Cause and Effect

Cause and effect is a simple tool that is used in almost all writing.  It is simply how one thing causes another thing to happen.  It is very useful to use cause and effect in writing, cause and effect helps the reader to understand why things happen giving them a better sense of the story.

The best way that i can think of to analyze a cause and effect paper is to look it over to see where it starts and see where it ends.  That way you as you look over the paper, and you can see what causes went together to bring it to its conclusion.

The importance of peer-review

Peer-review is a very helpful thing.  Having another person look at the story you are writing and getting feedback is a good way to assess where you stand when writing a story.  It is easy to overlook flaws in your own writing, another person can see what the writer can not see and make suggestions to help improve the story.

Arthurian Rhetorical Tools

In the Zambreno article she talks about the legend of King Arthur being retold in many forms.  King Arthur is the most used story in history, there are hints of it in everything we see in popular entertainment, from serious drama, to super-hero comics and movies. 

Also in the article she talks about certain rhetorical tool writers use to write a story.  The first one is mutability/plasticity, this refers to the ability to take a story and reshape it how you see fit.  Authors have taken parts of the King Arthur story and have change it into something of their own.  Whether they make it set in the modern day or add new characters this demonstrates mutability/plasticity.

The next tool is piecemeal.  This is when an author takes pieces of the story and moves them around or writes only using certain parts of the story that they like.  An example of this is when an author likes the idea of a young Arthur, so he take that piece of the story and writes about that.

The next tool is windows of opportunity.  This is when there are gaps in a story and another author makes his own story to fill the gap.  This happens all the time in modern stories, after a story is told they always want to make a prequel, utilizing the window of opportunity from a characters past.

 The final tool is open-ended closure.  This is when a story is done but there are hints that there is going to be more.  This tool is used a lot now a days, there are hardly any stories that stand alone anymore. A good example of this is Lord of the rings, there was only one book The Hobbit, The Hobbit was an open ended story allowing Tolkien to write a whole trilogy after it.

The importance of narrative part 2

This is a continuation of narrative and the tools we use to tell a story.  There are many tools to use to form a cohesive narrative.  Last time i talked about the importance of writing in a orderly and chronological fashion, i also talked about the importance of knowing your audience.  Now i will talk about some other tools that are used to from a narrative.  The first is when a writer changes to a story from another time in the middle of the story already being told.  This is, if going back in time a flashback, or going forward in time a flash forward.  These can be used to help add depth to the story, in a way that going forward in one direction cannot.  Flashbacks and flash forwards are useful but they can also be confusing without a proper setup.  This brings me to my second tool, transitions.  Transitions are ways to tell your reader when something changes so that they are not confused.  Transitions are necessary to form a coherent story, and they help greatly with things like flashbacks.


Now i am going to talk about structural elements found in narratives.  Most narratives have the same elements, these are plot, characters, setting, theme.  These elements interact with each other and create the story.  Character influence the plot and theme,  the plot influences the theme and characters, the setting influences all of these.  All of these elements combine together to make a solid narrative, and these are what make stories unique from each other.

The Importance of Narrative

Narrative is the structure of a story.  It is important because without structure the story is incomprehensible.  The narrative tells us what happened in a story, who did what, why they did it, and what happened because they did it.  without narrative we would have stories that make no sense, they would just be a collection of words without any meaning.


Narrative is important but it could not work without the proper structure.  The goal of a story is to tell your audience something in a way that is easy to understand.  It is easier to reach an audience when the story told is orderly and chronological.  It is also important to know the audience, to know their culture, and to know the time frame that they live in or grew up in.  People see things differently from one another based on their upbringing, their religion, and their own life experiences.  Knowing who the audience is can make a drastic difference in the writer's ability to connect with them.

The Writing Process

The writing process starts with a thesis statement, which is us telling the reader what the article is about.  We also introduce points we are going to make, this is called a road map.  There are three parts to writing an article, the introduction, the body and the conclusion.  When we write the article we start with the writing the body.  After that we write the conclusion, and then we write the introduction last.  We write an article this way because after we write the body we can use the information from body to write the conclusion and the introduction.