"Introductions"

Introductions

Standard types of lead-in sentences; thesis statements appear in red*.

A: Discuss the general subject; then narrow it to the specific subject area of this paper.

Example:

The earth has a population of billions of people, and each of those has her or her own unique personality. Yet those personality types can be described and classified. One instrument that tries to assess personality type is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which narrows an individual's preferences from four categories. Specifically, the indicator measures whether a person is an introvert or extrovert (I or E), processes by intuition or sensing (N or S), uses thinking or feeling (T or F), and is judging or perceiving (J or P). Based on the results, personalities are classified into sixteen different types. Each type carries the initials of the preferences: INTJ, ESFP, and so forth. Examining the characteristics of each type can also allow one to classify the personalities of characters from literature. Consequently, Shakespeare's Hamlet appears to be an Introverted Intuitive type with Thinking Judgment or an INTJ.

Note that sometimes a reverse of this type works well too. In other words, start with specific details and expand those to the specific area of the paper.

Example:

Joe is a problem-solver, an engineer; Katie manages a large corporation; Brian is a molecular biology researcher; Sue is a professor of philosophy. What do these individuals have in common? All are INTJs--Introverted Intuitive types with Thinking Judgment. The INTJ type is just one of sixteen that result from the results a person may receive on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test. Learning about one's personality is a common interest because it can help in understanding the self and others. It can also help in understanding characters from literature. Based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Shakespeare's Hamlet appears to be an INTJ.

B: Start with an anecdote or brief story. Relate it to your thesis. Your story may have dialogue or may not. This particular example does and, as a result, becomes more than a single paragraph.

Example:

One day I had a bit of an argument with my husband, Joe, as we discussed what to do for our weekend.

Joe commented, "I am looking forward to spending the whole weekend in the city. We'll visit all of our friends and perhaps go somewhere like Grand Central Station and just hang out watching the people."

My reaction was, "Oh, my gosh! No way! I have had such a tiring week that all I want to do is veg out reading or watching television. If I feel rested I might try some gardening. But the city? No, I just can't."

Our differences on what to do on our weekend actually reflect our different personalities. Joe is an extrovert, and I am an introvert. These are two of several parameters that are measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). In fact there are sixteen types including ESTP, INFJ, and fourteen other combinations, based on a person's preferences such as sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, perceiving or judging. Based on this instrument, Shakespeare's Hamlet appears to be an INTJ.

Note that use of first person may not be appropriate in all situations; therefore, a narrative told in third person might work better.

Example of one of these without dialogue:

Joe and Mary are a happy couple, at least most of the time. However, sometimes as a weekend is coming they have vastly different ideas of what they would like to do. Joe leans toward traveling to urban centers where he can be surrounded by people. He is energized by that sort of energy. Mary, especially if she has had a stressful week, is just the opposite. All she can think of doing is relaxing at home, curling up on the couch with a book or watching television. If she feels more energetic, she likes to garden. She recovers her energy in a more solitary atmosphere or in the company of a few intimates. Mary is an introvert. One instrument that reveals the degree of introversion or extroversion is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. It also discloses whether a person is more intuitive or sensing, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving. The results yield four-letter acronyms such as ESTP, INFJ, and so forth. When the Myers-Briggs theory is applied to characters from literature, they, too, can be labeled in such a manner. Based on this instrument, Shakespeare's Hamlet appears to be an INTJ.

C: Give a definition of one of the key terms related to your topic. Relate it to your thesis.

According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, personality is, " 1 : the complex of characteristics that distinguishes an individual especially in relationships with others 2 a : the totality of an individual's behavioral and emotional tendencies b : the organization of the individual's distinguishing character traits, attitudes, or habits." While it seems that personalities would be unique to each individual, there have always been attempts to name, label, and qualify personality into types. Myers-Briggs is probably the most famous of these type indicators. It identifies sixteen different types and labels those with initials of certain parameters: I for introversion, S for sensing, F for feeling, P for perceiving, and so forth. The result are names such as ISFP or ENTJ. Using this personality theory, Shakespeare's Hamlet appears to be an INTJ.

D: Use a famous or familiar quotation. Relate it to your thesis.

"To be, or not to be," is the beginning of a famous soliloquy uttered by Hamlet. It is one of many pieces of evidence that helps identify his personality. What Hamlet says and does as well as what others say about him--all help reveal Hamlet's type, which can then be labeled based on established indicators such as the Myers-Briggs. Based on this instrument, Shakespeare's Hamlet appears to be an INTJ.

E: Ask one question or several, but make sure your thesis is not a question.

Do characters in stories possess personalities just like real people? Can those personalities be identified? The answers to these questions are yes; furthermore, using renown personality theories such as Myers-Briggs, can reveal the personality of a character. Based on this instrument, Shakespeare's Hamlet appears to be an INTJ.

F: Combination of any two or more of the above.

"To be, or not to be," is the beginning of a famous soliloquy uttered by Hamlet. It is one of many pieces of evidence that helps identify his personality. Just what is a personality? According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, personality is, " 1 : the complex of characteristics that distinguishes an individual especially in relationships with others
2 a : the totality of an individual's behavioral and emotional tendencies b : the organization of the individual's distinguishing character traits, attitudes, or habits." While it seems that personalities would be unique to each individual, there have always been attempts to name, label, and qualify personality into types. Myers-Briggs is probably the most famous of these type indicators. It identifies sixteen different types and labels those with initials of certain parameters: I for introversion, S for sensing, F for feeling, P for perceiving, and so forth. The result are names such as ISFP or ENTJ. Using this personality theory, Shakespeare's Hamlet appears to be an INTJ.

In courtesy of Prof. Clifford, director of Writing Center for offering me this resource.

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Wee5 - ARS Critical Thinking Question

 “Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to few possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.”—V.S. Naipaul. Discuss how this relates to your intellectual and other pursuits.

Human Nature

The nature of the emotions or, rather, as they were to be known for many hundreds of years, the Passions, become an essential object of study.

The passions were assumed to exist independently, in fixed form. They waited to be activated and were experienced, as it were, passively. Their exact location was a matter of discussion—the head, the heart, the belly? The importance factor was that they could be activated.

Aristotle defines and classifies passions into ten, sometimes single, sometimes linked:

1.      Anger

2.      Calm

3.      Friendship and enmity

4.      Fear and confidence

5.      Shame

6.      Favor

7.      Pity

8.      Indignation

9.      Envy

10.  Jealousy

Aristotle’s descriptions of how, why and when emotions occur is extremely detailed. Each of them is examined in depth. Significantly, it is often questions of social relations that dominate, questions of status and class. In other words it is the situation that produces the emotion.

Thus, emotion only appears under certain conditions, depending on:

- the individual’s state of mind

- the object of his feeling

- the circumstances in which the feeling arises

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Anger

Let focus on “Anger” as the example.

Anger is a desire, not without some pain, for overt revenge for an overt and undeserved slight on oneself or a member of one’s family.

We are always angry with some men in particular (not with Man in general), because he has done or is about to do something against ourselves or our family.

           

In all anger there is an element of pleasure arising from the prospect of the revenge we conceive in our imagination, as in a dream. A slight is an open display of opinion about things considered to be worthless. This can take three forms—contempt, spite, insolence.

- to show contempt is to belittle something or to look down on someone

- to spite is to thwart another man’s wishes, not for your personal gain, but for his personal loss.

- to show insolence is to do or say things to shame the victim, not because of any injury suffered, but for the pure pleasure of doing it. Those who delight in insolence imagine they do so because they are superior to the person they are insulting.

We are angry when in pain. We are angry with people who oppose us, or do not help us, or thwart our desire in some manner. If we are ill, poor, in love, at war, thirsty, or generally obsessed with a desire we cannot fulfill. We are bad-tempered and ready to get angry above all with people who show no concern for our situation.

Question: in the comment below, answer me: with what people are angry? Ie: People are angry with: those who laugh or jeer or soff at them. People are also angry with those treat them as a joke. Tell me at least in 3 situations or more with what people are angry.

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Besides the examination of emotion (anger), Aristotle carries on to broader topics one of them is “Advantages of fortune.”

Advantages of Fortune

Birth

It is in the nature of noble birth to make the man who possesses it more ambitious. All men who have possessions add something to it. Good birth is the glorification of one’s ancestors. Men of high birth even despise those among their contemporaries who are as good as their own forebears since it is easier to boast of things in the distant past than of things in the present. The word high-born means being true to one’s stock, and nobility to that which still maintains their standards. In most cases, this is not what happens. The high-born are for the most part worthless, for there are good and bad harvests in the families of men as in the fruits of the earth and sometimes if the stock is good, eminent men arise for a certain time and then there is a decline.

Wealth

The characteristics that arise from wealth are plain to see. Men become arrogant, proud. Their attitude reflects the fact that they possess the good things of life. Wealth is the yardstick by which other things are judged. They are self-indulgent and extravagant; self-indulgent in the upkeep and display of their great wealth, extravagant and insolent.

They believe they have the right to command, since they believe they posses that which makes them fit to the rule. The character of a wealthy man is of a happy man devoid of sense.

There are differences between old and new money, the newly rich have all the faults of the old to a much higher degree. It is to be rich without the experience of being rich.

Power

Power has certain characteristics that are similar to wealth and some that are better. Men of power are more ambitious and manly than the rich because they are drawn to exploits which their power enables them to accomplish.

They are also more diligent, because they are always alert, obliged to attend to what concerns their power.

They are more dignified than pompous. Their rank puts them in public view and so their acts are moderate and their dignity is a kind of tempered pomp that is seemly.

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Youth, Old age, middle age

Youth

The young are by their nature full of desires and they are inclined to follow their desires. In their bodily desires they are particularly subject to love, which they are powerless to control. They are inconsistent, and quickly tired. Their desires are intense but brief (for their desires are urgent, not great, and are like the hunger and thirst). They are hot-blooded, rash and follow their impulses. They are governed by their ardor. Being ambitious they will not endure disdain and they grow angry if they think they are suffering from injustice. They love recognition but victory even more. For youth desires to be supreme and victory is supreme. These are their two ambitions rather than a love of money. They have no great love of money since they have no yet experienced need. They are good-rather than ill-natured because they have not seen much evil. They are trusting because they have not often been deceived. They are optimistic because they have not suffered failure.

They live for the most part in hope, for hope embraces the future while memory refers to the past and for the young the future is long and the past is short…they are more courageous than men of another age since they are rash and hope easily. Their rashness takes away all fear. Hope gives them confidence, for no one is afraid when he is angry and hope for some gain inspires confidence. They are easily embarrassed since they cannot conceive of anything other than what is beautiful having received a conventional upbringing. They are magnanimous. They have not yet been humiliated by life. They have not experienced inescapable necessities and magnanimity means believing oneself capable of great things, and this belongs to someone who is full of hope.

In their deeds they prefer beauty to self-interest, for they live by nature rather than calculation. Calculation deals in self-interest, virtue in beauty.

More than at any other age they love their friends and companions, because they take pleasure in the common life and do not yet judge things by their own self-interest and in consequence neither do their friends. They err always by exaggeration and excessive vehemence, for they do everything to excess; they love to excess, hate to excess and so on.

They believe they know everything and are obstinate in what they say. That is the cause of their excess in everything. They commit their crimes through excess rather than wickedness. They are open to pity because they believe all men to be honest and better than they really are. They apply the yardstick of their own innocence to all men. They imagine that other people’s suffering is undeserved.

They love to laugh and to joke, for a joke is excess tempered by good upbringing.

Old Age

Old men…have characteristics that are almost entirely opposite to the young, because they have lived many years, have been derived and made mistakes on more than one occasion, because they have seen that human affairs go wrong most of the time, and so they are never affirmative, always over-cautious. They say, ‘I think’, never, ‘I know’, and always add ‘perhaps,’ ‘possibly.’ Everything is qualified. To be continued….

 Question: How do you like reading this article?

Classical Rhetoric

Classical texts were assumed to be the ultimate repository of all knowledge. Wisdom ended there. Like sacred texts, they formed a body of learning and truth that was to be studied and learned as absolute. The same books were read, discussed and commented on generation after generation, so creating an intellectual tradition that was almost impossible to break. Educated men might study the small rage of works. They thus share a common frame of reference, so that their own writings and reflections are often reworkings of these same texts and are full of allusions and half-quotations to these basic books. It is impossible to understand the prevailing ideas about acting up to our own era without a proper recognition of the strength of the classical tradition.

The tradition of classical rhetoric is of central importance. All early discussions were made in terms of the precepts of rhetorical delivery laid down in Greece and Rome. 

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, of convincing other people that what you are saying is true. You can always persuade in two ways: by perfect logical argument, or by attracting a sympathetic emotional response. The best rhetorical work does both.

Most authors agree that the power to influence, to sway, is what matters most. And who better capture and control someone else’s sympathy than an actor in theater (drama) or character in the fiction? This was recognized by Aristotle, one of the most renowned Greek philosophers, the first thinker to make a serious study of characters. He laid the foundations for the study of theater and performance. He also provided the first comprehensive study of human natures—emotion and social behavior, which remained the dominant statement employed by the later authors in both theater and work of writing.

Aristotle’s comprehensive study of life is impressive. Life is universally known as tragedy. Life tragedy has been cleverly employed by the authors with an order of priorities. First and foremost, there is a plot, the action. This is defined as an imitation—not a copy, a replica, but a structure that resembles a set of life events, one that is self-contained, with a begging, a middle, and an end, and which is, therefore, intelligible.

Second come the characters whose function is to carry the action, who are its agents. Each person is conceived as having a deposition, an ethos, which has been given to him and which inclines him to certain actions. The primary concern is with what people do, what decisions, given their natural disposition, they take in the circumstances in which they are placed, and with the ethical and moral validity of those decisions. Often, the conflict in life tragedy is not between individual interests but between the sets of values, the conflicting moralities which the individuals represent.

Third, there is the writing, which must be consistent, and which rounds out the action in human terms. In theater, the actor’s function is to live out the dilemma in which the character is placed in the terms the writer has given, and to move the audience in a process of moral education.

Inspired by the Aristotle’s rhetoric, I feel extremely compelled to share you an excerpt to deeply understand human natures. The literary masterpiece, such as those written by Shakespeare, finds its way to exist until present because of one timeless asset that it embraces: human nature.  So I think if you could have a better understanding of human natures, you would become more insightful, more analytical, and more knowledgeable. Stay tune with the next blog titled “Human Nature.”


Inspired by my old lecture notes and "The Art of Actors"

What can failure offer?

Failure offers lessons. America is one exemplary example which proves the idea of success starts with failure: the failing of the Articles of Confederation allows the founding fathers to construct the constitution, the document on which American is built. Google Inc. observed the failures of its competitors and learned from these failures to build itself into the world’s most renowned search engine. The recent recession arising largely from the housing crisis is such a depressing failure; however lesson is learned, and this financial downfall would help reinforce the policy makings for the later proceedings. Hence, learning the lessons offered by failures is an itinerary to success.

Success can be achieved by studying and learning from the earlier failures. The United States, the first great democracy of the modern world, sets a strong example for this. After just five years of living under the Articles of Confederation, which established the United States of America as a single country for the first time, the states realized that they needed a new document and a new, more powerful government. In the late 1780s, the Annapolis convention was convened. The result, three years later, was the Constitution, which created a more powerful central government while also maintaining the integrity of the states. By learning from the failure of the Articles, the founding fathers created the founding document of a country that has become both the most powerful country in the world and a beacon of democracy.

Unlike the United States, which had its fair share of ups and downs over the years, the Internet search engine company, Google Inc., has suffered few setbacks since it went into business in the late 1990s. Google has succeeded by studying the failures of other companies in order to help it innovates its technology and business model. Google identified and solved the problem of assessing the quality of search results by using the number of links pointing to a page as an indicator of the number of people who find the page valuable. Suddenly, Google’s search results became far more accurate and reliable than those from other companies, and now Google’s dominance in the field of Internet search is almost absolute.

Lessons from failure can also be used to prevent the future chaos. The banks’ policy makers failed to set a cautious requirement towards credit check and the financial arrangement for clients who purchased a home. The mistakes are also shared by the corruption and the unpractical, overambitious individuals from Wall Street. The home loan requirement was too lenient that allows many people of the obscure, low-credit to buy houses without down payment, later resulting in a higher number of loans on default. The bankrupting of the home owners has been widespread across the 50 states. Consequently, America was officially hammered by recession which results in job loss, dramatic drop in economic growth, financial deficits, social problems and other painful drawbacks. Learned from this failure, currently the banking system takes a higher caution towards the home loan policy. This enormous collapse has been kept as lesson to prevent the future turmoil.

Failure is often seen as embarrassing, something to be denied and hidden. But as the examples of the U.S. Constitution , Google, and Housing Crisis prove, if an individual, organization, or even a nation is strong enough to face and study its failure, then that failure can become a powerful teacher. The examples of history, business, and recent recession demonstrate that failure can be the best catalyst of success, but only if people have the courage to face it head on.