The level layout alone gives us some insight into the effectiveness of the game’s opening. If you’ve never had the chance to play the game before, can you guess where Mario starts? Can you guess which direction he will be facing and where he’s supposed to go? After you have an idea, go ahead and watch the opening moment here (end at about 2:10).

By way of review, let’s break down how this reflects the aspects of interesting introductions I’ve discussed so far:

• An interesting introduction sounds good.

The sounds are really what make this opening moment so memorable to me. I’m not talking about the music either, although it is a fitting fanfare to bring players into this 3D world. The sounds that I remember most are actually the ones you hear after the music has ended: intermittent birdsong, the tap of Mario’s shoes, and the exuberant sounds as he leaps into the air. This gives the space and the characters in it another audio dimension to go along with the added spatial dimension, showcasing the power of the new hardware and the depth of this new world.

• An interesting introduction circumscribes, rather than describes, its subject.

The flythrough of the castle grounds could be considered a literal circumscription of the subject — we get to see the space which Mario will be exploring momentarily. But there is a second layer of circumscription in the use of the camera-wielding Lakitu. Lakitu is not the most iconic of Mario characters, usually coming up as an enemy in the later levels of the earlier games, so seeing him here (in what turns out to be a helpful role) may be a surprise for players. This not only builds up the suspense to see Mario in his polygonal glory, but allows players to see the space they will eventually begin exploring.

• An interesting introduction makes its audience start to think.

The flythrough does more than show off the castle — it gets players thinking about the possibilities of exploring a 3D space (which, again, was a novel concept in 1996). Lakitu’s flight under the castle’s drawbridge and over the green hills encourages players to think about how the space is connected and where they might traverse. Players with a keen eye might even notice an enticing secret: when Lakitu pulls back before going under the wooden bridge (at about 1:43 in the video), there is a door visible submerged beneath the castle’s moat.

The first time I noticed it, I immediately tried to swim down and check it out. Though it turns out to be nothing you can get to yet, its existence is enough to get players searching for secrets — a tactic the game rewards players for later.

• An interesting introduction recognizes its audience.

In general, games tend to address their audiences more directly than other media do, mainly by describing how the non-diegetic mechanics and systems work. Lakitu’s existence, however, takes this to another level. The audible click and perspective shift right before Mario comes out of the pipe establishes that the audience is viewing this world through a moveable virtual camera. As this was probably the first game with 3D graphics players would have experienced, and establishing this visual metaphor is crucial for the rest of gameplay. The connection to the “Lakitu Bros reporting live” bit is later made explicit in this introductory sequence in order to reinforce this point.

What is remarkable about this scene with Lakitu is how it represents one of the few non-optional tutorials players get in these opening moments. As soon as players are able to take control of Mario, they are presented with these directions:

Ciao! You’ve reached Princess Toadstool’s castle via a warp pipe. Using the controller is a piece of cake. Press A to jump and B to attack. Press B to read signs, too. Use the Control Stick in the center of the controller to move Mario around. Now, head for the castle.

In a mere 51 words, the game has told new players all they need to know about movement. The signs scattered around the castle and the game’s multiple levels give players more tips, but I don’t remember ever needing to read them in order to figure out the game. Pretty much everything you need to know is given here or via Lakitu’s talk about the camera (which occurs after you have a chance to mess around with the controls). This leads to the final takeaway of interesting introductions:

• An interesting introduction leans forward

Although players are free to explore Super Mario 64’s opening space, such a space is designed to push players forward. If the fact that Mario’s position at the bottom of a hill directly faces an enticing castle didn’t make it clear enough, the game tells the player three separate times (in Peach’s letter, the opening tutorial, and Lakitu’s discussion about camera movement) to go to the castle. No one stops to remind Mario if he’s fooling around for too long in the garden, but these original instructions do encourage forward movement. There are also more subtle techniques for this as well: players who fall into the moat soon discover that there is a slight current that leads them directly to a beach at the right of the screen, which is an easy walk back on land and towards the castle.

This is what I mean by leaning forward rather than forcing someone forward. Each of the introductions I have discussed so far — the descriptions of holes in The Hobbit, the slow zoom into a TV in Us, or Super Mario 64’s castle exterior — are wonderful places to linger, but are designed so that one doesn’t linger too long. After all, beginnings only function if they have a text that follows; otherwise, they’d just seem incomplete.

… and it is in that spirit that I really ought to get back to writing my dissertation. I hope that this look back on some of my favorite opening moments has been as fun for you reading it as it has been for me to write it! For now, it’s time to lean ever more forward and (hopefully) get a text worth a great introduction.

John Sanders is a PhD Candidate in the Syracuse University English Department where he studies film, new media, and adaptation. He is currently working on a dissertation about digital and analog games based on literary works, and hopes that no one recalls his library books.

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Here’s a link to the opening moments of Us — go ahead and give it a watch. I’m only going to be talking about the lessons we can learn from the first two and a half minutes, but feel free to watch the whole thing. I’m keeping this intro spoiler-free, but if you haven’t seen Us, you really should.

I could easily spend pages ranting and raving about how Us exemplifies the tendencies from last week: how the rhythmic sound of waves dominating the first few seconds are simultaneously made to allude to the rushing of subterranean subway cars, the eerily hypnotic scraping of porcelain from Peele’s previous film, and even possibly the dreamlike beauty of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight; how the epigraph about “thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the United States” perfectly contextualizes the dark mystery at the center of the film; how the sound of waves (above us now) literally immerses audiences in the plot as these words rise out of the darkness to make themselves known; and how all of this foreshadows elements in the rest of the film …

In the interest of time, however, I want to focus on the next shot of the film: a slow zoom on a “Hands Across America” commercial playing on an old TV. As I see it, the staging of this scene embodies the next tendency for interesting introductions I want to look at:

3. An interesting introduction makes its audience start to think.

Initially, the “Hands Across America” commercial (sandwiched as it is between a news teaser and an ad for the Santa Cruz Board Walk) seems completely bizarre. This goes beyond circumscribing the film’s subject – it initially has no discernible relation to the plot at all. And that, along with the claustrophobic nature of the tight shot, gets viewers to start asking questions. Where and when are we? Why aren’t they showing the rest of the house? What does any of this have to do with a horror film?

The agonizingly slow zoom on the relatively static screen also encourages viewers to explore the objects in the periphery in a desperate search for meaning. Isn’t C.H.U.D. about subterranean monsters? Wasn’t there a part in The Goonies about abandoned tunnels? Taken together, the commercial and the props lying around give viewers plenty of chances to make connections and form theories from the scraps of information they already have. This primes viewers to start paying attention and later rewards them for doing so when the connections are made clear.

Attentive viewers may also notice something strange about the screen itself, especially in the moment between commercials: it contains a reflection. Maybe it’s just me, but this moment really gripped me, and I think I now know why:

4. An interesting introduction recognizes its audience.

When I watched this on the plane, it took me a moment to realize the reflection in the screen wasn’t my own, despite the impossibility of that angle or proportion from where I was sitting. I was so used to seeing my own reflection on screens — or, alternatively, not seeing direct reflections of this sort depicted in movies due to the need for hiding cameras and lighting — that I immediately identified with this double.

Uncanny doublings like this are, of course, depicted in Us to an obsessive degree – they are the engine that drives its horror. But to introduce the motif in this way is to show an awareness of the audience’s position, to reach out past the wall separating the world of the story from the real world and address the audience as they sit in their chairs. In some ways, this frames the text as a conversation between the audience and the director and — just like when you’re addressed by an instructor during lecture — it makes you pay attention.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from these observations is simple: whether it’s through a seemingly off-topic anecdote that gets people making connections or through a conversational tone that addresses the audience as they are, interesting introductions grab your attention. The trick, as always, is how to achieve that in writing. If you’re stuck, maybe try writing an anecdote that is two degrees removed from your subject. The task of trying to connect to it, if nothing else, will give you a better idea of what you’re trying to say.

It will be interesting to see how all of this applies to video games — the medium which I am perhaps most familiar with — but I will leave that for next week.

John Sanders is a PhD Candidate in the Syracuse University English Department where he studies film, new media, and adaptation. He is currently working on a dissertation about digital and analog games based on literary works, and hopes that no one recalls his library books.

The post Captivating “Us”: What a Film Can Teach Us About Introductions appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

Right off the bat, I think I’ve found my first approach to successful openings.

1. Interesting introductions sound good.

Go ahead and read the first sentence out loud. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” It has a certain rhythm to it which is both familiar and distinct. Let me show you what I mean:

It begins not with the even stressed and unstressed syllables of “Once upon a time” (iambic, in poetry terms), but with three syllable units (feet) that have a similar rhythm. You don’t even need a comma between “ground” and “there” because the rhythm already breaks up the line naturally! Similarly, the two-syllable iamb “there lived” breaks up the pattern of three-syllable feet enough to basically function as an invisible colon, setting up the final three-syllable introduction of “a hobbit.” If I did this right (say a word enough and you get any number of rhythms), this final three-syllable foot inverts the rhythm of the first two, rounding off the phrase and ending with that mysterious word (“hobbit”). Aside from introducing the fairytale world in a lyrical way, the sound gives a good first impression of the writing overall.

The second thing I appreciate most about this opening paragraph is how it goes about introducing the concept of hobbits, which leads me to a second strategy for good intros:

2. An interesting introduction circumscribes, rather than describes, its subject.

Look back at the opening again. After mentioning “hobbit” — the subject of the book and this part of the first chapter — one might expect to get a description of the creature’s stature, habits, and hairy feet straight away. Instead, Tolkien describes the hole in which the hobbit lives — or, more accurately, the holes in which the hobbit doesn’t live. Even though they are two degrees removed from the subject at hand, the details easily put readers in the mindset of a hobbit.

The first hole Tolkien describes — “nasty, dirty, wet” — evokes the rather domestic image of a furrowed garden plot after a rain, filled with “ends of worms” sliced by trowels and the “oozy smell” of natural fertilizer. The second hole (“dry, bare, sandy”) may well describe a patch of land unsuitable for gardening, which the narrator implies would be much better with snacks and a chair. The attitude described here — summarized by the phrase “and that means comfort” — is the same sort of homebody-ish attitude that hobbits seem to have in abundance.

Tolkien goes on to describe hobbits in more detail in the following paragraphs, but this indirect style of description still carries the weight for me because it trains readers to get into a hobbit’s head before they are even described. By circumscribing rather than directly describing his subject here, Tolkien presents a script for the reader’s inner monologue to perform as well as a virtual (head)space for them to inhabit. You are not reading about hobbits; you are reading as a hobbit. Primed in this way, readers can begin to combine the hobbits’ descriptions with the tone presented, internalizing the subject matter as they learn more about them.

So, what is the takeaway from all this? It certainly isn’t that you should break out a poetry textbook when starting your next paper or take the longest route possible to get to the point (Tolkien’s circumscription only lasts a paragraph for a reason!). Instead, it is useful to ask whether your first few lines puts readers in the right place. A good way of doing this is by reading your words aloud (perhaps over music) to catch the rhythm, and including language that evokes your subject without describing it directly. Hey, if you’re reading this, you’re probably in the middle of some writing project — why not try it?

Next week, I’ll be taking this discussion to film and ask: what can a movie’s opening moments tell us about writing good intros? In the meantime, try reading Tolkien’s intro one last time, but this time with Howard Shore’s music in the background. You won’t be disappointed.

John Sanders is a PhD Candidate in the Syracuse University English Department where he studies film, new media, and adaptation. He is currently working on a dissertation about digital and analog games based on literary works, and hopes that no one recalls his library books.

The post Of Feet and Hobbit-Holes: Lessons Learned from a Literary Intro appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

“The beginning is the most important part of the work.”

How do you feel about epigraphs? My partner once said she hated them, at least in the context of academic writing. Why not just get straight to what you want to say? Many readers find them pretty easy to skip over (as I’m sure at least a couple of you did when approaching this blog post) and if used incorrectly they can easily become unnecessary filler, pretentious excess, or both. After all, you don’t need Plato to tell you that “the beginning is the most important part of the work,” and except for this bit I won’t really be talking about ancient Greek philosophers at all. All it really does is add a bit of pageantry to a pretty straightforward series of blog posts on writing and reading introductions.

But that pageantry does have a purpose, it does something for the reader, however slight … right? But is that the right approach? Moreover, when does it work? At this point in my dissertation process — writing and rewriting what will become the first pages of my first chapter — an obsession with how to start things has caught me in a loop of rewriting.

This is, of course, a common problem. I have also been told that knowing it is a common problem doesn’t make it any easier to overcome. In the words of one of my advisors, academic writing is one of those skills that actually gets more difficult as you have more experience with it. Or at least that’s what I tell myself when I realize it has taken me a longer time to write six pages now than it did to churn out thirty my first year in grad school, or when I scroll through the many versions of my prospectus while trying to find a particular source.

There have been plenty of blog posts discussing writing tips or offering methods for staying on task, and plenty more discussing the difficult and often isolating process of writing a dissertation (some of which are on this very site). These posts can be incredibly helpful and inspirational for the desperate graduate student looking at the long road of dissertation writing, due to the writer’s clever way of staying on task and/or their honesty about their struggles. However, seeing as I have not yet found an intuitive way of managing my time and already tend to overanalyze my writing struggles, I’d like to take a different approach. The goal of this series of posts is to make this reading material accessible and light, even for those without a lot of background in textual studies.

If my work in literary adaptation and new media have taught me anything, it would be that you can learn something from every text, no matter which medium or genre you are interested in. With that in mind, I am going to take a close look at some of my favorite opening moments in texts across print, film, and video games to see what makes them so memorable. With any luck, these deep dives will reveal something about what makes a good introduction in any genre, and just maybe help me break out of my writer’s block. If nothing else, it’ll be a great way to get back in touch with what got me into this line of work in the first place.

John Sanders is a PhD Candidate in the Syracuse University English Department where he studies film, new media, and adaptation. He is currently working on a dissertation about digital and analog games based on literary works, and hopes that no one recalls his library books.

The post Begin (Again): The Art of Openings appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Generally, there are few things that unite teachers more than a mutual aversion to grading. For some, the marking up of assignments and assigning of earned grades may be a mere annoyance; for others, the unavoidable nature of subjectivity inherent to that process, plus the amount of feedback necessary, multiplied by the time consumed makes for one distasteful equation. That being said, there are few things that further divide instructors of all stripes than asking them their preferred method for how to grade.

Those working and teaching in the humanities often find themselves faced with a number of different challenges in this regard, especially when considering what is most deserving of their attention. What can be done if a student writes a fair essay somewhat adjacent to the given prompt or topic, but for one reason or another, manages to completely miss the mark?  Does it bear repeating to stay away from broad and overly generic opening sentences proclaiming, “History has shown” or “Long has it been known” — or my particular favorite, “Since the dawn of time?” How many times can I point a student toward the multitude of online and print resources for proper MLA formatting, guidelines, and citations? How much time will a student truly take to run an eye over every correction of tense usage, verb-noun agreement, and improper uses of punctuation? (If by chance you are an individual who happens to enjoy grading, don’t hesitate to read on! This is neither a how-to guide for grammar police or self-proclaimed linguistic authorities of any kind, nor a tirade against the trials of reading the — occasionally trying, sometimes brilliant — work of our students. After all, aren’t we all still students ourselves, one way or another?)

In the papers of students past, present, and possibly future, two of the most common points of critique I have can be summarized by: 1) the structuring of sentences through passive versus active voice, and 2) the building and presentation of an argument.

The use of passive voice appears in a sentence where the subject receives an action, and is acted upon. In student papers, this typically reads as some variation of the following:

a form of to-be + verb

To correct this, one would remove the to-be, change the verb into its active form, and restructure the sentence so that the subject may perform the action. For example:

British women over the age of thirty were given the right to vote in 1918.

In 1918, Parliament granted British women over the age of thirty the right to vote.

Active voice encourages students to name a subject, focus on the responsibility of giving or performing that action, and keeps their prose from becoming cluttered with what I tend to call passive-aggressive voice. And yet as we all know, the use of active voice over passive voice is not a golden standard or an absolute requirement, but rather a suggestion to which there exist many exceptions to the rule.

On a larger scale, students have also tended to struggle with how to structure and organize an argument. “What is a claim?” they will ask. “Is it the same as an argument, or is it something different? Does this paper need a thesis statement? Is this too broad or too narrow? What do I do when I want to write about everything?”

Why are all of you so keen on restating the plot and leaving less room for your own original arguments? would be my common refrain, although it answers none of their questions. Usually, this cannot be achieved in a brief couple of paragraphs that comprise feedback on a student essay; this takes weeks of practice, and more than a semester of revising.

No matter the age difference or the amount of years we have spent writing, it seems we always need a group of readers to help take our draft, and then take it apart at different levels. My current dissertation committee consists of my main advisor, and two readers. The other two readers I have yet to approach, but at the moment, three are enough to take those same questions and turn them back my way.

• What is your thesis?

• Why have you close-read for ten pages, and left so little room for your own analysis?

• Footnote these critical arguments; you want your own to appear in the foreground, and for those to act as secondary support.

• Start with your largest claim, after which follow subsequent, subordinating, and scaffolding arguments.

Just this week, one of my readers warned me against using “ideological” when I meant “discursive,” due to the amount of baggage and theoretical weight the former carries with it. Maybe I’ll think of this the next time I circle a term or a phrase in a student essay and comment awkward wording. Yes, diagramming a sentence is difficult for most human beings, and no one likes verb conjugations in any language. Things like active voice and proper semicolon use can be taught or corrected; misspellings and comma splices happen even to the best of us.

Every writer can make use of an editor. 

It becomes much more difficult to show ourselves the same compassion when we think of writing as a skill, and one that we must have gotten good at by now; surely. Look at the years that have passed since undergraduate study! Look at the number of papers we have written. Pages upon pages of claims, material evidence, logical argumentation, and careful citation – how can we still look at an empty Word document with its blinking cursor and not know what to do next?

Truth be told, easily. But it is also fairly easy to accept that sometimes the mind falls fallow, for a season or for a day. Give it time. Give yourself some time.  

Perhaps one of the best lessons the dissertation process teaches us as graduate students is not another grammar admonition, but a good dose of humility and a flashback to the passive-voiced, plot-summarizing, incorrect-formatting student we all once used to be, and perhaps still are.

(Stop being afraid of using to be runs a close second.)

Vicky Cheng is a Ph.D. Candidate in Syracuse’s English Department. She studies Victorian literature and culture, with an emphasis on feminist and queer readings of the body. Her dissertation project explores alternate forms of embodied female re-production, refocused through the lens of queer regeneration.

The post Learning Writing By Teaching Writing appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Here I crouch, sifting through environmentally-friendly litter and scooping out poops. Several paces away, my handsome tuxedo derpface sits primly, tail curled around his hind legs, silently judging. After I’ve bagged the waste and gone to wash my hands, he’ll wander over, sniff around the corners of the box, and stick a paw inside to dig through the litter once again. It’s his way of saying he’s unsatisfied with my removal methods and would much rather complete the process himself.

At multiple points throughout my academic career, I have found myself hovering over the metaphorical litter box of my own writing. This process involves sifting through sentences, deleting entire paragraphs here, rearranging the topic and transitional sentences there, and then saving the remains to multiple files with variations of the name “working draft,” “redraft,” and “revisions.” Sometimes, passing the draft off to a supervisor — of the four-legged and bewhiskered or the two-legged and tenured kind — brings a certain sense of relief; an unwinding of the knots at the base of the neck, a long-deserved nap, and maybe a celebratory binge-watching of The Great British Bake-Off while eating lemon curd straight from the jar. Other times, it’s a week or two of anxiously avoiding Microsoft Word, OneNote pad or Google Docs all together until receiving the marked up draft with more words (litter) outside the box than remaining in.

Yet working, writing, and waiting do not exist as the only known states of being throughout this process. Personally, from undergraduate days to Ph.D. Candidacy, it has been necessary for this process to evolve. At one point, you may switch over from clay-based to corn-based litter, judging the annoying tracking out of the box a fair exchange for the health of your cat. At another point, you may exchange regular plastic bags for biodegradable bags, and move the box under a window, for better ventilation. Sometimes your cat puts on a number of pounds, and simply outgrows their previous box.

As an undergraduate student, I never worked through multiple drafts. I was (and still am, to be perfectly candid) the “edit as you go” type, who can agonize over a single sentence for far too long before allowing myself to move onto the next. This, when combined with an obstinate preference for writing in chronological order — meaning I must come up with a title before the opening sentence, and then the opening sentence before the thesis statement, only after which could follow each claim alphabetically, A through D or so, all rounded out by a proper conclusion — was formulaic and time-consuming to a fault, but for papers which ranged from seven to thirteen pages, could be done. This quickly becomes inadvisable at the graduate school level, when faced with the task of writing three to four different twenty-five-page seminar papers within a span of three weeks.

When writing, we does what we must.

This is not to encourage you to completely overhaul your writing style or methods of putting words on the page; as I soon discovered, I cannot write a graduate seminar paper the same way that I write a conference paper full of exciting theoretical what-ifs; I do not write a blog post the same way that I approach a dissertation chapter. Although the ideas may generate from the same noggin, the style and manner of articulation must develop in a way that suits the substance. Not only does this apply to wrestling with other scholars over argumentation, citation, and analytical intervention, but consider other genres of writing you have been asked to adapt, with or without instruction. A proposal for a travel grant may take you half an hour to draft, while trying to compose a letter of recommendation for a student may take twice that time, as you trawl through the thesaurus for alternate ways to say “a pleasure to have in class.”

We’ve all heard the usual metaphors, and inhaled advice of innumerable flavors: writing is a marathon, not a sprint; here is how you write like an architect and here is how you write like a gardener. If you dedicate yourself to writing a consistent 500 words per day, no matter the level of quality of those words, you will commit yourself to writing like Neil Gaiman, or that Ph.D. candidate who miraculously managed to finish their dissertation a year ahead of schedule. One of my favorite exchanges between individuals who write spells out the differences quite candidly:

I have not come to you with a list of how-to’s or to reiterate the differences between this type of writer or that type of writer. At one point or another, we have all felt like Sisyphus (or perhaps a dung beetle?) rolling a rock of our own making up the steep hill of multiple drafts. But whether you start your day with a fresh cup of coffee, the morning sunrise, and hammering out six hundred words, or find yourself dashing out of the bathroom mid-shower, suds and all, to jot down a phrase before it leaves your brain forever, it’s important to take a moment for self-realization.

This is your sandbox. Full of your words. After all, you are the one with opposable thumbs, the ability to write, and with thoughts in your head. If you won’t attend to these, in whatever fashion you deem appropriate, no one else will.

Get to writing, y’all.

Vicky Cheng is a Ph.D. Candidate in Syracuse’s English Department. She studies Victorian literature and culture, with an emphasis on feminist and queer readings of the body. Her dissertation project explores alternate forms of embodied female re-production, refocused through the lens of queer regeneration.

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