SECTION Two--Developing Papers: Generalizations and Particulars

In Section One we looked at some ways of generating content in prewriting. Here we’ll examine those methods and techniques more carefully, paying special attention to how they can be used in developing and organizing different kinds of papers.

We’ll begin by discussing generalizations and particulars, the building blocks of all writing, and then move on to the chief methods of developing papers — description, narration, division, comparison, classification, analysis of causes, definition. Traditionally, description and narration have been classified with exposition and argument as major types of prose discourse. Here we’ll treat them mainly as means of supporting exposition and argument, the kinds of writing you’ll do most often in college.

Keep in mind as you study each section that a method of development rarely occurs alone in a paper. Normally the methods are used in combination, to support one another, to share in carrying out the writer’s purpose. An explanation of why something happened (why a candidate won, why a team lost) may be presented within a narrative account of what took place (the political campaign and the election, the events leading up to the game and the game itself). Comparing is one way of defining (“Aikido, like judo, is one of the martial arts, but .. .“). And so on. But taking up the methods one by one makes it easier to single out their special uses and the problems in planning and writing they sometimes raise. What’s said about each method applies whether the method is used in developing part of a paragraph, a whole paragraph, a sequence of paragraphs, or (more rarely) a whole paper.

Generalizations and Particulars

One way to look at a piece of writing is to see it as made up of generalizations and particulars. Particulars often take the form of examples or details.

Some statements can immediately be identified as generalizations (“Italians love music”) and some as particulars (“The black-eyed peas were served with bits of bacon”). But the terms generalization and particular are relative; often we can tell which a statement is only in context. “The Olympic Games are held every four years” would probably be a generalization in a paper that looked back on the last Olympic Games. It might be a particular in a paper that dealt with the history of amateur and professional sports.

Though generalizations may dominate in some kinds of writing and particulars in others, usually there’s a regular interplay, with the particulars giving support to the generalizations and the generalizations giving point to the particulars. The following passage shows a typical inter weaving. Of the generalizations, the broadest occurs in the first sentence. Note the successive narrowing from “real life” to “your life” to “my mother’s house.” The glitter in the mother’s house is particularized by clusters of details about furnishings and clothes, details that justify the writer’s making two further generalizations — “size, quantity, and glitter always count” and “it all seems some how gayer that way.”

The drabness of real life seems to affect taste. If your life is exciting you are likely to decorate in stark Danish and wear simple un adorned black classics. But in my mother’s house there is glitter —a dazzling wall clock that bongs every half-hour, an oversized, wood-inlaid painting of Chinese dancers (a la Coney Island), painted figurines of bongo players, and a giant Buddha perched atop the TV. In her clothes my mother prefers bright reds to black. She will choose the flashy fakes over subdued pearls, big beads over smaller ones, and three strands over one. Size, quantity, and glitter always count. Her car is an orange and white Mercury (now in its declining years), and her hair is of rather similar hues—it all seems somehow gayer that way.—Patricia Cayo Sexton, Harper’s

Generalizations

Generalizations perform many different functions. They may sum up a number of experiences: “Growing up black means growing up angry.” They may bring out the meaning of a single experience: “Those first few days in the hospital taught me that there’s a time when just surviving is enough.” They may express an opinion or a judgment:

“The drabness of real life seems to affect taste”; “All in all, our team would have been better off if it had stayed in the locker room”; “That is certainly the best of Altman’s movies.”

Because generalizations show relationships, bring out meanings, and draw conclusions, you’ll find them indispensable in any papers that criticize or evaluate. At times you may find an entire essay spinning from or building toward the single generalization that is your thesis.

A bold, dramatic generalization can pull a reader into a piece of writing as nothing else can. When Irving Howe writes, “The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever,” he captures the attention not only of those already convinced of the significance of Richard Wright’s novel but of those who are either unfamiliar with it or unimpressed by it and ready to challenge what Howe has to say. Don’t, however, let the urge for dramatic effect tempt you into producing a journalistic opener like “Americans love violence” or “Our school totters on the brink of disaster” or “Marriage is obsolete” unless you can support your headline with convincing particulars. Unsupported generalizations are a major cause of weakness in any writing.

Examples

Citing a member of a group or class—using the Labrador retriever as a member of the class retrievers, or beets and carrots as members of the class hardy vegetables, or “Marriage is obsolete” as a member of the class generalizations—is the most common way of bringing in examples. But it’s not the only way. Anecdotes, or small-scale narratives, can serve as examples: an account of an experience you had when you were five might illustrate, or lead to a generalization about, how impressionable children are. Comparisons can serve as examples: a comparison of social dancing in the 1940s and social dancing in the 1970s could support some generalizations about young people in those two periods.

What turns an anecdote or a comparison into an example is its connection with a general statement. The connection may be explicit, as in the second sentence and the last phrase of this passage:

Among the fans of astrology everyone has his or her favorite item of proof. John Dryden’s melancholy reading of his newborn son’s horoscope is a fair example. He predicted disasters at the ages of eight, twenty-three, and thirty-three. At eight the child was involved in an accident with a stag. At twenty-three he fell from a tower. He drowned at thirty-three.

The amazing batting average of Nostradamus, who appears to have foretold the Great Fire of London, the French Revolution, and the rise of Russian power after World War II, is everywhere cited as evidence of the astrological imperative. — Linda Lewis, Atlantic

For example and for instance are the familiar introductory tags, but often no such signals are necessary:

Many slang words pass into standard use and once they do, of course, they don’t sound slangy at all. Among such now-sturdy respectables are club (social), dwindle, flout, foppish, freshman, fretful, glib, hubbub, nice, ribaldry, scoundrel, simper, swagger, tidy, tantrums, tarpaulin, and trip (journey).—Bergen Evans, New York Times Magazine

How many examples you need in a piece of writing depends on the rhetorical situation, especially on how familiar your audience is with your subject and how much authority you speak with. Provide too few examples and uninformed readers will be confused or unconvinced. Provide too many and informed readers will be bored. (Because it’s addressed to an audience with widely varied backgrounds and interests, this guide cites many more examples than it would if it were addressed to a homogeneous group.) The number needed depends also on the nature of the subject and the kind of examples it calls for. In the passage by Lewis, two striking examples are enough to support the opening generalization. In the excerpt from Evans, seventeen examples aren’t excessive in supporting the generalization about “many slang words.” The subject is specialized, and the fact that all the words in the list were once considered slang is likely to interest and inform readers as well as convince them that the statement is true.

Examples that will be immediately familiar to your audience need only be mentioned: “Freestanding sculpture may be small enough to hold in one’s hand or huge, like the Statue of Liberty.” If your examples are unfamiliar or if you’re using them to prove as well as to clarify, you’ll want to develop them, explain them, support them with details. That would be the case if you based a thesis about high-school education on your own experiences and the experiences of students you’ve talked with since coming to college.

In revising your papers, examine your generalizations to see if they need to be supported or clarified by examples. If they do, ask yourself whether it would be better to mention half a dozen instances or to develop one or two in some detail. Decide whether, in the particular rhetorical situation, the examples should lead up to the generalization or follow it. And make sure that the relevance of the examples to the generalization is immediately apparent.

Details

If it’s true, as we said in Section One, that in order to write well you must become involved with your subject, it’s equally true that your audience must become involved with it. The readers’ involvement will come about if you make it possible for them to visualize what you write about and to experience the sounds, smells, sensations, and emotions you’ve experienced. This you can do through your use of sensory details: the flashing blue lights of the police cars, the saw-toothed blade of a knife, the webbed toes of the Labrador retriever; amplified enough to make your nose bleed; walking arm-in-arm.

Like examples, details can make your generalizations clear and convincing. And they can do more than anything else to give your writing individuality, immediacy, concreteness. During an actual experience—say a trip to the dentist— sense impressions predominate. In telling about the experience, you should try to convey those impressions, not just the generalizations that come to mind later. Don’t talk about having felt pain; make the pain real. Abstractly, pain is “a distressing sensation of a part of the body.” Concretely, it’s the constant throbbing of an abscessed molar or the shocking twinge of a pinched nerve.

Details are essential if your readers are to share your experiences and your feelings about those experiences. They’re equally necessary when you’re dealing with literary works and with abstract ideas. A review of a novel calls for details of plot, character, style. A discussion of the abstraction virtue might use as details the individual virtues honesty, kindness, generosity, and so on. Every subject has its details. Much of the art of writing consists in choosing the right details and making them do what you want them to do. These are matters we’ll consider more fully in the next two sections.

• For Analysis and Writing

1. Recall an experience you’ve had, and in two or three substantial paragraphs present it so that the reader will be able to relive it with you. Your purpose is not to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end but to use sensory details to re-create a scene or recapture the feel of an experience.

Here’s a procedure you might follow in preparing the paper, First, choose a scene or an Incident from your experiences that, for one reason or another, appealed to your senses. It doesn’t have to be dramatic; a particular meal or bus ride or day in the sun may be memorable. Second, decide how you feel about the experience. Third, relive it in your mind, listing as you do as many details as you can. Try to draw on every one of your five senses. Fourth, select from your list the details that best re-create the feel of the experience, and arrange them so that they work together to give a unified impression. As you write, keep in mind that your aim is to share the experience, not just talk about it. Don’t tell your readers how you felt; let your sensory details do that.

When you submit your paper, turn in your complete list of details with it.

2. For each of the following passages, identify the main generalizations and explain why you think the writer’s use of detail is or is not satisfactory. Has he used enough details to support the generalizations? Are they the right details? In your answers, take into account the rhetorical situation. You can make a pretty good guess about the audiences by noting the publications in which the selections appeared. If you aren’t familiar with them, look for copies in the library.

a. My gym suits fit me only in sports shop dressing rooms. By the time I got them to school they’d be several sizes too small. I don’t think I ever passed a happy hour in a gym suit, and at no time was I unhappier than during the week we had coed gymnastics. All the equipment was set up in the girls’ gym, and I guess the Phys. Ed. department figured it would be logistically too difficult to have the boys and girls trade gyms for a couple of weeks.

Nowhere was I flatter of foot, spindlier and paler of leg, more equivocal of shoulder, and heavier of acned brow than in the girls’ gymnasium. We would have to line up boy-girl-boy-girl in front of the parallel bars, and it was no picnic when my turn came. I could never straighten my arms on the parallel bars, and spent a lot of time swinging from my armpits and making exertive noises.

We had to jump over horses in gymnastics class. We were sup posed to run up to the things, grab them by their handles, and swing our legs over them. This seemed to me to be an unreason able expectation, and I always balked on my approach. “You’re always balking on your approach,” the woman gym teacher would shout at me. “Don’t balk on your approach.” Thus lacking momentum, I would manage to grab the bars and kind of climb over the things with my knees. My only comfort was in watching Richard Walters try to clear the horse, which he never did, even by climbing.

The balance beam was probably the least threatening piece of equipment as far as I was concerned. I had a fair sense of balance and enormous, clutching feet, and I could make it across all right. But when the exercise called for straddling, and my flaring shorts endangered coed decoruth, I would pretend to slip from the balance beam and then hurry to the next piece of equipment.

Coed gymnastics was in some ways a mixed bag, for while there was always the agony of failing miserably and almost nakedly before the fair sex (as it was known at the time), we were afforded chances to observe the girls exercising in their turbulent Danskins. I hope I’ll never forget how Janet Gibbs moved along the balance beam, how Denise Dyktor bounced upon the trampoline, how Carol Dower arched and somersaulted across the tumbling mats. Perhaps one of the true high points of my adolescence was spotting for Suzie Hawley, who had the most beautiful, academically disruptive calves in Greenwich High School, and who happened once to slip from the high bar into my startled and grateful clutches.

But that was a fleeting delight in a context of misery. Mostly I remember just standing around, or ducking from the end of one line to the end of another, evading the apparatus and mortification of coed gymnastics as best I could.—Andrew Ward, Atlantic

b. I’ve always had a special liking for old men. Once when as a boy I saw some friends catch a fish and clean it without first killing it, I found myself thinking that an old man wouldn’t do such a thing. I listened to the stories strangers told—old people who sat next to me on a bus —and recognized that their pride in what they said was not random boasting, that a man’s life story summarizes plainly enough the stamina, concentration and energy he has had over the years, as well as his luck; loyalty, friendship, sanity, imagination — those old words too. Old men are usually joyful men at heart. Ulcers and hypertension have winnowed away the more fretful fellows to the peace of the grave. Old men are those who have bobbed to the surface in time of flood, who have smiled to themselves and let their hurts heal.

—Edward Hoagland, Walking the Dead Diamond River (appeared originally in Village Voice)

c. Even in the wilds of Texas, where ranchers still nail dead coyotes and chicken hawks to their fence posts as a taunt to wild predators in general, times seem to have changed. The two small Texas towns of Noack and Lometa held their rattlesnake round ups this spring, as they have done every spring for years. Thou sands of the creatures were captured, exhibited, beheaded, and fried. But this year, in addition to the participants, there was also a group of dissenters who made the indisputable point that the hunt was hard on the snakes. “There are a growing number of people,” one member of this group wrote in the Austin American-Statesman, “who recognize specieism as the bigotry that it is. Mistreatment of any animal, human or nonhuman, is wrong.” A few weeks later, Austin’s Armadillo World Head quarters, the country-music palace that had been second only to the Astrodome as an outlet for Lone Star Beer, cut off its Lone Star contract because the company persisted in sponsoring live armadillo races. “The only way to protect an armadillo,” said Eddie Wilson, the Armadillo’s manager, “is to leave it alone, rather than rounding them up and capturing them.”—James Fallows, Atlantic

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