Your authorial concern/purpose (your primary purpose as a writer of this particular kind of
communication) will of course govern your pattern of organization and your selection of details.
Your authorial concern is a matter of what you want your reader to understand having read your
writing. It’s a matter, specifically, of what we are trying to say to our readers that is important to
us, and so is likely to be of interest to them. We want to tell a story (narrate) about a significant
experience and provide the reader with an immersion into its physical reality (description). Your
rhetorical methods, then, should (1) be developed out of a concern for capturing the uniqueness,
the particularity of your subject. And this has to do, again, with your purpose as a writer. This
means you will use all five senses, sight, sound, and especially touch, taste, smell, and provide a
constant focus on the concrete, the specific, on those things that reveal your subject’s physicality:
this can be achieved, in part, by ensuring that your writing is “thing rich,” that you write out of
an awareness that noun-adjective combinations create this kind of shared physical portraiture we
are engaged with now; and (2) develop your writing as a story, i.e. a narrative, building with a
significant sense of purpose, tension, drama, suspense even, as the narrative moves toward the
climax, the high point of the story.
As well, we wish to share the dynamic qualities of our subject, the kinds of energies at play in
the writer’s experience. This is the life of your essay, its “spirit,” if you will. This, of course,
means that we need to pay unrelenting attention to the qualities/blendings/fusions of verb-adverb
dimensions by means of which energy flows and builds as our scenes and characters come alive
in our writing. Here, adverbs do for verbs what adjectives do for nouns. Use patterns like the
following: adjective-adjective-adjective-noun; adverb-adverb-adverb verb, and variations.
Use the resources of language that you are already familiar with, such as metaphor, simile,
irony, humor, and the creation of effective sentence patterns ranging from the simple to the
complex, to embody bold as well as nuanced shades of meaning and feeling.
Keep in mind that we are in a paradoxical situation as writers. We are both concerned with and
oblivious to the truth about what we say. We are not in the business of truth-telling (as
something historically valid, assuming for the moment that there is such a phenomena), and yet
we are vitally concerned to convey the essence of things, their defining characteristics. This
means that, besides the actual memory of what happened (a dim resource, at best), we have
available to us the imagination, which can create, or recreate persons, actions, speech, situations
as they might have happened; doing this, we will probably arrive at kinds of truth that are even
more, or just as valid, in terms of what they reveal about our subjects, as factual, remembered
data.
Constantly maintain a focus on your “authorial concern”; this will answer the “so what”
question in every reader’s mind which occurs at the conclusion of every piece of reading. Your
writing should have a sense of significance, and without being necessarily “heavy” or deadly
serious (certainly we don’t wish to exclude joy and brightness, even comedy as occasions for a
story), it should move toward a climax, a moment of most intensity, and it will, if you are clear
about what you want your reader to understand, to have experienced, as a result of encountering
your subject in your essay.
