TOW #1: "How To Say Nothing in 500 Words"

The title of this essay may say “How to Say Nothing in 500 Words,” but that is merely a description of the introduction of the essay. Written by Paul Roberts, the essay actually seeks to teach how to say something in 500 words. It does this by describing various strategies for injecting some life into school papers and essays. Roberts writes about common problems that college papers have, and then seeks to address them in a process-analysis essay format. Paul Roberts himself is known for the clarity of his textbooks, as well as his scientific approach to writing. This scientific approach focused on classification and descriptions in many of his works. How to Say Nothing in 500 Words uses much of the descriptions he is known to add to his papers. Roberts wrote this essay for college students, especially ones who found writing as a chore and not an art. Although the catchy title does attract readers, the main hook is in the way he writes his explanations for various concepts. For example, Roberts uses examples in the “Colorful Words” section of his essay. While discussing the meaning of colorful words, he writes, “Thus, in place of ‘Her heart beat,’ we may write ‘Her heart pounded, throbbed, fluttered, danced’” (Roberts 65). Roberts includes this sentence to exemplify the meaning of colorful words in a sentence. This is also an example of logos, which is a logical argument. By laying out ideas in a logical way, Roberts allows readers to follow exactly what he is saying. Another strategy that Roberts uses is satire. At the beginning of his essay, Roberts discusses an English teacher’s emotion towards a emotionless paper. He writes, “…he wonders how he allowed him to get trapped into teaching English when he might have had a happy and interesting life as an electrician or a confidence man” (Roberts 57). The use of satire here communicates with a reader’s emotions. This makes the sentence memorable, and considering his purpose of teaching good writing to students, the line emphasizes the wrongdoings of common freshman essays. Finally, Roberts carries a conversational tone throughout his essay. This also allows the reader to better understand the points Roberts makes. The aforementioned strategies are only part of Roberts’s method in writing this essay. He communicates his ideas effectively. I think he achieved his purpose of teaching good writing to college students, since the strategies he used were aimed at understandability and memorability.