SECTION Two--Developing Papers: Dividing: Finding the Parts

When your purpose is to explain or explore a subject, consider the method called division, or analysis. By dividing — by sorting out the parts — you can gain control of your subject. By analyzing the subject, you can generate ideas to build on later, and you can find a way of presenting what you have to say. Often you’ll discover that dividing is as useful a method for developing your paper as it’s for thinking about your subject in the prewriting stage. An initial sorting of ideas will help you understand the internal structure of your subject—whether it’s the many committees and subcommittees of student government or the parts of a protozoan. The same procedure, refined by what you’ve learned during prewriting, can make a complex subject clear to your readers as well.

If you wrote the process paper proposed as an exercise in the last section, you’ve already had some practice in dividing. You almost certainly presented the skill or operation or activity in stages. But while strict process relies heavily on chronological development, many divisions do not. You can divide an object (an automobile, a shark) or an institution (a social club, a corporation) in order to distinguish its parts and show how they fit together and function together. You can even divide an abstraction, like courage or capitalism, which doesn’t have parts in any physical sense. In such cases, the “dividing” you do consists in recognizing elements that can most usefully be singled out for discussion.

Purpose in Dividing

The same thing can be divided in a variety of ways, ac cording to different principles of division. For the user of a textbook, who is primarily interested in what the guide contains and how to find it, the table of contents may represent the most important method of division. For the editor who worked out the allotment of pages while the guide was being produced, the significant division may have been front matter, text, and end matter, perhaps with subdivisions of each of these. And for the person who had to estimate the manufacturing costs of the same guide at the planning stage, a simple breakdown into paper, printing, and binding may have been adequate.

The kind of division you make depends on the principle you apply, and that principle depends on your purpose. For some purposes, dividing an automobile into chassis, engine and driving parts, and body would be enough. Simple as it is, it’s consistent (only one principle of division is applied) and it’s complete (it takes in the whole car). By contrast, a division into chassis, engine and driving parts, and fenders wouldn’t satisfy any principle because it omits so much—all the body parts except the fenders. And a division into chassis, body, and dependable transportation doesn’t work because it’s both incomplete and inconsistent. The third “part” — dependability — introduces a new principle of division — performance.

Making a complete and consistent division is easiest when the subject is a physical object like a car. It becomes more difficult when the subject is an institution, like a university, and much more difficult when the subject is an abstraction, like patriotism or communism or love. Discussing the right to commit suicide, one student wrote, “The question involves morals, values, and perhaps selfishness.” Since values and morals overlap and selfishness may be considered a kind of value, no single principle of division can be identified.

Whenever you can, find a principle of division that reflects your own interest, your way of looking at your subject, your purpose in exploring it. In the following passage the author makes a division of the highly complex activity of listening to music, admits that the division is somewhat arbitrary, and then points out its usefulness for his purpose:

We all listen to music according to our separate capacities. But, for the sake of analysis, the whole listening process may be come clearer if we break it up into its component parts, so to speak. In a certain sense we all listen to music on three separate planes. For lack of a better terminology, one might name these:

(1) the sensuous plane, (2) the expressive plane, (3) the sheerly musical plane. The only advantage to be gained from mechanically splitting up the listening process into these hypothetical planes is the clearer view to be had of the way in which we listen.—Aaron Copland, What to Listen for in Music

Dividing to Organize

The Copland passage illustrates a point we made earlier: division is an aid to organizing. You make use of it every time you outline one of your own papers or a section in a textbook. First you divide the material into main topics; then you divide each of these into subtopics; and so on. Just as the outline helps you test the structure of your own paper or grasp the structure of a text guide section, so making a division of your subject at the beginning of your paper will forecast for your readers the topic. you’re going to discuss and the order you’re going to discuss them in. Especially when your subject is a complex one, this technique will help you as well as your readers. By setting up the organizational scheme for them, you’ll plant it firmly in your own mind; and you can then go on to develop each part of the division with appropriate details.

Here’s the opening paragraph of a student’s term paper on the traits used in selecting beef cattle:

The goal of commercial beef production is to market animals that return a maximum profit. Just as animals differ in their genetic makeup, they differ in the quality of their meat. There fore the quality of beef can be improved through selective breeding. Only those traits that increase the rate and efficiency of production as well as the quality of the meat are economically important to the beef cattle industry. These traits, frequently referred to as performance traits, are (1) reproductive performance, (2) longevity, (3) mothering or nursing ability, (4) growth rate, (5) efficiency of gain, (6) conformation, and (7) carcass merit.

There followed a section for each of the numbered traits and a concluding summary:

It’s through these seven major traits that beef production is improved. Change through selection is slow but tends to be permanent. These permanent traits increase the quality of beef, meeting consumers’ demands, and decrease the production costs, making them economically feasible for breeders.

An undergraduate who described himself as “a knowledgeable science student” first divided a nuclear reactor into three parts: “the reactor core and its component parts, the power plant, and the safety devices.” In his second paragraph he analyzed the nuclear core, discussing the radioactive fuel, the fuel rods, and the control rods and showing how the heat that’s produced turns water into steam, which operates the power plant. In his third paragraph he subdivided the power plant into turbine, generator, and condenser, describing each one and explaining its function. In his fourth, he discussed the numerous safety devices that are built into the reactor. In a brief concluding paragraph he summed up: a nuclear reactor operates on a very simple principle; it has very few major parts; these parts work together “to produce what our society needs so much of—electricity.”

Thus, through dividing and subdividing, this writer accomplished his purpose—explaining how a nuclear reactor produces electricity. It’s unlikely that any approach other than division would have produced such a clear and economical explanation.

Normally in expository and argumentative prose, you’ll use division as a means to the end you’re aiming for. You’ll analyze a poem not just to analyze it but to explore its strengths and weaknesses. You’ll set up alternative courses of action not just to set up alternatives but to argue that one is superior to the others. Unless you’re using division as a means to generate content, then, you should have the purpose of your paper clearly in mind as you divide. If you disliked a movie because you thought its plot was stupid, there’s no reason to launch your review by proposing a division into characters, direction, plot, and photography. Make such a division only when your judgment of the film takes all these elements into account.

A great many things—automobiles, anatomies, governments, nations, plays, leagues, and so on—have ready-made divisions: mechanical, physical, political, what-have-you. Even so, a writer may find it possible, and enjoyable, to suggest a new twist, as in the following:

It’s time to start over.

Oh, I don’t mean to raze the entire country and plunge it into the sea—there are still too many nice things about this land, bless its heart. No, it’s simply that it has now become too elephantine, too lumbering, too ponderous to work efficiently in the modern world. It can’t control the oil nations, it can’t get anyone to respect the dollar, it can’t even destroy a place like Vietnam, and there’s a whole host of problems at home, from crime to inflation to game shows, that it can’t begin to wrestle with. It’s just too big.

We sometimes forget that we started this nation with only 4 million people. But now here we are with 215 million, heading to 230 million by 1980, and we’ve become bloated and turgid, like some gluttonous dinosaur—and with as much chance of survival. And inevitably, because of our size we’ve become disputatious and contradictory as well, too large to have common assumptions and mutual sympathies any longer, too vast to hold the same values, share the same life-styles. Hence black against white, young against old, left against right, hip against square, straight against gay.

The solution, it seems obvious, is not to destroy the country we have spent the last 200 years in creating, but simply to divide it up, to make smaller, sleeker, more efficient nations out of the cumbersome one we have now—and then to give like-minded people their own separate areas to move to. Like the ancient Greeks with their city-states, the Swiss with their cantons, the modern Europeans with their hodgepodge of nations, we should decide that that which governs least — geographically, at any rate — governs best.

In countries, as in art, less is more.

As a small step in this direction, may I suggest the following model of a future America? Let’s May, just for starters, that we divide the country up into five new nations, each with 40 million people or so—that was a good number for Frenchmen, you may remember, and it’s large enough to get things done, small enough not to cause too much trouble. And, following the birds-of-a- feather principle, we might arrange them thus:

The Northeast. This would be made up of the dozen states from Maine to Ohio, the homeland of the Yankees, and would be set aside for intellectuals, scholars, students, academics, poets, romantics, people of that sort, the kind that seem to be so numerous in that region already. For its flag — of course each newly created nation needs a flag — this land might choose some version of the Union Jack, since most of them will probably be Anglophiles anyway, and for an anthem, let’s say “Yankee Doodle.”

The Southeast. Not much juggling needed here: this would contain all the states of the old Confederacy except Texas, and would naturally be the homeland of all the super-patriots, right-wingers, fundamentalists, racists, antifeminists and would-be Southern belles. Its flag, needless to say, would be the Confederate banner, its national anthem “ Dixie,” and for currency it could use old Confederate dollars brought out of the attics.

The Southwest. Here, in the vast region from Texas to southern California, would be a natural site for all the scientists and engineers, aerospace and computer types, military and defense contractors, most people with crewcuts and most retired folks over 65. This country would probably pick the Lone Star flag of Texas as its standard, since most of the area is settled by Texans, and, given a free vote, would most likely end up with “Rhinestone Cowboy” as its national anthem.

The Northwest. This nation, from San Francisco to Seattle, from the Pacific through the Rockies, would undoubtedly be the most beautiful and hence naturally the home for nature lovers, ecology folks, beach and ski bums, young people in general, hippies and, just to make sure they stay in one place, all radical types of whatever party or age. As a flag, the old Yippie banner with the huge marijuana leaf would seem to suggest itself, and for an anthem perhaps they might select “Rocky Mountain High” or, for the more traditional, “Roll On, Columbia.”

The Midwest. Finally, for everyone else left over, every place else left over: the heartland from the Dakotas to Indiana. Anyone who doesn’t fit into any of the other areas would be free to move here, but if the division elsewhere was done right they’d mostly be quiet, staid, simple, farm-loving folks anyway, rather like the ones who live there now. It figures to be such a quiet place that they’d probably not even need an anthem, but they’d undoubtedly want a flag —and since the traditional Stars and Stripes seems to be left over, we might work it out so that they could adopt that.

There, see how simple it all is?

Now, we haven’t quite solved all the problems. There’s Alaska and Hawaii left over— but maybe the former could be a congenial home for American Indians who didn’t want to live elsewhere, and the latter similarly for the black population that wanted space of its own. And there’s the problem of Washington, D.C. —maybe that could be closed off as a museum, and all those Federal types who cling to their bureaucratic lives could stay there as the caretakers.

Yes, true enough, there are a few wrinkles that may need working on. But the underlying principle of the de-unification of the United States seems to make preponderantly good sense: not only do you get smaller and more workable governments, but you get more homogeneous and harmonious societies as well. And as long as there was free choice, as long as the borders stayed open and people could take up citizenship in whichever state they found the most congenial, that arrangement could last for a long, long time to come. — Kirkpatrick Sale, Newsweek

• For Writing

1. Identify the parts of a mechanism—a can opener, a pencil sharpener, a lawn mower, an automobile engine—that are related to the function or use of the mechanism. In an essay intended for junior-high-school students, describe each part and explain how it functions in the working of the mechanism.

2. For a campus magazine, analyze the humor in a comic strip, a television comedy series, a movie, or any recent happening. You may want to explain why you think people laugh at the things they laugh at.

3. Describe the structure of a college organization or the activities of a club, showing how the structure or the activities relate to the purpose. Your audience is a friend you want to have join the organization or club.

4. Propose four different ways of analyzing your neighbor hood. Write a paper developing the one that would be most useful to someone who is organizing a political campaign in the area.

5. Argue for assigning the baseball teams in the major leagues to different cities or for dividing the teams or talent of major leagues in any professional sport in some new way.

6. Describe the composition—the structure—of a painting or photograph. In the course of your analysis, make clear what central idea or feeling the work conveys and explain what each part contributes to the effect of the whole. Submit with your paper a reproduction or copy of the painting or photograph.

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