04-26-2008, 09:46 PM
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#10 |
| Senior Member
Join Date: Oct 2004
Posts: 3,449
| That's one of the essay types Prof. Burke described in his blog: Quote: |
Set-em-up, knock-em-down. When it’s done right, this is just about my favorite kind of short analytic essay, and it is one of the structures well worth learning for its general utility outside of the college environment. In this structure, the writer explores some simplistic or banal assumption or argument for the first part of the paper, carefully bracketed off as a sort of “Let’s suppose that X is true”, where it is clear that the author is just thinking it through. Then halfway through the essay, the writer pulls the rug out, revealing that the initial argument is totally wrong, and substituting some other argument or line of analysis in its place. In the end, the reason I like set-em-up, knock-em-down essays is that they are so clearly focused on the purpose of analytic writing, at least in my classes, and that’s persuasion. This is why I grade descriptive essays so relatively low: they only prove that someone did the reading. An essay that is persuasive is an essay that shows a student has command of the material, has taken ownership of it. It doesn’t matter if their knowledge is less than encyclopedic in that case.
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