How did Woolf say what she said?

By asking you to choose a single passage from a longer reading, this assignment demands that you slow down and pay attention to how you make sense of the passage, how you read it. Passage-based papers offer you the opportunity to experience the connections between the interpretive practices of reading and writing as you make your reading visible through the act of writing. Here is how you would do this:
Choose a short passage (3‒5 sentences) from the text you are reading and write a 1‒2 paragraph passage-based paper on this excerpt.
Transcribe the passage onto the top of the page (including the page number from which the passage is taken) and then “unpack” the passage, paying close attention to the textual elements including the passage’s language, tone, and construction.
Once you have examined the passage closely, conclude your paper by connecting this passage to the rest of the work. In other words, once you have completed a close, textual analysis of your passage, contemplate the meaning of the passage and its place in or contribution to the meaning(s) of the text as a whole.
The following sample from a passage-based paper is taken from a paper that discusses a passage from Sven Birkerts’ essay “MahVuhHuhPuh” from his book The Gutenberg Elegies.
Passage:
The magnet that pulled them into shape was Woolf ’s classic essay, “A Room of One’s Own.” Not the what of it, but the how. Reading the prose, I confronted a paradox that pulled me upright in my chair. Woolf ’s ideas are, in fact, few and fairly obvious—at least from our historical vantage. Yet the thinking, the presence of animate thought on the page, is striking. How do we sort that? How can a piece of writing have simple ideas and still infect the reader with the excitement of its thinking? (Birkerts 11)
In this passage, Birkerts is discussing how it is that he was able to think through and pull together some of the ideas he had been concerned with for a while. It proved to be Woolf ’s “A Room of One’s Own” that helped him to do this.
Throughout this passage, Birkerts creates a distinction—one that Woolf helped him to discover—between “what” and “how.” This is a distinction he repeats throughout the passage. He even italicizes those words to show they are important. But, even if the words themselves weren’t italicized it would still be clear because of the repetition of both words. For example, he writes that it was not the “what” of Woolf ’s essay but the “how” that helped him. Toward the end of the passage he asks about the relationship between “what” and “how” by posing the question: “How can a piece of writing have simple ideas and still infect the reader with the excitement of its thinking?” In all of these instances and in other moments in the passage, Birkerts is trying to figure out how a piece of writing like Woolf ’s “A Room of One’s Own”—can be lacking in sophistication when it comes to ideas but still make readers take notice. In other words, he wasn’t blown away by the topic of her essay, but by how she wrote about the topic. He seems drawn to how she says what she says rather than what she says so much so that it “pulled [him] upright in his chair.” The question then becomes how did Woolf say what she said? In the passage above, Birkerts describes her style as “animate thought on the page” and it is this that he found “striking.” So, he was impressed by her style because it seemed as though she was actually thinking onto the page.
This passage seems important to the rest of Birkerts’ essay because it sets up or introduces what he will go on to do in his essay. He spends not just this passage—but the first few pages—talking about Woolf ’s “A Room of One’s Own” and how much he is impressed by the way she writes. Based on his description of her writing in this passage and in the next few pages it seems as though Birkerts tries to mirror her style by thinking onto the pages of his essay. In other words, he takes the same approach in his essay that she took in hers. This suggests that Birkerts believes that his ideas are not necessarily groundbreaking and that the way he will present them is just as—if not more important—than the ideas themselves. By introducing his essay in this way he lets his readers know that the topic he will be discussing—reading and meaning—is not new, but that the way he will discuss it is important, which is how Woolf presented her ideas—by thinking on the page. Therefore, thinking itself becomes very important. Just as Woolf inspired Birkerts’ thinking it seems he’s trying to inspire his readers’ thinking by using the same style. This is a key element to what Birkerts seems to be doing overall in the essay, which is emphasizing the importance of continuing to think (by reading) rather than just giving into technology, computers, and movies and allowing them to think for you.
Directions:
Consider one of the articles from the essay prompt, preferably one you would actually use in your essay. Write a 1-2 paragraph passage-based paper on what you find as part of your deeper analysis. Be generous referring to the text–that’s a major part of what makes this passage-based. This is text-intensive.