Frank L. Cioffi is professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY. He has taught writing and literature at Eastern New Mexico University, Central Washington University, Scripps College, Princeton University, and the University of Gdansk in Poland. His books include One Day in the Life of the English Language (Princeton).

The Imaginative Argument

A Practical Manifesto for Writers

By Frank L. Cioffi

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2018 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-17445-7

Contents

Preface, xi,
Acknowledgments, xvii,
Introduction, 1,
I Getting Started,
1 On the Writing of Essays, 13,
2 Audience: Your Projected Reader(s), 26,
3 Prewriting and the Writing Process, 45,
II Features and Fundamentals of the Imaginative Argument,
4 The Thesis, 61,
5 Developing an Argument, 81,
6 The Research-Based Argument in the Digital Age, 103,
7 Paragraph Design, 124,
III New Forms, Avant-Garde Strategies,
8 Different Structures, Novel Organizational Principles, 143,
9 Saying Something New: Ways toward Creativity, 154,
10 Continuous Composing: Streamwriting, 169,
IV Revising and Reimagining,
11 Rewriting and Revising, 187,
12 Figures and Fallacies, or Being Forceful but Not Cheating at Argument, 205,
13 The Argument of Style, 221,
V Creativity and Originality in the Epoch of the Post-Original,
14 Technology and Writing: On Being Imaginative Now, 247,
15 Concluding a Manifesto: The Future of Writing, 258,
A Instructors' Guide: How to Use This Book in Class, 271,
B Sample Essays, 315,
Works Cited, 349,
Index, 353,

CHAPTER 1

On the Writing of Essays

So much writing surrounds us that a textual environment has emerged as a complex and supremely detailed subuniverse. We as readers inhabit it as we take it in. All over the place — on cellphones, billboards, bottle caps, cereal boxes, the Internet; in magazines, newspapers, books — the written word proliferates. Yet the writing of short essays, "themes," or "term papers" has become an activity confined to students. Poor, beleaguered students. Louis Menand, an essayist and literary historian, claims that term-paper composition is "one of those skills in life that people are obliged to master in order to be excused from ever practicing them again" (92). One naturally wonders what other skills Menand has in mind — maybe the ability to do burpees? — but his point stands. Outside the college classroom, there is little direct use for writing of the kind done therein. The short, exploratory, focused, argumentative essay, though now starting to re-emerge in an abbreviated form in blog entries, still has only one secure home: academia.

But that's OK. I will contend here that the academic argument, the subject of this book, forms the central and most important kind of nonfiction writing that you should master, even if you don't get a chance to use it after graduating from college. Is this assertion "ridiculous," as one of my CUNY colleagues declared? I hope not. Argument is important because it draws on elements of all the other forms of nonfiction writing and hence allows you to move to any of those forms relatively easily. It also replicates the method by which ideas are created and tested. It teaches you to think in an intellectual way.

That's my belief, anyway. Mastering the type of writing I outline here will help not just students who want to become professional writers or professors but also those of you who work in any position that requires honest, sustained appraisal or scrutiny of issues, ideas, people, texts, or situations. It's writing that replicates the kind of thought needed to uncover, as much as possible, The Truth, though this use of the definite article, as I suggested in the Introduction, is something that we need to take with a grain of salt, or to recognize, with Emerson, as essentially "unbarrelable" (see page 5). If there is no such thing as The Truth, though, at least there is a truth that is provisional, convincing, and defensible right now. Essays seeking it look not only for confirmatory evidence (that is, evidence to support a given position) but for disconfirmatory evidence as well, and they end up using both kinds of evidence to develop their ideas. They aim to persuade yet also to provide as fair, honest, and complete an analysis as possible. For it is only such a fair and honest analysis, only such a careful appraisal of alternative and competing positions, only such a scrupulous but dispassionate scrutiny that will advance knowledge and understanding as it simultaneously opens up more questions.

While such goals are lofty ones, keep in mind too that writing such essays will also help you improve and clarify your own thoughts and insights, even about things that you thought you were already quite sure of. Sometimes, for example, you will have feelings and insights about an issue or a book or a film, but won't exactly know what they are — what they stem from, on what assumptions they might be based, or how they might connect with those of others. But writing the argumentative essay requires you to articulate these thoughts about an issue or text, and to organize your inchoate feelings and insights into a form accessible to others. Moreover, writing this kind of essay compels you to understand argumentation, a form of discourse that will be useful in any situation that requires analysis.

Once I had a position at an alternative newspaper (I was a contributing writer), and my job was to review science fiction movies. This would not have been difficult, except that I was always on a tight deadline — and I often would not really know what I wanted to say about movies like Nightwing or Dawn of the Dead. Yet I had to come up with something, maybe 1,500 words or so, and usually on the same night I had seen the film. So I had to mentally review that film first; I had to figure out what was special or striking or curious about it. And too I had to figure out if it worked — if I liked it. Then I wrote my review. Only by this exercise, really, was I able to determine, say, that Alien was a major achievement — and Nightwing was a flop. Argumentative writing helped me clarify both my feelings and my thoughts.

Before examining argument in detail, I'd like to look at more immediately recognizable and familiar kinds of writing. It seems to me that there are at least three discrete and historically established types of nonfiction writing, all of which differ from the kind of essay I describe here. The first might be called "essay as literature." Such a historically-established genre is quite capacious, and it can include personal essays or opinion pieces — these might resemble essays from magazines such as Harper's or the Atlantic, or from journals such as the American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, or Raritan. This literary genre of nonfiction, sometimes called "belles lettres," forms part of our Literary Tradition. It might include the works of Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, Addison and Steele, Margaret Fuller, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Loren Eiseley, Richard Rodriguez, Jordan Kisner, James Hannaham, Wendy Rawlings, and many others. The essay as work of art — memoirs, autobiographies, and other kinds of "creative nonfiction" — might fall under this rubric. Courses examining (and requiring) such writing are often offered by English departments.

Other university courses (often called "Technical Writing") are widely offered on the second major type of nonfiction writing, namely, "informative writing," a type of writing that intends primarily to convey information, not necessarily in a literary or artful manner, and often of a...