"I also tell students that an essay of two thousand words doesn’t give them all that much space to get going. “You’ve only got a few pages to make that argument of yours. You don’t need a grand introductory paragraph that begins, ‘Mark Twain is one of Earth’s greatest writers.’ It’s far better to start by giving us some idea of what you’ll be arguing and why. If you like, you can even begin by pointing us to a particularly important passage that will serve as the springboard for your larger discussion: ‘Not long after the second scaffold scene in The Scarlet Letter, when Arthur Dimmesdale joins hands with Hester Prynne and her daughter, Pearl, Nathaniel Hawthorne asks us to reconsider the meaning of the scarlet A on Hester’s breast.’”"
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Academics from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesBloggers from the United States
Original Language: English
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"Analyze, Don’t Summarize", published in Rhetorical Occasions (2006)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_B%C3%A9rub%C3%A9
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Michael Bérubé
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