Shaping

To begin the shaping process, consider your subject, purpose, and audience again. Has your purpose changed? Can you narrow your subject to a specific topic? Some of the answers you may know now; others you may not know until after you do your first draft. Jot down your current responses to the following questions:

¦ Subject: What is your general subject?

¦ Specific topic: What aspect of your subject are you interested in? Try to narrow your field or limit your focus.

¦ Purpose: Why is this topic interesting or important to you or to others? From what point of view will you be writing? What is the dominant idea you are trying to convey?

¦ Audience: Who are your readers? What are these readers like and why might they be interested in this topic? How can you direct your description of your subject to your particular audience?

With your answers to these questions in mind, you should experiment with several of the following shaping strategies. These strategies will organize your specific examples, but they may also suggest related ideas that might improve your description.

As you practice these strategies, try to focus your subject. In a profile of a person, for example, focus on key facial features or revealing habits or mannerisms. If you’re writing about a place or an event, narrow the subject. Describe, for instance, the street at night, a spider spinning a web in a windowsill, a man in a laundromat banging on a change machine, a bird hovering in midair, a photograph, a fish. Write in depth and detail about a limited subject.

With a limited subject, a shaping strategy such as spatial order, classification, or comparison/contrast will organize all your specific details for your audience. The shaping strategies give you ways of seeing relationships among the many bits of your description and presenting them in an organized manner for your reader. Seeing these relationships will also help you discover and communicate the dominant idea to your reader.

Spatial Order Spatial order is a simple way to organize your descriptive details. Choose some sequence—left to right, right to left, bottom to top—and describe your observed details in that sequence. In the following description of his “trashed” dorm room, Dale Furnish, a student who was the victim of a prank, uses spatial order. The italicized words illustrate the spatial order.

As I walked in the door, I could hardly believe that this scene of destruction used to be my room. ‘Along the left hand wall, nearly hiding my desk and mirror, was a pile of beer cans and bottles, paper cups and old crumpled newspapers. The small window on the far wall was now covered with the mattress of the bed, and the frame of the bunk bed stood on end. The clothes closet, to the right of the window, looked as though it were a giant washing machine which had just gone through spin cycle—clothes were plastered all over, and only four hangers remained, dangling uselessly on the pole. On the right wall, where the bed had been, was the real surprise. Tied to the heating pipe was a mangy looking sheep. I swear. It was a real sheep. As I looked at it, it turned to face me and loudly and plaintively said, “Baaaa.” Behind me, in the hall, everyone began laughing. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Chronological Order Chronological order is simply the time sequence of your observation. The above description of a dorm room contains chronological order as well as spatial order. The observer enters the room, looks at the left wall, then looks at the far window, and finally looks at the sheep. After the sheep cries “baaa,” the people in the hall begin laughing.

Since it is impossible to describe everything at once, many observations follow a chronological order. In the following passage, Gregory Allen, writing from his point of view as a five-foot-six-inch-tall guard on a basketball team, describes sights, sounds, and his feelings during a pickup game. The italicized words emphasize the chronological order.

The game begins. The guy checking me is about 6′ 1″, red hair, freckles, and has no business on the court. He looks slow, so I decide to run him to tire him. I dribble twice, pump fake, and the guy goes for it, thinking that he’s going to block this much smaller guy’s shot. Then I leap, flick my wrist, and the ball glides through the air and flows through the net with a swish as the net turns upside down. I come down and realize that I have been scratched. Suddenly, I feel a sharp pain as sweat runs into the small red cut. I wipe the blood on my shorts and continue playing the game. After that first play, I begin to hear the common song of the game. There’s the squeak of the high-top Nike sneakers, the bouncing ball, the shuffle of feet. Occasionally, I hear “I’m open!” “Pass the ball!” ” Augghh!” And then, “Nice play, man!”

Comparison/Contrast If what you’ve observed and written about your subject so far involves seeing similarities or differences, you may be able to use comparison/contrast as a shaping strategy—either for a single paragraph or for a series of paragraphs. The following two paragraphs, for example, are taken from Albert Goldman’s biography of Elvis Presley, entitled Elvis. In these paragraphs, Goldman’s dominant idea depends on the striking contrast between what he finds on the front lawn of Graceland , the rock star’s mansion in Memphis, and what he notices when he steps through the front door.

Prominently displayed on the front lawn is an elaborate creche. The stable is a full-scale adobe house strewn with straw. Life-sized are the figures of Joseph and Mary, the kneeling shepherds and Magi, the lambs and ewes, as well as the winged annunciatory angel hovering over the roof beam. Real, too, is the cradle in which the infant Jesus sleeps.

When you step through the ten-foot oak door and enter the house, you stop and stare in amazement. Having just come from the contemplation of the tenderest scene in the Holy Bible, imagine the shock of finding yourself in a whorehouse! Yet there is no other way to describe the drawing room of Graceland except to say that it appears to have been lifted from some turn-of-the-century bordello down in the French Quarter of New Orleans . . . . The room is a gaudy melange of red velour and gilded tassels, Louis XV furniture and porcelain bric-a-brac, all informed by the kind of taste that delights in a ceramic temple d’amour housing a miniature Venus de Milo with an electrically simulated waterfall cascading over her naked shoulders.

Reexamine your collecting notes about your subject. If there are striking similarities or differences between the two parts or aspects of your subject, perhaps a comparison or contrast structure will organize your details.

Classification Classifying people, events, or things by types may provide a shape you can use for a paragraph or a whole essay. In the following paragraph from ” Speedway ,” an essay on racing at the Indianapolis 500, cultural critic Paul Fussell categorizes spectators into three social classes: the middle classes, or “middles”; the high proletarians, or “high proles”; and the “uglies.”

I’d say the people can be divided into three social classes: the middles, who on race day tend, in homage to the checkered flag, to dress all in black and white and who sit in reserved seats; the high proles, who watch standing or lolling in the infield, especially at the turns, “where the action is”; and the uglies, the overadvertised, black-leathered, beer-sodden, pot-headed occupiers of that muddy stretch of ground in the infield at the first turn, known as the Snake Pit. These are the ones who, when girls pass, spiritlessly hold up signs reading “Show Us Your T—s.” The uglies are sometimes taken to be the essence of Indy, and they are the people who, I think Frank Deford has in mind when he speaks of “barbarians.” But they are not the significant Indy audience. The middle class is, all those people arriving at the Speedway in cars bearing Purdue and Indiana State stickers.

Classification is often a useful method of shaping description. To see if it is appropriate for your subject, ask “What types do you observe?” The answer may lead to categories or types you hadn’t observed, and the categories may provide a shape you can adopt.

Definition Definition is the essence of observation. Defining a per­son, place, or object requires stating its exact meaning and describing its basic qualities. Literally, a definition sets the boundaries, indicating, for example, how an apple is distinct from an orange, or how a ca­nary is different from a sparrow. Definition, however, is a catchall term for a variety of strategies. It uses classification and comparison as well as description. It often describes a thing by negation, by saying what it is not. Sidney Harris, a columnist for many years for the Chicago Daily News, defines a “jerk” by referring to several types of people (“boob,” “fool,” “dope,” “bore,” “egotist,” “nice person,” “clever person”) and then compares or contrasts these terms to show, for example, where “jerk” leaves off and “egotist” begins. Harris also defines by negation, saying that a jerk has no grace and is tactless. The result, when combined with a description of qualities he has observed in jerks, is definition.

Thinking it over, I decided that a jerk is basically a person without insight. He is not necessarily a fool or a dope, because some extremely clever persons can be jerks. In fact, it has little to do with intelligence as we commonly think of it; it is, rather, a kind of subtle but persuasive aroma emanating from the inner part of the personality.

I know a college president who can be described only as a jerk. He is not an unintelligent man, or unlearned, nor even unschooled in the social amenities. Yet he is a jerk cum laude, because of a fatal flaw in his nature—he is totally incapable of looking into the mirror of his soul and shuddering at what he sees there.

A jerk, then, is a man (or woman) who is utterly unable to see himself as he appears to others. He has no grace, he is tactless without meaning to be, he is a bore even to his best friends, he is an egotist without charm. All of us are egotists to some extent, but most of us—unlike the jerk-are perfectly and horribly aware of it when we make asses of ourselves. The jerk never knows.

At this stage in the writing process, you have already been defining your subject simply by describing it. But you may want to use a deliberately structured definition, as Sidney Harris does, to shape your observations.

Simile, Metaphor, and Analogy Simile, metaphor, and analogy create vivid word pictures or images by making comparisons. These images may take up only a sentence or two, or they may shape several paragraphs.

¦ A simile is a comparison using “like” or “as”: A is like B. “George eats his food like a vacuum cleaner.”

¦ A metaphor is a direct or implied comparison suggesting that A is B: “At the dinner table, George is a vacuum cleaner.”

¦ An analogy is an extended simile or metaphor that builds a point-by-point comparison into several sentences, a whole paragraph, or even a series of paragraphs. Writers use analogy to explain a % difficult concept, idea, or process by comparing it with some­thing more familiar or easier to understand.

If the audience knows about engines but has never seen a human heart, for example, a writer might use an analogy to explain that a heart is like a simple engine, complete with chambers or cylinders, intake and exhaust valves, and hoses to carry the fuel and the exhaust.

As an illustration of simile and metaphor, notice how Joseph Conrad, in the following brief passage from Heart of Darkness, begins with a simile and then continues to build on his images throughout the paragraph. Rather than creating a rigid structural shape for his details (as classification or comparison /contrast would do), the images combine and flow like the river he is describing.

Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far away—in another existence perhaps.

An analogy helps shape the following paragraph by Carl Sagan, author of The Dragons of Eden and Cosmos. To help us understand a difficult concept, the immense age of the Earth (and, by comparison, the relatively tiny span of human history), Sagan compares the life­time of the universe to something simple and familiar: the calendar of a single year.

The most instructive way I know to express this cosmic chronology is to imagine the fifteen-billion year lifetime of the universe . . . com­pressed into the span of a single year. … It is disconcerting to find that in such a cosmic year the Earth does not condense out of interstellar matter until early September; dinosaurs emerge on Christmas Eve; flow­ers arise on December 28th; and men and women originate at 10:30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. All of recorded history occupies the last ten seconds of December 31; and the time from the waning of the Middle Ages to the present occupies little more than one second.

Consider whether a good analogy would help you shape one or more paragraphs in your essay. Ask yourself: “What is the most difficult concept or idea I’m trying to describe?” Is there an extended point-by-point comparison, an analogy, that would clarify it?

Title, Introduction, and Conclusion Depending on your purpose and audience, you may want a title for what you’re writing. At the minimum, titles—like labels—should accurately indicate the contents in the package. In addition, however, good titles capture the reader’s interest with some catchy phrasing or imaginative language—to make the reader want to “buy” the package. Writing primarily for himself, Mark Skelton uses a simple label, “A New Leaf,” for his description which appears at the end of this chapter. Samuel H. Scudder’s title, however, is both a good label (the essay is about looking at fish) and has catchy phrasing: “Take This Fish and Look at It.” If a title is appropriate for your observation, write out several possibilities in your journal.

Introductions should set up the context for the reader— who, what, when, where, and why —so that readers can orient themselves. Depending on the audience and purpose, introductions can be very brief, pushing the reader quickly into the scene, or they can take more time, easing readers into the setting: “It was more than fifteen years ago that I entered the laboratory of Professor Agassiz . . ., ” Scudder begins, giving us background information and context. Stephen White, in his essay about Mesa Verde at the end of this chapter, begins more mysteriously: “It is difficult for me to say exactly what it was that drew me to this solitary place. . . .” White doesn’t tell his reader that he’s talking about Mesa Verde until the second paragraph. Mark Skelton, writing primarily for himself, however, is content with an abrupt beginning: “My potted plant sits on my desk at home.”

Conclusions should bring the observation to a close, giving a sense of completeness. Conclusions depend upon a writer’s purpose and audience, but they tend to be of two types or have two components: a summary and a reference to the introduction. Scudder summarizes his dominant idea that his experiences were of great value, and he also refers back to the introduction: “At the end of eight months, it was almost with reluctance that I left these friends and turned to insects. . . .” Mark Skelton concludes by reemphasizing the dominant idea of his description: the plant is really a family of leaves.

As you work on shaping strategies and drafting, make notes about possible titles, appropriate introductions, or effective conclusions for your written observations.