Stasis Theory and Me

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I mentioned a while back that I blew the first assignment for this course (like almost everyone else!  Only Lisa and some guy who dropped a couple weeks ago got it right).  We were supposed to analyze a newspaper editorial using "stasis theory," which none of us had ever heard of before, and Toffee told us to go to the (very helpful, if only I'd thought it through) Purdue OWL website to learn about the theory (she talked about it a lot in class, too).  I guess I thought that I just had to say something about the theory, but it turned out that what she wanted was for us to write about what kind of argument the editorial was making.  In class, she said the topic of the editorial was irrelevant, which I took to mean that the theory would work on anything (which it does), but what she really meant was that we had no reason to spend any time talking about the editorial's topic in our essays.  So, of course, we all talked about the editorials' topics and barely said anything about the theory.

Well, that's what happened, and later on we discovered how serious she was about the theory, since she's been applying it right and left to everything.  This week, I'm supposed to journal about what kind of argument I'm making in my research paper.  My thesis is "A filmed version of a Sherlock Holmes story has to be an action film unless it is told from Dr. Watson's point of view" (yeah, I'm not happy about the wording yet).  Anyway, I think it's an argument of definition, since it depends on how you define an action film.