英语修辞写作—语法修辞篇 参考材料 Section 9.docx

Section 9 Modes of Discourse (4) : Expository一Classification and Exemplification,1. Key to the Exercise1. What is classification? Why is it so important?Classification or division sorts things into categories or groups according to their common characteristics. Classification concerns typology (the genus and species of things). Therefore it is very important not only in developing paragraphs and organizing discourses in writing, but also in building up scientific systems of things.2. What are formal and informal classifications? What are the essentials for formal classification?Find out the answer in the lecture.3. Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow.1) How is the subject classified?It seems that the subject New York is divided into three classes, but actually the people of the city are classified. The first sentence is the general classification and the rest are the detailed definitions or discussion of the specific classes, the three groups of New York people.2) Is it a formal or informal classification? Why?It is a rather clear classification, but not quite formal, because the inclusions (people working in New York City) are not explicitly limited and the criterion (where they come from： New York natives, commuters and those who come from other places to work in New York City) is implied rather than stated.3) What are the essentials for this classification?A. The criterion (where they come from) is sensible： according to this criterion, people working in New York can be effectively divided into three groups.B. The classification includes more than two subclasses： three groups altogether.C. The three groups are basically not overlapped they are easily differentiated.Exemplification means to provide examples about something. Writing an exemplification essay typically involves offering many examples to support a generalization about something. In this type of essay, examples act as supporting material to explain or clarify the generalization.InstructionsStep 1Decide on a topic. Basically, what generalization do you want to exemplify? If a topic is assigned, most likely you will already have a set of generalizations about it so you can just build your essay from that. If you choose your own topic, you will have to decide on a generalization about that topic that you can support with examples.Step 2Determine a purpose. What angle of the generalization do you want to present to the reader? Having a clear purpose will help you choose examples and write your thesis.Step 3Think about your audience. How do you think members of the audience feel about the generalization that you are discussing?Step 4Make a list of examples related to your generalization. Initially list all examples that you can think of-you will narrow them down later. Include anecdotes (short stories), facts, statistics and any other types of examples.Step 5Choose examples from the list that are relevant to your purpose. Make sure that all of the ones that you choose support the generalization. Obviously, you do not want to choose ones that contradict your purpose.Step 6Write a thesis statement. The thesis statement should state the generalization that you are exemplifying and make it clear that you are attempting to support it with examples.Step 7Write an introduction that lets your reader know what to expect from your essay and states the thesis.Step 8Write a well-developed body that supports the thesis. The body should fully support the generalization. Each paragraph should directly relate to the thesis.Step 9Arrange your examples logically. It may be important to categorize examples if you have a lot of them so that you don't confuse your reader.Step 10Use transition words and phrases to guide readers through your essay.Step 11Write a conclusion that sums up the essay's main points and restates the thesis. Remember to make it clear in the conclusion what you want readers to take away with them.2. Guide (2): Exemplification (B)Using ExamplesOne of most impressive forms of argument (which is not really an argument at all) is to use examples of whatever it is we're talking about. It is also one of the most common forms of discourse and we use it constantly, even in the most informal discussions. Ask people what they mean, and they will surely answer with an example, an illustration. The Guide to Grammar and Writing is practically one example after another.When writing an illustration or example assignment, we will have to decide how many examples will be enough to make our point and then, if we use more than one, in what order should we use them. Do we work up to the most persuasive point or illustration or do we begin with that and then fill in with more details? No one pattern will work all the time, and it's going to depend on the argument we choose to back up with examples. You'll also have to decide when to stop. If you're trying to define what it means to be a good teacher, how many examples of good teaching do you have to give before you make your point? You need enough examples to make a valid point, but not so many that your reader will put down the essay and walk out the door.Be careful of the Transitions you use to connect your examples. It is too easy simply to number them, but then our essay begins to sound like a mathematical exercise. If it helps to organize your paper, you can number your examples at first and then go back over the paper and provide other transitions (another advantage of word-processing). Get in the habit of providing steps, though, from one piece of the puzzle to another.Speaking of examples, let's look at one now, an essay that illustrates the writer9s suspicion that news programs are getting longer and longer and offering less and less actual news. It was written by a student, Geton Hamurd, who gives us permission to use his paper. Brainstorming for this essay is easy, Mr. Hamurd says: sit in front of the television for an hour and take notes, keeping score of the things that are news and the things that aren't. To be completely fair, Hamurd adds, we should probably do this over the period of a week or on random nights over a month (to make sure that we didn't catch the news on a bad night), and it would be fun to use a stopwatch to time the ads, too, but we'll let you do that for your own paper.What Happened to the News?The Guide to Grammar and WritingCapital Community College FoundationWhen television news started out, back in the 1950s, it occupied less than a thirty-minute slot. Ten or fifteen minutes would be granted to local stations for their news, and then the networks would say all there was to say about national and world news in the remaining fifteen to twenty minutes. There were very few advertisements during the news; it wasn't regarded as appropriate to sponsor news about floods and fires and political disasters. Life must have been simpler then.Nowadays many television stations set apart ninety minutes for local news alone, and thafs just for the early evening news show. On March 17, 1998 (St. Patrick's Day), we watched a local news show in Hartford for one hour, from 5 to 6 p.m., and kept track of what seemed to be really news and what was well, not news.First of all, during this one hour of news, there were 35 advertisements. Among other things advertised, there were ads for cars (sometimes competing car companies would follow nose to tailpipe), lots of pharmaceuticals (with dreadful warnings about side-effects), fast-food chains (no warnings about side effects), mutual funds, feminine hygiene products, cheese, utility companies, phone service, shampoos, and deodorants. Most of the ads were fast paced, colorful, slick, and sometimes funny. They seemed to do a lot in their thirty seconds. Graphically, they were the most interesting part of the hour. In addition, there were ten advertisements apparently produced by the television station itself that advertised programs and services of the station sometimes featuring what was coming up later that evening, sometimes touting the virtues of the station's news team and weather forecasters.Besides these self-advertisements, the news program was also littered with eight very brief "teasers55 (well call them) announcing that “This is Connecticufs Newstation,J and telling us what will happen “at the top of the hour," or “on Late Line, tonight at 11 "Wait511 you hear this" preceded more than one break for ads. In both half-hour segments of this one-hour news program, there were Torecast First" moments where the weather forecaster was apparently awakened from a nap to tell us that later on he was going to give us his weather predictions. He told us, right then and there, that it was sunny outside now, but look out for later on tonight! (Details to follow, fifteen minutes later.) Incidentally, the weather forecast itself, when we finally got to it, was exactly the same (with maybe a degree difference) at 6:20 as it had been at 5:50. It could just as well have been videotaped, but it wasn't. There were also teasers for the sports commentator. He announced at two different times what he was going to tell us about fifteen or twenty minutes later. At least the sports news was different in the two half-hour segments./Perhaps the most annoying moments in the news hour are the little moments of conviviality and chit-chat between members of the news team, the little asides of mutual congratulation and gratitude and commiseration (with the various victims in the day's news) that are supposed to make us see how wonderfully human the newscasters are. What must the fifteen-minute, get-it-done-and-get-out newscasters of the 50s think of all this?Surprisingly, only one portion of the news this evening from 6 to 6:30 repeated exactly what we had already seen during the 5:30 to 6 segment. Billed as a "follow-up,n it was a videotaped redundancy. There were, however, several features that didn't exactly feel like news. "Covering Connecticuf amounted to several five- or ten-second blurbs on what prominent people had done that day across the state. "People in the News" was mostly about the shenanigans of Hollywood types, about a new film called Primary Colors that seems to mock the White House scandals and about the star of Titanic being upset because some pictures of him, naked, were being published by a magazine. There was the nightly announcement of the winning Lottery Numbers (perhaps this is, indeed, important news for some people!), and two segments about St. Patrick's Day parties going on in the capital city lots of people drinking lots of beer. A "HealthBeaf segment told us about pheromones and perfumes and "Business Beat" told us something about Kathie Lee G讦ford's sweatshops.Finally, the news broke and there was a solemn and clearly labeled Editorial Comment, complete with the suggestion that the news station was willing to entertain opposing viewpoints.Whatever happened to the news? What we need to do now is to take a stopwatch to the news hour and determine how much of the time is spent actually reporting uhard news," the kind of thing that was put into that fifteen-minute segment during the early days of television news. We're willing to wager that over a one-hour news show there is considerably less than the fifteen minutes that used to be devoted solely to news. We can5t say that our lives were simpler back then, but apparently we had less time to spend watching nonsense.composition/examples.htmPoints to Ponder: Does the writer convince you of anything? What structural elements holds this essay together? Try printing the essay and connecting structural elements with circles and lines. Do you think the writer goes overboard with his illustrations? If so, can you say what you would leave out? The writer insists on a difference between “hard news" and the kind of thing he sees on the news program. Is it clear what the writer means by “hard news"? Would it be more fair if the writer provided us with a good definition of what "news" really is? Should the writer do a more scientific or statistical survey of news programs - using a stopwatch, perhaps, watching other channels and sampling the news on several different evenings over a period of weeks or even months?Here is a brief essay developed by means of a series of examples about how language has changed so dramatically in our century. Try to point to that place in the essay where you know what the writers want you to believe and what they want you to do about it.A CENTURY OF CHANGE WORDS MODIFIED BY TIMEWhat a century this has been. A century that took us from horseback to fuel-injected horsepower, from gaslights to sodium-vapor streetlights, from crystal radios to digital television, from compasses to global positioning satellites, from wood stoves to micro wave ovens, from Victrolas to DVD players, from poultices to computed tomography.While those and many more innovations were accompanied by the introduction of new terminology and additional meanings for existing words, technology was not alone responsible for the metamorphosis in meaning of a substantial number of existing words that changed dramatically over the course of the century. Some alternative terms supplanted once-dominant names. Other terms declined in usage and gradually vanished from the common lexicon. In some cases, shorthand reference to specialized terminology eclipsed traditional meanings of certain words.Language is dynamic, and certainly many of the changes introduced during the 20th century constitute logical progressions in usage. But a disturbingly large quotient of modern terms result from grotesque mutations in meaningthe illegitimate progeny of ignorance and lack of respect for etymology and history.Just as a person awakening today from a century-long Rip Van Winkle doze would be bewildered by our modern world, we would be confounded if we could somehow travel back in time to the early portion of the 20th century. Consider how confused you'd be to learn that the shop down the street was having a sale on waists, and how people feared consumption. During the early part of the century, "waist" was the term for a blouse or the bodice of a woman's dress. While today we laud “consumption” as a symbol of affluence and an indicator of a healthy economy, this term connoted anything but health a century ago, when it commonly referred to tuberculosis. Today we gawk at spectacles, but back then that was the term for what we call eyeglasses or, in even more abbreviated fashion, glasses.Some words have all but disappeared during the past five decades. Few people refer to pants as "trousers" anymore. Ask the clerk in a clothing store to sell you some dungarees and youll likely leave empty-handed. Few people, including that clerk, realize that “jean” is really the name for