"An essay is a golf swing, an angler's cast, a tennis serve. For example, say, and experience happens to you, one that seems to have literary potential. You wait for it to grow in your mind into a short story, or even just an episode of "Friends," but somehow it doesn't. Then a further experience, or an odd chance, or something a friend says, or something in the newspaper chimes with the first experience, and suddenly you understand you can write about it, and you do. You quit longing for form and write what's there, with whatever serviceable prose comes to hand, for no better reason than the fun and release of saying. That sequence-- that combination of patience with sudden impatience, that eventual yielding to the simple desire to tell-- identifies the essay." (Atwan 23)I found this quote very appealing because most of my papers are ones that can be related back to something that has happened in my life. I like my papers to be relatable, and as Frazier says, sometimes no matter how great of an experience, sometimes you just can’t write about it yet. Something else has to happen, is yet to happen for us to fully understand it. Frazier talks about how often, we can find things on television, he uses “Friends” as an example to relate back to an experience we’ve had. And if you really think about it, what does make a television show popular? What makes people sit down every week and watch a show? It’s the characters, the experiences that they have that keep people wanting more. Things that make you sit back and go, yeah, that’s happened to me. Or, what would I have done had I been in that position? The same holds true for a good essay.
Diagrams function in many ways, but the most important function, in my opinion would be to give a deeper understanding of the topic at hand. The diagram I selected is definitely a learning device. Someone who is studying diabetes, for example would find this very useful because if shows the digestive system, from organ to organ. The original context of this diagram is in an article about diabetes, and now that it has been removed from its original context, it has lost much of its meaning. It needs the article that goes along with it to make sense. One without the other is like peanut butter without the jelly. It just doesn’t make sense. As a writer, my responsibility after removing the diagram from its original context is to properly cite it, as well as maybe even hyperlink it to its original text. The details that are important, in my diagram are of course the internal organs of the digestive system. Its labeled with an arrow pointing to each organ. I wouldn’t of labeled them any differently, it seems as though this is the most efficient way. I think that diagrams are a huge part of writing. In a research paper, this would be an extremely valuable tool in presenting information. It is a huge part of writing, to deeper understanding, and to explain things in depth.
