Blog Prompt #1
Forgetfulness is terrible. With all the catch-up work I had this week, I completely forgot to post a reply to this blog prompt. I take full responsibility for it. Anyways, since I did have a response to the quotation, I will still post it albeit past the deadline."Any experiment incurs a debt with the reader and it needs to be paid back." --Judith Grossman
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An experiment from a writing perspective is the argument within an essay or other piece of writing. Essentially, the writer is exploring different ideas and narrowing it down to a group of related ideas that the writer is making a statement about. The thesis is the purpose within the experiment, like a science lab report. The writer is going to attempt to set up a procedure (the rest of the paper and its paragraphs of support) that will prove to the reader that his thesis is valid. Ultimately, the counterargument is like the analysis at the end of the experiment. Sometimes there are ideas that conflict with the argument (like error in a lab experiment), but the writer is supposed to build a stronger defense of why his thesis is still valid despite irregularities. Finally, the writer has to finalize his thoughts and his points in the conclusion, much like a conclusion in a lab report.
The idea of the debt is quite simply the fact that when a writer presents an argument to a reader, the writer has to be able to support it. If he throw an idea into the blue without evidence or support that it could be valid, the reader will not be able to believe the argument. In that sense, the writer is letting down the reader by not supporting the thesis. If the writer is successful, he has paid that debt back and ultimately has gained validity to the reader because he followed up on his thesis. The reader starts off with a thesis and hopefully, by the end of the essay, the reader will get enough evidence to realize that the thesis has its merits and that the writer knows what he is talking about through the research presented.
posted by Deborah @ 3:27 PM
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