Discursive Writing Techniques

Discursive Writing

• To make a discursive essay interesting, present a contrarian idea that challenges a common view.
• The goal is not persuasion but to provoke thought about the reader's own opinion.
• Use a persuasive pattern, agreeing with the opposing side before introducing your own opinion.
• Combine the contrarian idea with the persuasive pattern by agreeing with the common view first, then making it irrelevant before introducing your contrarian view.

Structure 1: Block Structure

• Begin with a macro anecdote (short personal story related to the theme) that agrees with the opposing (common) view.
• Use a first-person, introspective voice to connect personally with the reader.
• Focus on specific nouns to establish setting and characterization.
• Reveal emotion to elevate your discursive.
• Use a macro motif/extended metaphor.
• Show a shift in emotion from negative to positive.
• Briefly discuss the issue, agreeing with the common view.
• Include anecdotal (personal) evidence relevant to your age group, avoiding teenage angst or school-related topics.
• Minimize factual evidence and objective facts like statistics or data.
• Reference contextual, historical, cultural, literary, or liberal arts topics.
• Create a flip to make the common view irrelevant.
• Elaborate on your side of the argument.
• Revisit the macro anecdote, continuing the story to show the benefits of your side.
• Conclude with your opinion, using low modality.

Structure 2: Braided Structure

• This structure uses multiple persuasive patterns.
• PP1: Macro contrarian idea.
• PP2: Micro contrarian idea.
• PP3: Macro + Micro contrarian ideas combined.

Example: Suburban Theatre (ST) - Motif/Extended Metaphor

• Common view: Suburban theatres are irrelevant and dying.
• Contrarian view: Suburban theatres are still relevant.
• Use a positive human quality, theme, or motif related to losing relevance.
• Macro anecdote: Attend a suburban theatre to see a friend perform but not looking forward to it.

Example: Mask

• Common view: A mask is a fabrication of one's identity, a façade.
• Contrarian view: A mask allows an actor to be more authentic and experiment with different characters.
• Micro anecdote: A friend performing as Hamlet seems fake, but gradually realize it showcases his character.

Example: Suburban Theatre (ST) + Mask

• Common view: The theatre is for the audience's enjoyment.
• Contrarian view: The theatre is important for the performers, especially hobbyists like the friend, providing a stage for them to perform.
• Anecdote: Performing was as important for the friend as it was for the audience, as he found his voice.

The Power of Literature: The Three P's

• Plays
• Poetry
• Prose fiction (novels)
• Literature involves storytelling, unlike critical essays.
• Storytelling conveys complex ideas about humanity in a digestible way.

Textual Integrity

• A text possesses cohesive unity in its values, creating a complete whole.
• A text must resonate with universal ideas that transcend time and place.
• Texts that don't stand the test of time lack textual integrity.
• Textual integrity is proven if it is subject to critical discourse.
• Ongoing debate about the significance and interpretation proves its continued relevance.

Authorship

• Authorship is critical to literature because humans connect with the lived experiences of the author.
• Humans may be less receptive to AI-generated text as it doesn't feel genuine.
• Although AI may understand literature intellectually, it cannot experience or feel human emotions.
• Humans are bound by the human condition, marked by death, mortality, and moral anxieties.
• Society values beauty, truth, love, connections, and identity.
• People want to hear stories narrated by individuals who have lived and experienced the human condition.

Writing a Good "Power of Literature" Discursive

• Include a title that weaves in a motif/extended metaphor.
• Insinuate your contrarian idea in the title.
• Begin with a personal anecdote (macro anecdote) using creative writing in the first person.
• Use a persuasive pattern: agree with the common view, make it irrelevant, and then introduce your opinion.
• Weave in an introspective, personal voice.
• Use descriptive language (adjective, noun combinations), alliteration, sibilance, plosives, fricatives, and emotive language.
• Show contrasting emotions.
• Use specificity of nouns to enhance setting.
• Use figurative language: personification, simile, and metaphor.
• Use the rule of threes/tricolon for emphasis.
• Vary syntax, using long sentences with interjections/appositions.
• Employ cumulative listing to provide many examples quickly (but don't overuse).
• Use sensory, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile imagery, as well as synesthesia.

First Paragraph for Power of Literature

• Include a personal anecdote, reflecting on a time when you disliked English.
• Layer contrarian ideas.
• Example: The common view is that Shakespeare is admired, but you did not like Shakespeare.
• Example: The common view is that English is neutral, but you felt forced to engage, causing marginalization.
• Use intertextuality by referencing multiple texts.
• Discuss marginalized characters and weave in emotions.
• Sprinkle English jargon (language techniques/conventions).

Layering Complexity

• Connect deeper impersonal truths that arise through literature to the complexities of humanity.
• Show how literature challenges your assumptions and deepens your understanding of complex issues.
• Acknowledge the timeless relevancy of texts, even if they aren't your favorites.

Playful Personal Voice

• Explore how stories transcend time and place and are essential for human growth and survival, like food.
• Acknowledge the common view that children love stories, but as we grow older, stories become less relevant.
• Argue that we have to read to fall in love with literature.
• Explain that storytelling manifests into literature.
• Discuss the relationship between the reader and the teller.
• The stories we read and tell ourselves shape our identities.

Well-known Text DO's

• Don't summarize or recount the story.
• Share your personal take and how the story influenced your life.
• Focus on how you felt.
• Apply your understanding of how the ideas in the text personally affected you as a revisionist.
• Raise questions to show engagement with the reading.

New Idea

• Draw from different cultures to share a commonality (universality of stories).
• Contrast stories with well-known literature to highlight how ideas resonate differently.

Choosing a Good Motif/Extended Metaphor

• Choose a liminal space/transitioning void or boundary that can represent both positive and negative ideas related to your theme.
• Be able to refer back to the motif for both the common and contrarian views.
• Example Motif: Jail (Bad)

Narrative Persons and Structures (Voice)

• First person: Provides an intimate account of the narrator's own experiences, focusing on emotion.
• Second person: Narrates directly from the character's perspective, making the reader feel the character's sentiment directly.
• Third person: Describes more than the character sees or knows.
  • Third person omniscient: The narrator knows all characters' thoughts and feelings.
  • Third person objective: The narrator reports events without revealing any character thoughts.
• Stream of consciousness: Written in the first person, presenting the character's inner thoughts and emotions as if from their subconsciousness.
• Epistolary form: Similar to stream of consciousness but presented in a more formal medium like letters or a diary.
• Diptych: A two-part story where each part can be read independently, but together they create a larger story (1+1=3 effect).
• Triptych: Same as diptych but with three parts.

Meta-fictive Writing

• Writing within a story.
• Writing from the perspective of an actual writer.
• The story revolves around the writer's backstory.
• Use textual allusion to famous texts.

Narrative Structures

• Linear structure (OCER):
  • Orientation (Who, what, where, when): Character/setting.
  • Complication (problem of the story): The most important element. Without a complication, there is no story.
  • Evaluation (The sequence of events between the complication and resolution).
  • Resolution (how the complication is resolved or not resolved).
• Non-linear structure: Only use when necessary to provide pivotal information that is only understood when going back to the past.
• Circle (Ouroboros) structure: 3-1-2 order. At the end of part 3, pose a strange question. At the end of part 2, answer or reveal the misunderstood question from part 3.

Engaging with Moments of Conflict (Characterization)

• Create characters that are complex, with dualities/dichotomies.
• Characters should want two opposing things simultaneously.
• Create urgency with an event that forces the characters to confront their tensions.
• Don't begin the story at the start; drop the reader into the moment that forces the character to confront their underlying tensions.

Steps

1. Make sure that your characters have DUALITIES and dynamotors in their longings (internal contradictions)
2. YOU MUST create URGENCY with an event or happening that FORCES the characters to actually CONFRONT the tension (time pressure)
3. DON’T BEGING YOUR STORY AT THE START.
4. Make sure that you allude/insinuate the coming duality with unusual sensory details -> motif
5. Dialogue -> DON’T use a lot but if you had to use dialogue - make sure that it is to CAPTURE the complex characterisation
6. You should ALWAYS resolve the story (otherwise your teachers will think you ran out of time)

Plots to Consider for Thematic Creative Writing

• Consider a theme or two (universal human experience).
• Ensure specificity of characters and setting.
• Base your story on actual historical events to tell the gaps where history is unresolved.
• Choose a story that is niche (specific) research.
• Ensure that there is a strong compelling point of conflict (character tensions).
• Write from a minor character's point of view.

Themes

• Cultural/identity: Explore complex cultural shifts across time.
• Relationships: Explore unlikely relationships between people.
• Your character as the writer: Focus on a very culturally significant setting.
• Focus on an actual writer WHO VISITS this very bookstore -> 1920's.

What NOT to do

• Avoid clichés
• Teenage angst/school/teachers/homework/study
• Too dark - S/A, suicide/how to die
• Money - Successful billionaire
• Technology/AI
• Grandparents
• Bookstores/library except for significant/specific researched libraries
• Anything teenage topics

Writing Reflective Writing

• Justify and evaluate, but don't analyze or summarize.
• Justify/elaborate -make sure that you are engaging with your WORK PROCESS/ writing process. How? -> PURPOSE and CONVENTIONS.
• Step 1: Find as many MACRO conventions in your MENTOR TEXT (before you start drafting your creative/discursive)
• Even if the text that you are studying is a different text type - you can still borrow those conventions and put it into your creative/discursive/persuasive.
• The MOST important thing about purpose is that: There is no ONE OBJECTIVE PURPOSE. (it is subjective) Have Dual Purposes
  • Syntax structure: "my purpose was not only to show (abc) but to reveal (xyz)"
  • Side note: (optional) - think of contrarian purpose.
• Lace two purposes - Macro purpose and Micro purpose
  • Macro purpose: broad thematic exploration of a theme
  • Micro purpose: be the specific/personal purpose of your text -> imbue the thoughts/feelings/specified ideas/(text)
• There is a RELATIONSHIP between purpose and conventions.
• Therefore; YOU are stating that YOU carefully chose these conventions because they were the BEST conventions to achieve your PURPOSES. (this is the framework that you want to carry when writing reflections

Structuring

• Always follow whatever structure your teacher recommends / School (if at all)

Part 1: Focus on PURPOSE (but foreshadow a little bit of the MAIN Macro convention)

• Generally – the first paragraph should start with the Text type, title à ideas and dual purposes + foreshadowing of the macro conventions
• But if there is a question in your reflection OR there was a theme in the PART A of your exam (eg. à theme “X” à you need to weave this in EARLY!
• Assume Questions stimulus = X
• Your prepared reflection = A x B
• In the exam = My purpose is not only A x B x X, but also (micro purpose)..

How to Reflect upon conventions

Part 2 (Body paragraphs à REFLECTING upon your CONVENTIONS

• Start with the MOST important techniques (MUST be your MACRO technique that you have FORESHADOWED at the start)
• They focus on whatever techniques they can find –
• The most important macro techniques should come first. -e.g. structural techniques
• When stating conventions à do not just say you USED IT – link it back to PURPOSE!!!
• Do not say: My mentor text did (xyz) so I also used XYZ in my text à quote – See?
• Say this: My mentor text used (XYZ) so I employed the XYZ to establish MY purpose of ABC...

Choosing Quotes

• When choosing quotes à make sure that it aligns with something about your PURPOSE.