Known-New, Name It Sister!

After Tuesday’s workshop, I wanted to rework my introductory paragraph, placing more immediate emphasis on the creation of the term Affrilachian. After reading Kolln chapters 4 and 5, I focused most specifically on the transition between two sentences which originally looked like this:

Researchers have studied ballads and haint tales, poetry and belief statements to find conventions and trends which lead to better understandings of Appalachian culture. One genre currently circulating in the region is Affrilachian poetry, or poetry by and about the experiences of African-Americans in Appalachia.

I begin sentence two with the subject, “one genre currently circulating…” However, no where in sentence one (or in my paper so far) do I introduced the word genre. In this way, my transition disobeys Kolln’s idea of the known-new contract, where given info comes first and new info second. Her idea is particularly important to this section of my paper—the introduction—because if I am exploring Affrilachian poetry as a genre, then I must introduce this before calling it a genre. The following is my revision:

Researchers study many genres within Appalachian literary culture—from ballads and haint tales, to poetry and belief statements—to create better understandings of the region’s people. Of the many factors governing these genres, one of the most silenced has been that of race. In 1990, in fact, Webster’s dictionary defined an Appalachian as a “white resident from the mountains” (Affrilachian, “History”). In response to this narrow definition, black Appalachian poet, Frank X Walker created the term Affrilachian to refer to African- Americans of Appalachia.

By renaming the ballads and tales genres, I set-up sentence two and am able to more naturally point to a trend within these genres: the missing factor of race (i.e. the main point of my paper).