4.2  Building Detail into Your Essay

I'm just a little short . . . .

Okay--you've read a prompt or task and analyzed it. You've found your role as a writer, your audience, your purpose for writing, and the organizing pattern you want to use. You've even done an outline by writing one sentence for each part of the organizing pattern.

The only problem is that you're a little short of the length requirement for a response. You've written about 100 words, but you need 350-600 words. How did this happen? What are you going to do?

Let's back up for a minute. Here is the prompt you read:

Your school is preparing a time capsule. The capsule will contain items that represent life at our school today. One hundred years from now, the capsule will be opened and the students of the future will look at the items to see what school was like way back then. You have been asked to recommend an item to be included in the time capsule. What item would you recommend?

Write an essay persuading the time capsule selection committee to include the item you recommend.

When you analyzed the prompt you came up with these contexts for the writing:

Writer's Role: myself, as a student in my school
Audience: time capsule selection committee
Subject: what to bury that represents school life today
Purpose (Form): to persuade them to accept my recommendation
Pattern: opinion-reason

Your outline of topic sentences or main ideas for your Persuasive Essay might look like this:

Opinion: I think we should bury a set of three pictures: one of our old building, one of our new building, and one of the plaque with our school mission statement on it. Reason 1: The set of photos would show that things do change. Reason 2: It would also show that some things don't change. Recommendation: I recommend that we include the photo set in the time capsule to show students of the future that they can be in a different building but still be in the same school.

Good for you! You've done a good job, so far. It looks as if you've already found and organized your arguments. Where will you get the other 250-500 words? Are you just going to repeat them until you hit 350 words?

No, you're not going to repeat your arguments. You're going to develop them in detail. Each of the ideas in your outline will be developed into a block of text of 100 words or more. You might repeat an idea for emphasis, but not just to boost the word count.

Let's see what the rubric has to say about developing ideas in detail:

Content & Development: Effective writing develops ideas fully and artfully, using extensive specific, accurate, relevant details. If there is a text or texts, there is a wide variety of details from the text(s) to support ideas.

So, the other 250-500 words are going to come from developing your general statements with--

• specific (not vague or general) details,
  
  
• accurate (not false, misleading, or uncertain) details, and
  
  
• relevant (not just randomly chosen) details.

The details could be:

• facts: The average rainfall is 12.3 inches per year in that location.
  
  
• examples: Hawaii is an example of an island state.
  
  
• reasons: Since suspects A and B could not have committed the crime, the only other suspect, suspect C, must have done it.
  
  
• anecdotes: I was walking down the street, kicking a stone along in front of me when I had the idea for the wireless fence to keep dogs on the owner's property.
  
  
• illustrations: How quickly does this bacteria grow? Suppose you put a penny on one square of a checkerboard. After two seconds, put two pennies on the next square. After two more, put 4 pennies on the third square. There are 64 squares on a checkerboard. In a little over two minutes, you'd have more than 9 quintillion just on the last square. That's how fast it grows.

These details are the content of your paper. This characteristic has two names, development and content, because the content can't just be dumped onto the paper like gravel from a truck. The content must be developed by various methods of development. The rest of this section of this section will show you 7 Methods of Development and give you practice with each.

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