Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Simplicity & General Apache
In the essays "Writing about General Apache" and "Simplicity" the authors wrote in a reflective manner. The main way they accomplish this is by using a present tense to establish a univeral value or experience and then uses past tense to reflect on it. William Zinnsser, the author of "Simplicity" merely states one of his experiences with unnecessarily complicated diction and then provides a noted historical point in time in which a well known person had commented on the same subject his essay touches upon; possibly in an attempt to say "I'm not alone in my thinking." Aside from these two parts, Zinnsser's essay is mostly in the present tense. Dick Harrinton's "Writing about General Apache", however, takes place mostly in the past tense. Where "Simplicity" only had two points of past tensive writing, "Writing about General Apache" is entirly in the past tense save for the first quarter of the essay. One of the important things to note about reflective essays is to find what changed in the author. In "Simplicity" what impacted the author is easy to identify as he states it in the beginning. "Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, cicular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon." For the author of "Writing about General Apache" the affect of meeting the man known as General Apache has on the author is a bit ambiguous to me. From what I can tell is that the author simply became awed and inspired by a man he thought so special that he wanted to write a poem about him. The universal appeals of each of these, I suppose, are experiecing a complication one would deem unnecessary and being in awe at how insignificate ones hardships are compared to another and how well they deal with it. In the end, the appealing factor to the reader is the most important part of a reflective essay.
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Good job looking at the tenses and their purpose in the writing. Harrington uses present tense at the beginning and then follows it with past tense narrative. In other words, he is setting up a shared space for the reader to appreciate the story he intends to tell.
ReplyDeleteZinsser using present tense throughout means he is advocating something, a value (simple, clear writing), and the short step into reflection is one piece of evidence to support his values-laden argument.
There were a lot of other insights to tease out of these two writings, including ones that come from critiquing them, but you have stayed focused here on the manipulation of tense in a reflective essay. Your focus is admirable, Brandon. You have stayed focused on how these two writings were relevant to the assignment at hand, a sign of a conscious reader.