deductive – The Secret Language of Comics

Deductive -> Inductive Writing

January 23, 2023 David David's Posts

Hopefully, there will be time in class today to look at the essay below as a method for breaking down differences between inductive and deductive writing and to look at a more concrete example of an ABT thesis.

A number of years ago, I assigned students at a class three hard-boiled detective short stories and assigned them to write a comparative essay in response. I no longer remember the exact prompt I gave those students, but they needed to compare the stories. The three stories are all set in Los Angeles: The Big Sleep is one of the originators of the genre, with a white male hardboiled detective in the 1930s; in “Murder is My Business” the protagonist is a lesbian detective in LA of the 1980s; and in Devil in a Blue Dress the protagonist detective is a black man in LA of the 1950s.

Below is a real essay a student wrote in response, which has some good observation in it but the five paragraph structure of the essay seriously undermines the author’s ability to make any kind of argument. Please read over the essay (it shouldn’t take more than 5 or 10 minutes). In class, we’ll spend about half the class looking at this example and go through an example process of revising the structure of this essay to be an inductive essay using an ABT thesis.

Detective-comparisons-essay

Week Ahead 3: Brosh, Small, Sousanis, and Olson

January 20, 2023 David David's Posts

	1/22	Sketch 2: Sunday Sketches Literacy Narrative, part 1
3	1/23	Randy Olson, “Introduction: Why Science Needs Story” (pp. 1-21) Allie Brosh, “Adventures in Depression, Part Two“
	1/25	Sousanis, Nick. “The Importance of Seeing Double and Then Some” and “The Shape of Our Thoughts,” from Unflattening. Stitches — first 2/3rds of “I was six” (pages 8-63)

You should finish up your Literacy Narratives this weekend. Post the essay to your site as a page (not as a post) then you should also write a post that provides a compelling overview of your essay and also reflects on the writing process. In that post, link to the essay’s page.

On Tuesday, we’ll spend a bit of time discussing Adventures in Depression, Part Two, but we’ll likely devote most of the class period to discussing Randy Olson’s ABT thesis structure. You should be able to skim the Olson essay fairly quickly — the key idea is understanding the (bad) deductive structure that Olson describes and then his suggestion for improving it by utilizing a (good) inductive structure instead.

In class on Thursday, we’ll spend the bulk of our time discussing the opening section of Stitches. As you read those first 50ish pages I would like you to consider the following questions:

How does Small establish character and setting in the introduction?
This chapter all takes place while David is 6 years old. What are the major subdivisions of the chapter though? You’ll probably decide that there are three (maybe four) major sections in these pages — what is the primary idea being conveyed by each section?
Pick the single page that you find the most compelling or interesting or that you think is the most important in today’s reading. Describe the page in a few sentences. Why is it interesting or important?

We’ll also look at two chapters from Unflattening by Nick Sousanis, who drew Unflattening as his dissertation for Teachers College at Columbia University — it was the first comics dissertation ever and has since been published by Harvard UP and has won a bunch of awards. Sousanis took a job at San Francisco State University a couple of years ago and is building a comics studies program there.

Unflattening will serve as one of the theoretical frameworks for our analyses of comics. Be aware that this comic is probably a little more dense reading than you’ll find Stitches to be, so give yourself a little extra time to work through those 20 pages carefully. I’ll start off our discussion of Sousanis by asking you to consider how effective Unflattening is as an academic, philosophical argument. (Soon we’ll read another theoretical framing text, but in the form of a more traditional essay by Hillary Chute and I’ll ask you to consider how the two pieces are similar and different.) How do the words and images in Unflattening interact together? Is it different than what happens in Stitches?