Known-New Revisited

Tessa's Post

Here are two sentences from an essay I wrote about Margaret Atwood’s story collection Wilderness Tips:

Each story in the collection involves a protagonist looking backward. A failure to stabilize the present by recollecting the past often leads Atwood’s protagonists to recede further still, clinging mercilessly to ghosts that allow them to exist in stasis.

Like Katie, I see here that I’m not following the known-new contract very well. Because the second sentence starts with “A failure to stabilize the present,” rather than referring to the “looking backward” in the first sentence, readers might be confused. I will rework the second sentence to try to get the old information “the looking backward” into the front of the sentence. Here’s the rewrite:

The stories in this collection involve protagonists looking backward. Looking backward, however, does not help them stabilize the present, so they recede further still, clinging mercilessly to ghosts that allow them to exist in stasis.

Following Kolln’s suggestion on pg. 99, I also added the word “however” and set it off with commas to change the intonation of the second sentence. This puts stronger emphasis on both “the looking backward” and on “does not,” the latter of which is absent from the first passage. I also corrected the shift from the singular use of “protagonist” in sentence one to the plural use of “protagonists” in sentence two, not something Kolln mentions in chapters 4 and 5, but something that also improves the sentence. It’s amazing what a difference a few small sentence level changes can make. Thanks, Kolln!