For this second expository/argumentative essay, consider the following essays: Childhood and Poetry, To Love the Marigold, Walking with the Wind, Jesus and Alinsky, Gate A, Despair is a Lie, and The Transformation of Silence. Each of these essays suggests a unique pattern of its own and would be best discussed in relation to a specific rhetorical mode [listed below]. I will once again outline the modes and make recommendations for paper ideas. A “Division and Analysis” essay represents a division of a subject into several parts to be analyzed or further classified. Break any essay/subject into parts and you have division and analysis. Maybe separate “Jesus and Alinksy” up into sections, analyze each. Track Walter Wink’s use of numbers throughout the essay [categories]. He cites many examples that you might analyze. “Process” writing usually involves the separation of your subject into its components. It divides a continuous action into steps or stages. Process involves time chronology, steps, stages. Perhaps you might write about the many stages in Susan Griffin’s “To Love the Marigold.” How did she eventually come to the conclusion that the imagination will in fact save us? From Tina Modotti painting to Robert Desnos’s experience in the concentration camp. She undergoes a process of realization. Pablo Neruda’s “Childhood and Poetry” also reveals a process. This event that the poet experienced was the first in a chain and led to his point of view today. Gate A” also represents a process. First, the woman is weeping and the people around her are worried or annoyed. Then communication happens and everything begins to change…that’s process. John Lewis, in “Walking with the Wind,” identifies an event [like may of these authors] that changed him. An event led to a fundamental change in how a person sees himself. Does this happen in other essays? Yes. In Neruda’s “Childhood and Poetry,” in Gate A, in Audre Lorde’s Transformation of Silence, and in “To Love the Marigold.” You might write about these essays as representing processes or you might identify the events as “causes…” See Cause and Effect. “Cause and effect” writing [closest form to argument] explores “causes” and asks the question Why? Look for relationships by explaining why something is the way it is [explore causes] or by showing what the results are of its existence [explore effects], or both. Pablo Neruda identifies the first cause of his life of poetry. What caused Audre Lorde to want to discuss silence as a problem that must be overcome? You might trace causes in several essays. This would also be comparison [if you were to compare only two]. If you want to study three or more authors and the causes that led them to do certain things, you will be combining cause and effect with division/analysis. You might also discuss the “effects” on these authors or on the reader, you. An opened mind… A “Comparison/Contrast” essay demonstrates a separation of two things based on how they ar.

1. For this second expository/argumentative essay, consider the
following essays: Childhood and Poetry, To Love the Marigold,
Walking with the Wind, Jesus and Alinsky, Gate A, Despair is a
Lie, and The Transformation of Silence. Each of these essays
suggests a unique pattern of its own and would be best
discussed in relation to a specific rhetorical mode [listed
below]. I will once again outline the modes and make
recommendations for paper ideas.
A “Division and Analysis” essay represents a division of a
subject into several parts to be analyzed or further classified.
Break any essay/subject into parts and you have division and
analysis. Maybe separate “Jesus and Alinksy” up into sections,
analyze each. Track Walter Wink’s use of numbers throughout
the essay [categories]. He cites many examples that you might
analyze.
“Process” writing usually involves the separation of your
subject into its components. It divides a continuous action into
steps or stages. Process involves time chronology, steps, stages.
Perhaps you might write about the many stages in Susan
Griffin’s “To Love the Marigold.” How did she eventually come
to the conclusion that the imagination will in fact save us? From
Tina Modotti painting to Robert Desnos’s experience in the
concentration camp. She undergoes a process of realization.
Pablo Neruda’s “Childhood and Poetry” also reveals a process.
This event that the poet experienced was the first in a chain and
led to his point of view today. Gate A” also represents a
process. First, the woman is weeping and the people around her
are worried or annoyed. Then communication happens and
everything begins to change…that’s process. John Lewis, in
“Walking with the Wind,” identifies an event [like may of these
authors] that changed him. An event led to a fundamental
change in how a person sees himself. Does this happen in other
essays? Yes. In Neruda’s “Childhood and Poetry,” in Gate A, in
Audre Lorde’s Transformation of Silence, and in “To Love the

2. Marigold.” You might write about these essays as representing
processes or you might identify the events as “causes…” See
Cause and Effect.
“Cause and effect” writing [closest form to argument] explores
“causes” and asks the question Why? Look for relationships by
explaining why something is the way it is [explore causes] or by
showing what the results are of its existence [explore effects],
or both. Pablo Neruda identifies the first cause of his life of
poetry. What caused Audre Lorde to want to discuss silence as a
problem that must be overcome? You might trace causes in
several essays. This would also be comparison [if you were to
compare only two]. If you want to study three or more authors
and the causes that led them to do certain things, you will be
combining cause and effect with division/analysis. You might
also discuss the “effects” on these authors or on the reader, you.
An opened mind…
A “Comparison/Contrast” essay demonstrates a separation of
two things based on how they are either alike or different or
both. Take any two of the essays we’ve read and compare them
in specific ways. Again, comparing causes would be a good
idea. You might also compare “processes.” Several of these
authors experienced things that changed them in fundamental
ways.
Choose a subject [see any of the recent essays we’ve read—or
coming essays—for subject ideas] and write an essay using any
one of the methods above. You may also choose to use a
combination of two or even three. Your essay will be 3-4 pages
in length. Paper must be typed, double-spaced. Good luck!
nation, indivisible--or merely a charade masquerading as piety
and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their
own way of life at the expense of others."

3. Economic inequality is now as severe as at any point since
the movements that Moyers describes. With even our basic
franchise increasingly threatened, taking to heart this chapter
of US history is more important than ever. As with the other
examples I've gathered, I hope it will stiffen our backbones and
give us the strength to resist those who'd reduce our democracy
to a mere instrument for private gain. As Moyers says, it's a
story
that should be told again and again, inspiring each new genera-
tion of Americans.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Transformation of Silence
Audre Lorde
~
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most
important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even
at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the
speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing here
as a black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon
the fact that I am still alive, and might not have been. Less
than two months ago, I was told by my two doctors, one female
and one male, that I would have to have breast surgery, and
that there was a 60 to 80 percent chance that the tumor was
malignant. Between the telling and the actual surgery, there
was a three-week period of the agony of and involuntary reor-
ganization of my entire life. The surgery was completed, and
the
growth was benign.
But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon
myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has
left me still shaken but much stronger. This is a situation faced

4. by many women. Some of what I experienced during that time
has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning
the transformation of silence into language and action. In be-
coming forcibly and essentially aware of my own mortality, and
of what I wished and wanted for in my life, however short it
might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in
a merciless light and what I most regretted were my silences.
221
222 Audre Lorde
Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I
believed would have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so
many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change
or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that
might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had
ever spoken what needed to be said, or only betrayed myself
into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited
for someone else's words. And I began to recognize a source of
power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while
it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a
perspective gave me great strength.
I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I
had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me.
Your
silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for
every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which
I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while
we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed,
bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of
all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to
scrutinize the essentials of my living.

5. The women who sustained me through that period were
black and white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual, and hetero-
sexual, and we all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence.
They all gave me a strength and concern without which I could
not have survived intact. Within those weeks of acute fear
came the knowledge-within the war we are all waging with
the forces of death, subtle and otherwise, conscious or not-I
am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.
What are the words you do not have yet? What do you need
to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and at-
tempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them,
still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the
face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am
black, because I am myself, a black woman warrior poet doing
my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours?
And, of course, I am afraid-you can hear it in my voice-
because the transformation of silence into language and action
THE TRANSFORMATION OF SILENCE 223
is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with
danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my
difficulty with it, said, "tell them about how you're never really
a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that
one little piece inside of you that wants to be spoken out, and if
you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and
hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and
punch you in the mouth."
We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the
same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.
For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own
needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence

6. for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence
will choke us. The fact that we are here and that I speak these
words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of
those differences between us, for it is not difference which im-
mobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be
broken.
Excerpted from "The Transformation of Silence into Language
and
Action," originally presented at the Lesbian and Literature
panel of
the 1977 Modem Language Association meeting and printed in
Can-
cer Journals (Aunt Lute Press, 2006, www.auntlute.com).
Lorde's other
works include Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing
Press,
2007).