I enjoyed this reading.
Although many people would disagree with my approval of this essay, they should not disagree with my approval of this reading. After reading this piece of writing, I concluded that this is more apt to be an instruction manual rather than an essay. Although technically everything is an argument, this recipe seems to lack one, or at most has a weakly-supported, implied argument. In fact, this writing is officially a recipe, which further convinces me that Recipe is not an essay.
That is not to say that I did not enjoy this reading. Unlike the past essays I have read, there was no clear claim or point of argument that the author took. Although the author makes several small, negligible claims, there wasn't any strong, direct claim to one side of an argument. Like any normal recipe, Recipe instructs people on a suggested way to make chocolate sauce for ice cream. With a writing such as this one, it is possible that the author could have claimed that this recipe was the best, the authority on the best way to make chocolate sauce for ice cream. However, the essay began and ended without that claim. Instead, the author continues to instruct people how to make the chocolate sauce.
Reading the bio, it is understandable that a person may be confused by such a strange "essay". In fact, the bio states that this is not a conventional essay, as it does not persuade anyone to do anything. Therefore, it is politically incorrect to say that this "essay" is an essay. This piece of writing is more comparable to an instruction manual or even a narrative than an essay, since neither of those aforementioned persuade anyone to do anything. However, this is not to say that I am disappointed in this writing. I still enjoyed it, though I do not agree with the categorizing of this piece of writing as an "essay".
I didn't enjoy the reading. But after reading your post, I got some new insights about this strange piece of writing. Indeed, I judged this essay as judging a real recipe and this essay fails to be a functional recipe. However, as you said, this essay is more about a pure description of a series of author's subtle actions. And the author expresses his deep love and passion for cooking by recording all these merely recognizable actions.
ReplyDeleteAs a steady follower of the claim that everything is an argument, I want to say that the author expresses his love in the essay so he is trying to convince the readers that he is very experienced in cooking and he loves it.
I enjoyed reading your response, and one piece of advice I could give is to back up your claim with examples. You said a lot about how the essay is not an essay and you had very good logos. If you could cite couple examples from the passage your post will be more convincing.
I disagree with your point. An essay with an implied argument isn’t always an essay that portrays weak argument. Implied arguments can actually be the most effective of them all. Sometimes an author wants to implant a strong lesson into your head, so he or she portrays the argument with an interesting story. From that story, you can understand possible outcome of what happens if you do not learn from the lesson. Most of the time stories are more likely to stick in your head than claims and facts because they tend to be more interesting. There are many other types of inferred argument styles besides stories that are just as effective, although they might be hard to find.
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