Nature vs nurture frankenstein essay

Introduction for Students

Both students and teachers often agree that it is important to write well, and it is not hard to figure out why. Knowing how to write well is stressed at every rung of the educational ladder — from the early grades, through middle school, high school, and college. “You need to know how to write.” This thought, often a command, has become an educational cliché, a truth so often uttered and so seemingly apparent that few people feel the need to offer any explanation for it. As the authors of Models for Writers, however, we feel a special obligation to offer reasons for learning to write and for doing it well. It’s simple. We always learn better if we understand what and why we are learning.

No activity better develops your ability to think than writing does. Writing allows you to express what’s on your mind, to examine your thoughts, and to “see” objectively what you think. When you write thoughtfully and clearly, others can better understand you. Better yet, you can know yourself better. One way of thinking about writing, then, is to see it as holding a mirror up to yourself.

Writing, unlike speaking, is usually more deliberate and allows you to examine your ideas carefully and critically by reading what you have written as you compose sentences. It’s not a one-way street but an interactive process. The process of reading what you have written and then revising and refocusing what you think gives you many opportunities to improve, clarify, and best express what you want to say. At some point in the process, when you are satisfied with your thinking, you can freeze the best expression of your thoughts, for that moment at least. And that moment can be an immensely satisfying one. When you can say about what you’ve written, “That’s exactly what I mean,” you will have brought order out of chaos and certainty where none seemed possible before. No other activity can do as much for developing your critical and intellectual abilities as writing.

It should not come as a surprise, then, that employers in every field are looking for people who can read and write well, for all these reasons. Simply put, employers want to hire and retain the best minds they can to reach their business objectives, and the ability to read and write well is a clear indication of a rigorous mind. In today’s workplace, there is virtually no field that doesn’t require clear, accurate, and direct expression in writing, whether it be writing cover letters and résumés, internal e-mails, self-appraisals, laboratory reports, contract bids, proposals, loan or grant applications, sales reports, market analyses, journal articles, books, or any other documents. Perhaps more than anything else, your ability to organize

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your thoughts and present them clearly will affect your overall success not only on the job but also in life itself.

Models for Writers is designed to help you learn to write by providing you with a collection of model essays — that is, essays that are examples of good writing. Good writing is direct and purposeful and communicates its message without confusing the reader. It doesn’t wander from the topic, and it answers the reader’s questions. Although good writing is well developed and detailed, it also accomplishes its task with the fewest possible words and with the simplest language appropriate to the writer’s topic and thesis.

We know that one of the best ways to learn to write and to improve our writing is to read. By reading, we can see how other writers have communicated their experiences, ideas, thoughts, and feelings. We can study how they have used the various elements of the essay (words, sentences, paragraphs, organizational patterns, transitions, examples, evidence, and so forth) and thus learn how we might effectively do the same. When we see how a writer like James Lincoln Collier develops his essay “Anxiety: Challenge by Another Name” (p. 85) from a strong thesis statement, for example, we can better appreciate the importance of having a clear thesis statement in our own writing. When we see the way Maya Wei-Haas uses transitions in “How Chuck Taylor Taught America How to Play Basketball” (p. 186) to link events and important ideas so that readers can recognize how the parts of her essay fit together, we have a better idea of how to write coherently.

But we do not learn only by reading. We also learn by doing — that is, by writing — and in the best of all situations, we engage in reading and writing in conjunction with each other. Models for Writers therefore encourages you to practice what you are learning and to move from reading to writing.

Part One, On Reading and Writing Well (Chapters 1–2), introduces you to the important steps of the writing process, shows you how to use apparatus that accompanies each selection in this text, provides you with guidelines for critical reading, and demonstrates with three annotated student essays how you can generate your own writing from reading. You will soon see that an effective essay has a clear purpose, often provides useful information, has an effect on the reader’s thoughts and feelings, and is usually a pleasure to read. The essays that you will read in Models for Writers were chosen because they are effective.

All well-written essays share a number of structural and stylistic features, and these are illustrated by the various essays in Models for Writers. One good way to learn what these