Summary/Analysis: Reflections

 Organization/Paragraphing
The biggest problem I saw with the summary/analysis was the way paragraphs were formed and organized. Although sentence level issues related to grammar and style were frequent also, they are less important as they can always be fixed and honed.

If you organized your paragraphs as a kind of "chronological" analysis, your paragraphs were uneven and rarely focused on one point. Instead, they drift off in other directions. In order to write about any text, you must be able to create your own "temporality" that you can write within. Your argument should somehow "develop" or "move" and you need to be able to signpost these movements with words like "Although," "However," "But," "In contrast," rather than merely saying "x" represents this. Although this may be a great way to take notes (simply moving through the video and interpreting all the images), it produces a disorganized and non-unified paper.

I suspect that some of this stems from your wish to speak in terms of "symbolizing." Now, I am not saying in the least that there are not symbols within the Kanye West video (Sword of Damocles, Horus Chain, daggers,etc), but you have to be able to say something with these symbols more explicitly than that they "relate" to power. When discussing things" symbolically, it seems as though you think that the argument does not have to move linearly in some sort of logical progression. Furthermore, its important to show how these symbols connect with each other. These images cannot be interpreted in isolation of one another--they are all part of the same 'image'/painting/video.

 You have to decide what your paragraphs will be "about"--this is what teachers have meant by "topic sentence" and then you can take paragraphs, move them around, and think about how to transition between them. What is the connection between one paragraph and the next? What is the connection between a paragraph on the women surrounding Kanye and the men that replace them? Is it one of contrast? analogy? etc. etc.

This "movement" of paragraphs  is what Bartholomae and Petrosky mean by writers "punctuating" essays. We will talk more about this as we move through the other texts we will be using.

Sentence-Level issues


A couple of common ones:

• avoid "you" as much as possible
• avoid using contractions (don't, can't, etc.) in any formal writing--it sounds too colloquial 
• check for unneeded words and passive voice. Examples of unneeded words are intensifying adverbs and adjectives  like "completely," "obviously," "clearly," "very," "really." 
• Unneeded passive voice--this only obscures what you are trying to say (or poorly masks that you have nothing to say)