars, rectors, and earnest country priests all read from Tyndale instead.  Nobody wants that.

And did you know that there is a genuine school of Biblical textual criticism that considers the King James Version to have been actively and uniquely composed by God for accuracy and truth?  This is called “double inspiration,” and I think this it is an excellent move on God’s part.  Not only does it make Him sound much more Shakespearean, but it ingeniously helps to withhold salvation not just from Hindus and Confucians but from the French and Germans as well.

In my life as a high school teacher, I have been given the chance to delve deeply into a number of classic works, usually by returning to them again and again on a strict timetable, year after year.  I have also been given the chance to delve deeply into an endless stream of student exercises and writing assignments about these works.  Furthermore, I have been given the chance to delve deeply into classroom management, behavior modification, faculty meetings, and crisis conferences with students and parents.  But my love of literature has not wavered, and some of the works I’ve taught eight or nine times still have the power to move me towards enlightenment or the window.

Still, such books are invariably colored by the experience of teaching them to young people.  Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, for instance, is a rich meditation on truth and memory and storytelling.  In the classroom, however, it becomes the ground for clarification of such basic concepts as “the draft” and “the Cold War” and “wishing you hadn’t killed people.”  Certain readers of Pride and Prejudice have difficulty understanding why four hundred pages are necessary when Keira Knightly can do it in two hours.  Cormac McCarthy is a brilliant and sobering excavator of the human soul, but in classroom practice he mainly just scares the children. 

And then there is Shakespeare, our greatest writer even after four hundred years.  (That’s one full year for every page of Pride and Prejudice!)  The challenge of Shakespeare in the classroom is that of inviting students to love the language.  Not the plots, not the actors, not even the characters, but the language itself.  This is difficult, and there’s no way to force it; most of us begin as far from Shakespeare as we do from Urdu or COBOL, and students bear no blame for this.

But what many young readers fail to understand, and what blocks them I think, is that it’s really best to identify with Shakespeare’s villains rather than his heroes.  Villains are the characters he does best, not merely because they get the best lines but because they are the most human.  Shakespeare, even more than the Bible, certainly more than Frank Herbert or James Ellroy, understands that what is most interesting about us is our great and miserable sinfulness.

And this is what literature is for, I think.  We do not use Shakespeare.  Indeed, we do not use any of the books that change us, even the ones we laugh about.  Instead, those books use us.  They find us, partial and ridiculous, and make of us what they can.  They try very hard, they often fail, but even that failure leaves us somewhere other than where we started.  One thing I have learned in all this reading is that a good book, whatever its time and place, always mocks us out of precisely where we are.

Your English Course

Your English Course

Mr. Teacher

            Welcome to your English course!  Together we will explore a full set of complex literary works, each of which stands on its own but also forms part of a larger conversation, as you will see.  Or perhaps you won’t.  It’s one of those things that’s kind of difficult to pull off, actually.

We will write extensively and in a variety of ways.  This is a year to attempt to refine your own voice on paper.  I mean this, and I really hope it happens, but I can’t make any promises.  You’re going to have to do most of it yourself, and it mostly depends on where you’re starting from.  If you’ve been reading all your life, you’re probably going to do fine (which is pretty unfair, I know).  If you’ve never been much of a reader, I hope you’ll start.  I can give you a list of good books that may annoy your peers and/or parents.  I wish I could inspire everyone to read and think and love it, but I’m not exactly Robin Williams here.

In this class we will explore how literature makes meaning, and also how we make meaning in our own writing.  The idea is that an encounter with really excellent writing could actually spark something for you.  It’s all graded, though.  Sorry about that. 

Junior year is an exciting time, but also a stressful one.  You’ll probably develop some awful habits.  If you hide them well enough, I might not notice; I have a lot on my mind.  Come and talk to me if you have questions, problems, or just want to chat.  But I don’t really want to hear about the icky or illegal parts.  That’s what your Art teacher is for.

Texts:

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises          

An alcoholic’s book about boozy, self-destructive drinkers whose lives are imploding because of alcohol.  We will use it to talk about bullfighting.

Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

An extraordinary account of 1930s Southern gothic girlhood via alcohol.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

A dead body decomposes and talks about it.  I’ll bet you ten bucks that Faulkner can’t even remember writing it.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

A minority writer, because sober.  I will notice if you merely rent the movie about the bandaged guy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

A fable of obscene wealth, lies, pretensions, and freedom from consequences.  Sound familiar?  Also, alcohol.

Shakespeare, Hamlet

Hamlet is a linguistically challenging and philosophically difficult dramatic study in the superiority of Kenneth Branagh over Mel Gibson.

…as well as a variety of short stories and poems photocopied in violation of somebody’s copyright.

Course Expectations:

            Your Notebook and Homework:  You must keep a notebook in English.  Stop laughing.  You should write down everything I say more or less exactly as I say it.  This will help you to present it slightly differently in your own essays.

Writing will happen to you throughout the year.  There will be written responses to reading, in-class writing practice, short written homework assignments, and longer critical essays.  The longest assignment will be something close to five pages, or maybe four with creative margins.  Don’t panic.  You probably think this is a lot, but have you ever written a one-hundred-ten-page college thesis?  Have you?  I didn’t think so.  Punk.

            All writing for this class must be produced on a restored 1930s-era Underwood typewriter, the kind used by the all of the writers on our syllabus, possibly excluding Shakespeare.  The Underwood is a sturdy and reliable machine capable of standing up to all manner of author eccentricities, peccadilloes, vices, and obscenities.  During the Second World War, the Underwood Typewriter Company made M1 Carbines for the War Department.  What did your iMac ever do to kill Nazis?

Reading:  I will expect you to do all of the reading for each class before the time it is due.  Actually, that’s the last thing I expect.  Couldn’t you at least try?

Every sentence you don’t read is a stinging tear I weep for the future.

            Speaking and listening are of utmost importance in your English work and in the world beyond.  In class discussions you will practice articulating your ideas while also developing the attentive listening skills.  This will allow you in the future to, you know, be proactive or leverage your competencies or think outside the box or something.  Whatever.

A Note on Plagiarism:

Plagiarism is defined as the copying of another’s work, the use of a single essay for more than one course, misrepresentation of another’s work as your own, copying and pasting from Wikipedia, copying and pasting from Elizabeth, buying a fifty-dollar paper online the night before the assignment is due, dipping into the essay file at your older brother’s fraternity, having your girlfriend do your homework, copying and pasting from that guy’s website, digging through my recycling bin for discarded papers, having Mom “edit” your final draft, failing to adequately cite your sources, making up imaginary sources, failing to adequately cite your imaginary sources, or similar tricks designed to give the appearance that you wrote, did, or know something you haven’t, didn’t, or couldn’t possibly.  In a world of spin, faulty logic, and shoddy attribution, being honest and accurate about your relationship to your sources is more important than ever.  You’re not fooling anyone anyway.

Assessment Guide:  The Rubric

Grade A (90-100)

Reading:

* Demonstrates a thorough understanding of the complexity of literary texts.  Willingness to deal with both (or more) sides of ambiguity.  Congratulations!  You will never win an election.

* Embarrasses teacher (who didn’t quite do the rereading this year) with recollection of textual facts.

* Can tell the business end of a metaphor.

Writing:

* An A paper can be graded in under ten minutes.  This means more to me than you can possibly imagine.

Studentship:

* Active participant in class discussion.  Saves classmates trouble.

* May I write you a college recommendation letter?  Perhaps a supplemental?

* Popular with faculty.  Unpopular with peers.

Grade B (80-89)

Reading:

* Demonstrates coherent and adequate understanding of literary texts.

* Doesn’t always call a memoir a novel.

* Excellent recall of principal characters and their associated reductive themes.

Writing:

* Adequate focus present or nearby.

* Margins not ridiculous.

* Uses SAT-prep words, sometimes appropriately.

* Double-digit sentences.

* Adequately disguises summary as analysis.

Studentship:

* Nods appreciatively.

* Pretty much almost always prepared with book and assignments.

* Knows place.

Grade C (70-79)

Reading:

* Bookmarks SparkNotes.

* Demonstrates a thorough understanding of book cover.

* Confuses main character with that actress in the miniseries.

* Connections are disjointed, irrelevant, fragmented, desperate, indicative, unsupported, and sad.

Writing:

* Broad generalizations drawn from a variety of contexts.

* Wild guesses still within ballpark.

* Regurgitation of other’s points and/or lunch.

* Forgets to save.

Studentship:

* Probably stoned.

Grade D: (60-69)

Reading:

* Possibly a little.

Writing:

* The kind of thing I wish I could help.

* Really I do, but I hardly know where to start.

* Maybe it’s my fault?

Studentship:

* Thank you for playing.

Grade F: (59 and below)

* Believe me, I’m not looking forward to the parent conference any more than you are.

Succinct Rebuttal Theater, Episode 1

I do not Tweet, chiefly because I cannot square it with my guiding tenet question, “What Would Abraham Lincoln Do?” While the Gettysburg Address contains about two hundred eighty words, by one hundred forty characters we have not yet reached “equality.” In fact, we haven’t even noticed the War.

At the same time, though, I’m attracted to the idea of word limits. I have a tendency to go on, particularly when I have nothing to say. I suppose I keep thinking I’ll find something. The discipline imposed by a solid ceiling has its attractions, and the G.A. shows the power that can be generated by just ten sentences.

Thus today’s exercise, the first episode of Succinct Rebuttal Theater. The idea is to propose a claim (not patently absurd, for the sake of fairness) and then to craft a solid and meaningful rebuttal in the space of fewer than two hundred words. Who knows? Development of skills for the task might eventually prove useful on message boards, at picket lines, or in church.

Topic: Evolution

Claim: “Human life is too complex to have evolved by chance. How could everything about Earth and biology just happen to be so perfect for us?”

Succinct Rebuttal: Think about your family tree: generation after generation of people meeting, mating, and raising children to do the same in their turn, all of it leading to you. Take away just one of those people and your unique particularity disappears. One accident, one missed acquaintance, one worse disease, one misplaced sperm in umpteen thousand years and your place in genealogy would be occupied by somebody else. It stands to reason, then, that every choice and action made by all those countless ancestors must have involved not chance or choice but predetermined intelligent design. Otherwise, the odds against you existing at all are simply astronomical.

But of course it isn’t that way, is it? You exist at the foot of your family tree by chance, not choice. You’re what came of those events and possibilities, just as human life is what resulted from the mutations, selections, and behaviors of a billion years. Given what we know of the robustness of life, the likelihood of humanity occurring (or something like humanity, which we would call humanity if we were it) is actually rather good. The universe is very large. The odds are astronomical, but only because there burn so many stars.

Markings and Corrections Guide

Markings and Corrections from Your English Teacher

Because You Need Serious Correction

You’ll see comments of various kinds on most writing that you get back from me.  The purpose of each is to improve your writing.  This document is a guide to interpreting those corrections and using them to your advantage.  Also, somebody has to know these things. 

“affect”/“effect”

These two words sound a lot alike but mean different things.  This is one of the tricks played by language on people who don’t read enough.  I think it does this on purpose.

“Affect” is a verb:  The plight of the soulful, suffering English teacher affected her strongly.

“Effect” is a noun:  The main effect of alcohol is senior prom.

(Note that there is an uncommon noun use of “affect” and an even rarer verb use of “effect,” but you will never need them unless you go to graduate school.  Do you really want to do that?)

agreement

A clause’s subject and verb must agree in number:  The dog likes cheese. Dogs like cheese.

Pronouns should also agree with their antecedents:

            Incorrect:  A person needs their enemies. (This is a very common mistake.)

Correct:  A person needs her enemies.

Other than that, nobody really has to agree about anything.  If they did, we wouldn’t have literature.

analysis

(See “A Few Notes on Literary Analysis” in your coursepack.  Then write a five-page essay exploring only arbitrarily chosen and extremely picky details from that article out of context. )

awkward (or awk.)

A sentence is awkward when something about its structure isn’t right.  Maybe you have piled up too many prepositional phrases, or have strung together too many “because” clauses, or have created a clunky phrase, or something else.  Maybe you’re just at a certain age where your body does uncomfortable things, and you have feelings that scare you and that you don’t understand.  In any case, an awkward sentence is difficult to follow for reasons of grammar or clarity.  It should be rewritten, usually in a simpler form.  Also, try not to embarrass yourself in front of your peers.

block quotations

When a certain passage would take more than three lines to quote, format it as a block quotation.

           

A block quotation is single-spaced even when the rest of your writing is double-spaced, which means you have to consider whether the quotation is really going as far as you think it is towards filling the page.  The whole block is indented half an inch on both sides (not just the left), so that’s a plus.  Block quotations don’t need quotation marks, and they look stupid in italics.  Employment of a block quotation implies that you have read the passage.

character description  (see also summary)

See analysis above.  If you are only describing characters and their behavior, you are not writing an academic argument.  You are merely doing literature.

citation

When you make use of an outside source, you must cite that source in your work.  This will deflect blame away from yourself.  The most basic citation format is to list all works cited at the end of your essay while referring to the source and the page number using parenthetical citation.  For example:

It has been argued that Shakespeare’s critique of power in Measure for Measure implies a sort of Foucauldian archaeology of power avant-la-lettre (Ernie 134).  Others say, “Meh” (Bert 12).

Having introduced your reader to these sources, you may walk away with clean hands, confident that the issue is no longer your problem.

clause (see also phrase)

A full grammar lesson on clauses is beyond the reach of this handout.  (You’re welcome.)  In brief, a clause is a group of words containing a verb and its subject.  In this sense, all clauses are equal.  Some sentences contain more than one clause, and some of these may be dependent (or subordinate) to other clauses.  Thus, some clauses are more equal than others.

cliché

A cliché is a phrase, idea, or set of words that have been overused to the point of meaninglessness.  Use of clichés will make you sound like a television.

            Some common clichés:  grow as a person, across the board, think outside the box, accept herself for who she is, be proactive, fair and balanced.

comma usage

The comma is a bitch-goddess beholden only to its own laws.

            Commas are used between independent clauses (before the coordinating conjunction):

                        The day passes slowly under a hot sun, and at night the weasels come.

                        I had never seen such a huge mob, but I was impressed with their manners.

            Commas are used after introductory clauses and phrases:

                        When the shit hits the fan, act surprised.  (Introductory clause)

                        Happily, there was really no reason to be in class at all.  (Introductory adverb)

                        During the day, we never seem to worry about the undead.  (Introductory phrase)

            Commas separate items in a series:

                        Larry’s voice was high, reedy, and despondent.

            Commas are used to set off non-essential clauses (see “which”/“that”/“who” below).

Unnecessary commas:

            Do not put a comma between a subject and verb or a verb and its object.

                        Incorrect:  The boys on the bus[,] always make such a noise.

            Do not put a comma between the elements of a compound subject or compound verb:

                        Incorrect:  The flag bearer[,] and the sergeant both went down in cannon smoke.

                        Incorrect:  We ran as fast as we could[,] and sidestepped the controversy.

comma splice (or splice or c.s.)

A comma splice is an error that occurs when you try to join two independent clauses using only a comma.  Who do you think you are, Marcel Proust?  A comma splice is like botched plastic surgery.

The soldiers raised their rifles, they uttered a fearful cry.

There are several ways to correct this kind of error:

            Make it two sentences.  The soldiers raised their rifles.  They uttered a (etc.).

            Use a semicolon:  The soldiers raised their rifles; they uttered a fearful (etc).

            Choose a conjunction:  The soldiers raised their rifles, and they uttered a (etc.).

                                    The soldiers raised their rifles, but they uttered a fearful (etc.).

                                    The soldiers uttered a fearful cry as they raised their rifles.   

coordinating conjunctions

Coordinating conjunctions are the small words that can join independent clauses together, producing a compound sentence.  The coordinating conjunctions are For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So, and WTF.

double-space

If you submit work that is single-spaced, your instructor will not have room to make comments or corrections.  Think about that for a minute.

fragment (or sentence fragment or frag.)

A fragment occurs when a sentence is incomplete as written.  This usually means that it lacks a core independent clause.  It’s like you’re not even trying.

            Whenever I feel afraid.  Because that’s the way I like it.  Like rain on your wedding day.

Sometimes it is just one clause that is fragmentary (e.g. if it lacks a subject or verb).

literary present tense

When discussing literature, you should base your discussion in present tense.  The temptation is to use past tense since you are pretending that you have read the book, but this causes confusion in certain cases.  Literary present reminds you that the book will still be around long after you are gone and forgotten.

            Incorrect:  Romeo almost found Juliet in time, but he was too late.

            Correct:  Romeo almost finds Juliet in time, but he is too late.

numbers

You should spell out any number than can be expressed in a word or two (e.g. “sixteen,” “ninety-seven,” “twelve million”).  All numbers are actually words.  Algebra is grammar.  Geometry is like type-setting or something.

passive voice (or passive)

Passive voice sentence construction obscures agency; that is, it hides the true agent of the action described.  Without practice, passive voice sounds stilted and dishonest.  Done well, it can deflect responsibility even under oath.

            Mistakes were made.  (Who made them?)  The car was wrecked.  (Who wrecked it?)

            The girls were being taught to do anything that made them look good.  (By whom?)

The opposite of passive voice is active voice, which foregrounds a clearly-discernible subject.  This should usually be someone else.

plot summary

If you must summarize plot in your essay, be sure to do the reading first.

pronoun antecedent

There’s nobody in the whole damn world who can’t be replaced by a pronoun.

quotation usage

A quotation included within one’s own writing is called an embedded quotation.  A quotation long enough to take more than three lines should be set off as a block quotation.  Never quote unless you have something to say not just about what the passage says but also about how it says it.

            The great thing about quotations is that someone has already said something interesting about what you’re talking about.  The not-so-great thing is that it wasn’t you.

(See also citation.)

repetition

Repetition is like redundancy, but more obnoxious and less subtle.  It is the Frat Boy of errors.

run-on

A run-on sentence is an error that occurs when two otherwise complete and unattached sentences are not properly set off by the condom of punctuation.

            Incorrect:  The open sea is my best friend without it I would be lost on land.

            Correct:  The open sea is my best friend; without it I would be lost on land.

            Correct:  The open sea is my best friend, for without it I would be lost on land.

“shall”/“will”

According to Garner, the will/shall distinction is both pretentious and illusory. It is unnecessary in American English.  Thus, one says "I will crush this puny planet," and never "I shall crush this puny planet."

“thee”

Even worse than the subjunctive.  Don’t go there unless you’re a Quaker.  It also works for sonnets, but only if you’re dead.

“their”/“there”/“they’re”

“Their” is possessive.  The bears dragged their hapless victim away into the murk.

“There” is an adverb referring to “that location” (as opposed to “here,” which refers to “this location.”)

            Put it there and never bring it here again.

“They’re” is a contraction of “they are.”  “They’re at it again,” she said ruefully.

Mixing these up tells your reader that you don’t care enough to read your own writing.  I’m sorry I even assigned it.

theme

Literary authors generally return to certain key issues, problems, conflicts, or other matters in their work.  Often this is because they can’t afford therapy.  Whenever you identify such a main concern in a text, you have identified a theme.  Most analytical writing about literature focuses on themes, but not just their identification.  Equally important is how the author explores the theme in the work.

            When asked about theme, think this way:  what is the author asking us to see or think about differently in this work, how are they doing it, and why does it matter?  Answer this question, and then subordinate that issue to whatever particular axe it is that you have to grind.

thesis and thesis statement

Your thesis is what you are trying to prove, argue, or otherwise explore in your writing.  A thesis statement is a single, clear, distinctive sentence that states what this thesis is.  It usually occurs in your introduction paragraph, often (but not always) as the last sentence of that paragraph.

            The plural of thesis is theses, which rhymes with feces.

titles (of your essay)

Imagine that you pick up a magazine article with no title or a book with no cover.  Like, say, you picked it out of the dumpster behind a bookstore.  Have you ever done this?  I have done this.

titles (of books, etc.)

Titles of books, movies, magazines, albums, and other objects published on their own are underlined or italicized (but never both):  Gone with the Wind, Romeo and Juliet, Europe Central, Newsweek.

Titles of stories, poems, essays, songs, and anything published within something larger get quotation marks:  “The Hollow Men,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “How To Tell a True War Story,” “Hey Jude.”
Sometimes books out of a dumpster don’t have visible titles, but I think I’ve mentioned this already.

transition

Writing must flow logically.  When one sentence follows another with no apparent connection to what was just being discussed, there is a problem with transitions.  Marking a transition can be as simple as including an appropriate phrase (e.g. thus, however, therefore, on the other hand, etc.) or as complex as alluding to a point made much earlier in the writing.  One way to describe writing that lacks good transitions is to say that it is “jumpy.”  Another way is to say that it is “awful.”

unnecessary

It’s always tempting to include intensifiers, personal anecdotes, and even small amounts of cash folded into your writing, but these are seldom appropriate to straightforward argument and analysis.  When I mark something as unnecessary, try to rewrite the sentence without it.  The following example sentences are all stronger with the bracketed portions simply removed.

            [I have argued in this essay that] Shakespeare’s women are often crippled by words.

            No one [that I know of] has ever said that Shakespeare’s women are simple.

                        (Even better:)  Shakespeare’s women are not simple.

            [We have to ask ourselves,] what does it mean to be a strong female character?

Sometimes whole sentences will be marked “unnecessary.”  This is often a nice way of saying that they are “boring.”

vague

I mark words as vague when they are so general or universally applicable as to say almost nothing.  Common problem words here include interesting, unique, special, and such.  Absolutely everything is “unique” when you think about it.  Instead of saying that something is “interesting,” come right out and tell us what is so interesting about it.  The opposite of vague is precise.  In writing, precision is a twin to clarity, while vagueness is the mutant Siamese doppelganger of bullshit.

verb tense

Jumping around with verb tense is confusing.  Keep it consistent.  One day at a time.  Or, er, yesterday.

“who”/“whom”

“Who” is for subjects, just as “he” and “she” are for subjects.

“Whom” is for objects,” just as “him” and “her” are for objects.

            Who wrote the letter?  (She wrote the letter?)

            You gave the book to whom?  (You gave the book to her?)

            We gave a party last year, and who came to it?

            Whom do you love?

“Whom” is also for people who want to sound like English teachers or certain British movie stars.  William Shakespeare used it.  He also coined the word “pedant.”