8.8–Sample Analysis of Creative Nonfiction

How to Read this Section

This section contains two parts. First, you will find the prompt. The prompt is a very important element in any writing assignment. Don’t be fooled by the fact it is short! Even though it is a short document, it highlights and makes clear every element you will need to complete the given assignment effectively. When writing an essay, the prompt is where you will both begin and end. Seriously. Before you begin, familiarize yourself with the prompt, and before you submit your final draft, give the prompt one final read over, making sure you have not left anything out. When you visit the University Writing Center and Libraries, they can better help if you bring along the prompt. Both the Writing Center^[1] and the Libraries^[2] provide indispensable tools to aid students, so take advantage of their services.

The second part of this section contains a simulated student essay—the essay is not an actual student essay, but an essay written to demonstrate a strong student essay. The essay in this section is not meant to represent a “perfect” essay; it has its faults. However, this essay is an effective response to the given prompt. The “student” essay will be represented in a wide column on the left, and the grader’s commentary will be represented in a smaller column on the right. Use the example and the comments to help you think about how you might organize your own essay, to think about whether you will make similar—or different—choices.

Sample Prompt

203 OER Nonfiction Essay

Essay Description & Components

In this paper you will perform three preliminary tasks: one that answers the question “what?,” another that answers “why?,” and another that answers the “how.” You don’t need to cover every approach listed under the numbers (such as #2); these are just a range of ideas. The sections in the chapter cover the different components this handout details.

1. Describe the primary stylistic feel of your selection (the what). Keep in mind that:
   1. 1. The “feel” will not be homogeneous, but is likely to change within any passage, and definitely across passages.
      2. The “feel” is not always immediately apparent, and likely your relationship to the text and the writer will shape what the feel is.
      3. The aim is NOT to convey the same feeling in your own writing.
2. Explain why the stylistic feel is important or interesting by considering questions of context, either at the time of writing, now, or both. Possible approaches:
   1. 1. Consider context internal to the text: how does the style and this effect relate to (alter, become essential for) what is being said or described?
      2. Consider the cultural contexts at the time of writing. What was going on that might demand this effect?
      3. Consider elements of authorship: what do we know about that author’s approach and aim that would help us understand these effects? (While author intention is not to be taken as authoritative, it can help clarify the stylistic approach as long as you also attend to the text first and foremost).
      4. Consider the rhetorical challenges that your text might be addressing in terms of audience preconceptions, resistances, hopes, experiences, etc.
      5. Consider the current setting for reading this text, particularly in how it might alter, change, or perhaps need the effect described in the what portion of your paper.
3. Provide a detailed analysis of the stylistic nuances present in your text. These should include both the sentence-level stylistic choices and the tropes, schemes, and images.
   1. 1. Do not just describe what the text is doing, but analyze it. To do so you need to introduce a passage in relation to your thesis, insert the relevant passage into your paper (3-8 lines at a time), and then point out what is interesting in that passage and why.

   Student Essay	Instructor Annotations
   Korku Mensah Dr. Matt McKinney 4/15/2022 “This Fourth of July is Yours, not Mine”: Frederick Douglass Speaks on Fifth of July	I like how quickly your intro gets to the immediate context of the speech. Since the first sentence provides the year, you don’t need to repeat that information in the next sentence.
   In 1852, Frederick Douglass was invited to give a speech to a group of privileged white people at the Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society’s Fourth of July event to mark the independence anniversary celebration of the United States of America. Douglass delivered his speech on July 5th, 1852, a day after the anniversary celebration, in Rochester, New York. He chose to give his speech on July 5th instead of July 4th as a statement in support of his argument in which he implies that in light of the perpetual violence and brutality been enforced by the institution of slavery against enslaved people in the United States, the country’s celebration of liberty and independence is ironic and holds no essence for enslaved people. In the speech titled “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” Douglass presents a rhetorical argument to oppose the institution of slavery. He speaks specifically against the Fugitive Slave Law of 1853, which mandated that enslaved people be returned to their enslavers, regardless of wherever they were in a free state. In a careful train of thought that threads together ethical, religious, and sociopolitical arguments, Douglass remonstrates the ironies in the values of the United States, particularly calling attention to the existing exploitative nature of slavery as an economically efficient system of wealth production for white Americans.	The FS Law was passed in 1850 (1853 would be after Douglass’s speech). Your thesis makes a strong and specific claim about the text. However, you do allude to your argument earlier in the introduction. I would avoid mentioning Douglass’s use of irony until your thesis to make your argument more impactful.
   Douglass’s speech has three informally structured argument-based sections. He begins his address by focusing on a general public audience, then moves his focus to the church, and then addresses Republican politics. This presentation structure allows him to engage a broader audience and highlights how intrinsically connected politics and religion are in American discourse and practice. Throughout the speech, Douglass uses the second-person pronoun – “you” – to refer to his white American audience, establishing them as his sole unified audience who are Christians yet believe in their privileges over others. He switches tones from philosophical to critical and employs specific linguistic allusions to present his ethical, religious, and political arguments. With his rhetorical strategies, Douglass develops a passionate speech that persuasively addresses the oppressive system of slavery and calls for its urgent abolition.	I really like how you chose to focus on structure for one of your early body paragraphs; this gives you the ability to deep dive on more specific points later, and set up a general to specific pattern in your essay points. Your topic sentence claim could be a bit more argumentative. Why did Douglass choose this structure? Briefly making a claim about this will help the reader understand your assessment of Douglass’s choices.
   At the beginning of the speech, Douglass appears to be kind and gentle with his audience, honoring their forefathers as being “decorous, respectful, and loyal” (4) while addressing them as “fellow citizens.” He presents these ethical postures to please his audience and gain their trust, to begin with. A switch in tone and argument follows as he calls the Fourth of July celebration hypocritical, making his audience begin to feel uneasy at this point. Douglass switches between styles/tones and arguments to manage the feelings of his audience while getting his points across to them without losing them. Douglass also employs some referential techniques to control his audience’s imagination and establish his arguments on rhetorical appeals. For example, he uses biblical linguistic imageries like “the weak against the strong” (3), the “national altar” (8), “the canopy of heaven” (10), and “God speed” (21) – from an abolitionist’s poem that he introduces at the end of his speech. These Christian imageries are techniques that Douglass uses to make his argument familiar and appealing to his White American Christian audience. Likewise, Douglass makes several references to the Constitution of America, which he emphasized as a “GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT” (19) to give authority and authenticity to his arguments. These frequent rhetorical references to religious and political documents again show how religion and politics are intertwined in the American psyche.	“Douglass switches between styles/tones…” reads more like a topic sentence because you’re making a claim about the writing, rather than making a factual statement. It’s great that you’re incorporating textual evidence in this paragraph, but this should generally come after you’ve made your point. Otherwise, putting your sources in the topic sentence can create the impression that they’re framing the focus rather than supporting yours.
   Perhaps the most important point of the speech is captured in the title (What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?). This interrogative statement/question demands answers from his audience while pointing out the hypocrisy and irony of asking him, a formerly enslaved person, to give a speech about the “national independence” (8) from which Douglass feels “not included” (8) by stating that: “This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn” (8-9). In his speech, Douglass lays out his thesis in this emotional moment, contrasting the white American’s “high independence” (8) with the “stripes and death” (8) suffered by enslaved Black Americans. Douglass develops a narrative that clarifies that there exist two distinct American experiences, and there is an “immeasurable distance” (8) between them.	Great work with this topic sentence: you get your argument across quickly. You don’t need a colon to introduce the quote, since “that” leads into it organically.
   Douglass’s personal lived experience as a formally enslaved Black American gives him the authority to speak about the vast distinction in the experiences of white and Black Americans. According to his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Douglass was subjected to physical brutality on Edward Covey’s plantation when he was about 16 years old. His firsthand experience on this plantation exposed him to the horror of slavery and informed his growth into a passionate advocate for freedom and equality. Douglass’s early life experiences shaped his adult life, nurturing his passion into a seasoned orator, writer, and activist for the end of slavery and the humanity and equal rights of all people. The solid reputation he built for himself over the years in his activism earned him the invitation to the 1852 Fourth of July event at Rochester. The speech draws on Douglass’s lived experiences as he argues that the United States’ “shouts of liberty and equality” (11) are false. He exposes the violence and brutality that is imminent in the system of slavery. Douglass impresses upon his audience that slavery is unjust and should be ended by probing and projecting the American value system’s inherent ironies that encourage and support one group of people to enslave the other.	“Formerly” enslaved rather than formally. Italicize book titles as well. I like that you connect Douglass’s early life to the speech, but I would mention earlier in the paragraph that his invitation was based on his status as a former slave, rather than waiting to the end to make this point.
   Douglass exposes the complex American society of the 1850s. He forces his white American audience, who pride themselves on the liberty that was a core founding value of America yet undermining the freedom of enslaved people, to see through their hypocrisy and complication. Douglass asks poetically: “Is this the land your Fathers loved; The freedom which they toiled to win?; Is this the earth whereon they moved?; Are these the graves they slumber in?” (13-14). Employing this poetic style of presentation, with the element of anaphora, in making inferences about the core values of the American past, Douglass pushes his audience to admit to themselves the hypocrisy in claiming that they value equality when they do not believe in the freedom and humanity of all people. In effect, Douglass criticizes America by focusing on the country’s own history.	What does Douglass expose about this society? Clarify briefly for your reader’s benefit.
   In sum, Douglass presents his arguments, in part, from a philosophical standpoint, making statements like “oppression makes a wise man mad” (4) and referring to the forefathers as those who “did not shrink from agitating against oppression” (6). Douglass gets his audience to agree with him in these persuasive statements as he appeals to their values and belief systems. Also, Douglass references America’s act of inviting “fugitives of oppression from abroad” (18) to project the irony that “the fugitives from [their] own land [they] advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill” (18). By this revelation, Douglass submits that oppression occurs in America contrary to the country’s purported “love of liberty” (17). Having established that the forefathers resisted oppression and noted slavery as a system of oppression, Douglass solidifies his arguments and drives home his point on the hypocrisy of the American society given the country’s history and acclaimed values. Although slavery is extinct by law, it is extant through its quintessential relationship with racism, subjecting and suppressing African American bodies and cultures through America’s social and criminal justice systems. This is a systemic or a new form of oppression with the same impact as their enslaved ancestors endured. And since Americans still celebrate their founding values of liberty, justice, and equality, the continuous presence of racism in America today signals the perennial hypocrisy of American society.	Very strong conclusion, especially in the second half where you illustrate the speech’s significance in contemporary America. I would suggest including some sort of recap of your body paragraph points, so that you can illustrate how you’ve synthesized them.
   Work Cited Douglass, Frederick. “‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”.” Teaching American History, 27 Apr. 2022, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july/.

   Attribution:

   McKinney, Matt, and R. Paul Cooper. “Literary Nonfiction: Sample Analysis of Literary Nonfiction.” In Surface and Subtext: Literature, Research, Writing. 3rd ed. Edited by Claire Carly-Miles, Sarah LeMire, Kathy Christie Anders, Nicole Hagstrom-Schmidt, R. Paul Cooper, and Matt McKinney. College Station: Texas A&M University, 2024. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

    

   Mensah, Korku [pseud.]. “Literary Nonfiction: ‘This Fourth of July is Yours, not Mine’:

   Frederick Douglass Speaks on Fifth of July.” In Surface and Subtext: Literature, Research, Writing. 3rd ed. Edited by Claire Carly-Miles, Sarah LeMire, Kathy Christie Anders, Nicole Hagstrom-Schmidt, R. Paul Cooper, and Matt McKinney. College Station: Texas A&M University, 2024. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.