Hello everyone,
I was wondering if I could receive assistance on how I can move away from very simple ideas per paragraph. I'm studying This Boy's Life at the moment. If I got this prompt:
"I didn't come to Utah to be the same boy I'd been before. I had my own dreams of transformation" Ultimately, the text demonstrates that everyone covers up or transforms in some way.
Immediately seeing this, this is how I would structure it (and it's bad)
Par 1: Examples of people who covers up (to agree with prompt)
Par2: Examples of people who transform (to agree with prompt)
Par3: Examples of people who don't cover up or transform (to disagree with prompt)
I know I'm doing this wrong. How can I come up with insightful ideas to discuss (quickly). Please help! 
And if you get a really simple 2 mark text response prompt, HOW can you discuss more in dept ideas when the prompt is asking you something fairly simple?
Just going to break this up a bit...
Firstly:
I was wondering if I could receive assistance on how I can move away from very simple ideas per paragraph. I'm studying This Boy's Life at the moment. If I got this prompt:
"I didn't come to Utah to be the same boy I'd been before. I had my own dreams of transformation" Ultimately, the text demonstrates that everyone covers up or transforms in some way.
The best way to go from simple ideas to complex ones is to create a sophisticated contention. The way I explain this makes more sense visually when I can make
erratic hand gestures, but you basically want to funnel the text through the prompt, then funnel that through your contention, then distribute what's left into three body paragraphs.
Crude approximation:
You can also have four, (or, I suppose, five sub-arguments) but that's hard to format so let's assume you're sticking with three for argument's sake. So you're never writing on 'the text' or 'the prompt;'
you're writing on your contention! This means that your first thought should be turning this prompt into a viable argument, since if you bypass that step and try to come up with sub-arguments before you've come up with... well... an argument... things get a bit tricky.
For example:
"I didn't come to Utah to be the same boy I'd been before. I had my own dreams of transformation"
Ultimately, the text demonstrates that everyone covers up or transforms in some way.Alter's already covered what to do when a quote is involved in the prompt, so let's put that to the side for now. The core of this prompt is:
All of the characters in TBL cover up or transform in some way.Next, do you
mostly agree or
mostly disagree with that sentiment?
--> If you mostly agree, then consider how you might still challenge the prompt somehow.
--> If you mostly disagree, then consider how the prompt might still be somewhat true.
Let's assume you're
mostly agreeing, since that seems to be the more logical line of inquiry here.
We want to argue that the characters do cover up or transform, but we don't want to be too definitive. The prompt states that
everyone covers up/transforms, and we shouldn't just take that absolute word without questioning it. Perhaps our challenge could come in the form of examining characters that don't really cover up/transform. But that's not really an 'argument' kind of challenge since listing some evidence that doesn't conform to our rule isn't a very substantive discussion point. A lot of students will write a 'challenge' or 'rebuttal' paragraph where they examine the 'other side' of the prompt, but too often this will occur in the form of them just listing evidence that goes against their points.
For instance, if you were to have:
Para 1: the characters who cover up
Para 2: the characters who transform
Para 3: the characters who DON'T cover up or transform
...then you won't have argued anything other than 'some characters cover up/transform and some don't.'
This seems to be kind of where you're at right now, but I'll unpack your sample structure later. For now, because we're concentrating on ways of formulating an overall argument, let's revisit our paraphrasing of the prompt:
All of the characters in TBL cover up or transform in some way.If I'm agreeing with the underlying principle here, then I want to be arguing that
many of the characters cover up, transform, or both. (Note the use of the word 'many,' which serves to pull my contention back from the cliffs of definitiveness - I'm not saying 'all,' because I don't want to seem aggressively 100% certain about my interpretation.)
As a possible challenge, I might consider:
...that the characters cover up/transform for different reasons
...that the characters cover up/transform in different ways and to different extents
...that the characters cover up/transform, but their individual journeys are nevertheless unique because of who they were before and after these cover ups/transformations
...that the characters cover up/transform, but they differ in terms of their own self-awareness
^see how each of these is giving me a more substantial argument than simply saying ...but some of the characters don't cover up/transform?
So our contention might look something like:
Many of the characters in TBL cover up/transform, but they do so for different reasons, which brings about different consequences.
Or, in more academic, essay-ish terms:
Although the characters in This Boy's Life often have vastly different motivations for their actions, Wolff unites many of them through demonstrating their capacity to deceive others by subverting expectations, as well as their propensity to conform to the society or circumstances around them.Notice here that I've also unpacked that terminology of 'covering-up' (=deceiving others and subverting expectations) and 'transforming' (=conforming to their society/circumstances) which up until now, we've just been treating as self-evident ideas. This is something that will need to be evident in your essay because you don't want to get through the whole thing using words like 'cover up' and 'transform' without ever clarifying what you're talking about. For the record, I'd probably use the bulk of my introduction in this case to flesh out these terms and broaden the definitions beyond the bit of clarifying I've done here, so it's not like we're replacing the idea of 'covering-up' with the idea of 'deceiving others by subverting expectations' - that's just one of many avenues to be explored.
Immediately seeing this, this is how I would structure it (and it's bad)
Par 1: Examples of people who covers up (to agree with prompt)
Par2: Examples of people who transform (to agree with prompt)
Par3: Examples of people who don't cover up or transform (to disagree with prompt)
I know I'm doing this wrong. How can I come up with insightful ideas to discuss (quickly). Please help!
Okay, so in each of those paragraphs, you've got
evidence but no
argument. It is possible to structure an argument around the evidence that you've presented, but you can't go into a paragraph thinking 'I'm going to write about the characters who transform in the text' because all you'll do is talk about those characters, and there won't be any broader point that helps your contention.
Imagine if we're arguing about the best city to live in, and you say 'Melbourne's the best because it's got a diverse culture, plenty of attractions, and it has won awards for its livability.' Then I say, 'yeah, well, there's a really nice house in Adelaide. So there.'
^One piece of evidence does not make a viable argument, so when you're structuring your essays, you need to prioritise actual sub-contentions rather than just jumping to ways of sorting out evidence.
This is also why structuring paragraphs by characters is a fairly weak approach.
eg.
This Boy's Life shows that lies can be damaging. Discuss.Para 1: Jack's lies and their damage
Para 2: Rosemary's lies and their damage
Para 3: Dwight's lies and their damage.
^Again, I haven't said anything substantial about these different points, I'm just proving the prompt right in three different ways... which isn't exactly valuable and won't earn any credit for exploration/idea discussion.
Instead, going for thematic breakdowns where each paragraph has a proper sentence as its focus makes for a much stronger piece overall. And in terms of doing it quickly... practice makes perfect
And if you get a really simple 2 mark text response prompt, HOW can you discuss more in dept ideas when the prompt is asking you something fairly simple?
Not sure what you mean by a '2 mark text response prompt,' but in the event you get a really simple prompt like:
This Boy's Life is about accepting change. Discuss. then it's up to you to make things more expansive. Question things in order to broaden your discussion and try to construct your own arguments rather than relying solely on the prompt to provide three obvious talking points.
On that point, do our contentions need to be really mind blowing? As well as our topic sentences/ arguments. Or could they just be insightful body paragraphs that have good use of evidence and relate it to the author's ideas and what not?
If you can manage to write something 'mind blowing,' then go for it, but ultimately your teachers will be reading hundreds of essays (and might have been doing so for multiple years) so the chance of you stumbling onto a never-before-seen amazing argument that's totally unique and utterly impressive is fairly low
Most people who try to write 'mind blowing' stuff end up doing irrelevant stuff with really tenuous links to evidence, but it's more than sufficient to be insightful. A competent essay that takes a safe line of argument but does all the important structural stuff well is going to be leagues ahead of someone who goes out of the way to have a special snowflake contention at the expense of actually hitting the criteria
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