A Sampler of Styles
(excerpts from actual student papers)

 

Skinner’s analysis is persuasive, yet I’m not sure that I agree with his conclusions.  My biggest bone of contention is that he makes light of an idea which I consider central to the issue: even given that a certain behavior is the end product of numerous controlling forces outside myself, the illusion that I am relatively free from outside control preserves my sense of accomplishment.

Ever since the Sixteenth Century, surgeons have recognized the benefits of replacing defective organs of one person with the functional organs of another; but it was only on December 23, 1954, when the first successful kidney transplant was performed, that man could realistically envision transplants as a means of saving lives.  What keeps surgeons from realizing this goal today is not the purely surgical problems in connecting up tissues and organs, nor is it the problem of keeping the host from rejecting the graft, thanks to a type of drug (called immunosuppressive) which impairs the normal body function of attacking foreign cells; it is the fact that these immunosuppressive drugs also impair a patient’s ability to fight infectious diseases, which usually results in death.  The main concern of transplant surgeons, therefore, is the immunologic system, the defense mechanism that protects the body against any type of foreign protein, be it a transplanted organ or the virus that causes pneumonia.

From any island or city in the Puget Sound Basin one can see the Olympic Mountains to the west and the Cascades to the east.  Both ranges look like the ragged edges of a ripsaw, only with white rust pocks on the tips of the teeth.

Prince Hal (in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I) is as hard to crack as a walnut.  “I know you all,” he says of Falstaff and Co. in his soliloquy ending I ii, but what friend–what reader even–can speak with equal confidence about Hal himself? His true nature seems finally to be as riddling as Hamlet’s or Cleopatra’s; indeed, he seems at times to be a hybrid of those two characters, infinitely various, theatrical, cunning past man’s thought, loving, brutal, equivocal–the list goes on.  It’s little wonder that Hotspur, so childishly open and simple, often surpasses Hal as the reader’s favorite.  It’s also little wonder that we are hard pressed to decide whether Hal is actually likable or merely admirable.

 

A student excerpt quoted from John Trimble's Writing with Style.

Several Saturday mornings ago, at 6:30 a.m. on NBC, the Smurfs–Brainy, Hefty, Handy, and Smurfette–climbed into the mountains to find a magic snow flower.  Unfortunately, the Abominable Snowbeast spotted them, captured Smurfette, and made her his princess.  Frightened, of course, Smurfette cried.  Speaking sweetly and gently, every sentence beginning with “ooh,” she begged the Snowbeast to let her go. At last, the rest of the Smurfs were able to rescue Smurfette by throwing snowballs at the Snowbeast.

 

After the suffragists’ active campaigns, the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, the temporary equality brought about by the world wars, and the current fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, it is unbelievable that such sex-role stereotyping still continues in our society.  But it does.

I've been told that there are three kinds of lies: black ones, white ones and statistics. The element of truth in this statement lends it humor. Statistics reflect the truth but not the whole truth. Like some peep-show pictures, they require special lenses to create a realistic image. Viewed with misunderstandings, statistics present a distorted image of truth. Statistics never lie; they are misinterpreted.

I am considering the following statistic. Out of 689 students reacting to the statement, "My Expository Writing class is better than most other Expository Writing classes":

  • 33.7% strongly agreed,
  • 22.5% agreed,
  • 20.5% were unsure,
  • 10.4% disagreed,
  • and 10.9% strongly disagreed with the statement.

My first reaction to the statistic is quite positive. Most of the students' Expository Writing classes are better than most of the students' Expository Writing classes.

Businessmen should love economist Milton Friedman.  With one stroke of his Nobel Prize-winning pen, Friedman grants executives and managers free reign to indulge in profit-maximizing activities to their hearts’ content.  Get all you can while the getting is good–just don’t break the law, he exhorts.

 

Friedman bases much of his argument upon his perception of the relationship between a corporation’s stockholders and its manager.  Friedman makes the undeniable point that a corporate executive is an employee of the stockholders and as such has the “responsibility…to conduct the business in accordance with their desires.”  When Friedman strays from this generally accepted position, however, and enters the more controversial realm of attempting to define just what stockholders’ “desires” are, his argument loses much credibility.  Friedman asserts that, in general, stockholders’ sole wish is “to make as much money as possible.”  Furthermore, he claims that “to say that the corporate executive has a ‘social responsibility’ in his capacity as a businessman…must mean that he is to act in some way that is not in the interest of his employers.”

Social groups are essential to the definition of human socialization.  People belong to many social groups–family, church, school, neighborhood, club.  Although, as individuals, we might like to believe that we are independent, free to act as we think and feel, the truth is that much of our behavior is influenced by our social in-group (Horton & Hunt, 1976).  This paper describes a primary social in-group that I belong to along with three peers.  The group is a primary group because the members came together as friends, not for a particular purpose, as would be true in a secondary group like a college classroom or a church choir.  Individual members of a primary in-group interact with each other on an intimate basis, with each member interested in each other group member as a whole person, not simply as a performer of particular social roles. In the specified secondary groups, people would regard each other as classmates or as singers.  In a primary group, members regard each other as complete people.  I will also give attention to the characteristics and values of the group, its ethnocentrism and its means of social control.