Chapter seven of AW focuses on how writing in the humanities is conceived. The structure of the writing style consists of a thesis, which is the introduction of the text. It shows a clear central idea of the text, which will be built off of it in the rest of the text. Beyond the thesis, the body paragraphs often start with a topic sentence telling the reader what information is within this paragraph. It is then finished with a transition sentence linking it to the following body paragraph. Language should avoid being passive and should use human emotion. These aspects contribute human-like elements, so your writing can come across as more expressive. The writing styles for the humanities include MLA and Chicago.
For the example essay given within chapter seven, I find the introduction to help explain the background and what beliefs and society were like when this essay was written; however, I feel the thesis is overly complicated for no explicit reason, using just the sentence “Chopin explores marriage as the oppression of one’s true self and desires.” would be a much easier thesis for the reader to grasp. The overall structure is well done with a clear hook at the beginning into the background of the time, finally building a thesis. The language used in this introduction is very on-point, engaging, and somewhat concise on the topic of the essay. Reference in the opening paragraph includes properly citing the text the author is using. They also include names of other famous writers writing around the same time.
The body paragraphs are the meat of this essay and contain evidence to support the author’s claims. This essay would be better represented under headers rather than just paragraphs but to the formatting. Many paragraphs often are written about the same section of text. The topic is introduced in one paragraph, and in the following, certain aspects of the text are explored for how they build the story’s meaning. Besides this structure issue, the rest of the formatting is fine. Each paragraph includes a topic sentence, followed by drawing meaning from the text and analyzing it, then is tied back to the thesis. The author often goes down the path of summarizing the text without linking it to their thesis. The language is the standard for this style of writing and has no major flaws. Quotes are abundant in this paper, and the author does them correctly by naming the story’s author once with the paragraph number, then only including the paragraph for the rest of their citations.
In their concluding paragraph, the thesis is retouched, and key points of the text are used to provide final proof of the author’s claim. A final meaning is also drawn from the text, which wraps up the paper.
