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!

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).

We'll use this site for experimenting with Kolln's ideas.