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The point of this blog

(It’s going to be about writing essays in college)

The WordPress tutorial says I should put a heading here, so here you go

Alright, I think I’ve clicked in the right text box.

The main target audience for this blog is going to be first-year college student writers. That said, I think the things I want to talk about might be interesting to others as well, at least in a passing sense. Generally speaking, though, this blog is a place for me to write down all the things I want to say to first-year writers that I don’t think they often hear enough. To be clear, my hope is to make your lives as essay writers easier, not harder.

(And no, this isn’t going to be touching on creative writing, for the most part. The only reason “poetry” is in the domain name is because I can’t figure out how to use WordPress properly.)

For what it’s worth, this is a sort of list of credentials, just to clarify that I know at least a little about what I’m talking about. This isn’t to say I’m an expert, but should at least give you a sense of where I’m coming from:

I worked as a writing tutor in undergrad.
I taught High School English for one year (9th and 10th grade) after graduating from college.
I was a writing tutor in various positions after college.
I’m currently in an English MA program, where they make you write a lot of big essays.
I’m working as a writing tutor at my grad school, too.
Right now (Spring 2020), I’m teaching my second semester of a mandatory introductory writing course for first-year students.
I’ve tutored writing for the Higher Education Opportunity Program in New York.
For my MA thesis, I’m researching composition pedagogy (translation: I’m researching how to teach writing).
I’ve really done an awful lot of writing tutoring…just an unreasonable amount of it.

Anyway.

If you’re an undergraduate student who finds essay writing to be A) terrible, B) vaguely interesting, or C) a thing your instructors keep telling you to do, you’ve come to the right place. Or maybe the wrong place. Maybe this is traumatizing you. Well, too late, I guess.

Oddly, I think the very best thing I can do off the bat is to point you to someone else’s blog. If you Google “Paul Graham The Age of the Essay,” you should find what I think is one of the most important and useful essays on essays out there. Really, it’s great; it’s nice and short, it’s easy to read, and it has repeatedly blown my first-year students’ minds with how immediately useful it is. I read it in my third year of undergrad and immediately thought, “Well, wouldn’t it have been nice to know all this two years ago?”

So go. Right now. Go.

…

I suppose the fact that you’re reading this probably means you did not go check out that other blog like I told you to, and that you are therefore bad at following directions. As such, I am curious as to why you are still here looking for advice, given that you obviously won’t follow it.

But putting aside your obstinance for the moment, here is a short list of topics this blog will (probably) cover at some point:

Common problems with first-year writing and where I think they come from
Writing to perform versus writing to communicate (and why you should do the second one, and not the first)
How to actually care about essays, or at least not be totally miserable while writing them
(Maybe something about writing satire?)
Writing honestly (definitely going to happen at some point)
Reading in college, and how not to drown in it
The point of writing essays (also definitely going to happen)
Statements of Purpose (because I don’t see many good guides on this out there)
On keeping an open mind while writing
The point and principles of grammar (as in, why grammar is the way it is)
Rough drafts versus final drafts
Writing as conversation

As you can probably tell, this isn’t going to be a blog about a lot of finer points of writing, like how to indent a block quote. If you’re looking for something like that, you can google pretty much any American university’s writing center website, and they’ll have all sorts of helpful online handouts for you. I think UNC Chapel Hill has a particularly good set of resources.

This blog is going to be more about…the philosophy of essay writing in college? Maybe the purpose of it? You might boil it down to being about why you’re asked to write thousands upon thousands of words, what your school expects you to get out of it, and what you can actually do (in a practical sense) about all of that.

Maybe the best way to give you a sense of what I mean is by giving a sort of teaser for one of the posts I really want to do about writing honestly.

There’s a plaque at the University of Virginia, sitting in an archway above what I think is the original entrance to the school (or at least, it was put up a long time ago). The plaque says this:

Enter by this gateway
And seek
The way of honor
The light of truth
The will to work for men

I want to pay attention for a moment to that fourth line: “The light of truth.” It sounds a bit aphoristic, like something you’d find inside a Hallmark card in the back of a CVS. On the other hand, somebody a long time ago thought that those words were important enough to literally set them in stone, so that long after he was dead and gone, the students walking into the school for the first time would see them.

The reason I bring this up is that there are, in a basic sense, two ways of doing college writing.

The first is one the cynical way. Pretty much everyone is familiar with it. You hate that you have to write an essay. It’s a boring topic. You just want to get it done, so you try to figure out what the instructor wants or what will get you a good grade. You write that even though you don’t believe it or care about it. It’s miserable while you do it, and you’re not even that proud of what you turn in. The sense of relief that comes when you finish is the kind of relief that comes when you stop hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. It’s not that you feel good about it. It’s just that you don’t feel bad anymore.

I would be lying to you if I said it’s impossible to get through college writing that way. I watched my sophomore year roommate get away with it too much to tell you it’s not possible. It’s difficult, probably more difficult than you think, and you probably won’t be happy while you’re doing it or after you’ve done it. But it’s possible.

Or, if you want, you can do college writing in the second way. You can take the words on the plaque at UVA seriously, and consider that seeking the “light of truth” isn’t just a real, possible thing, but actually your job.

Instead of only needing to get by, maybe you have a job as a student, every time you put pen to paper, to seek the light of truth, to try and figure out something you think is actually true (to the best of your ability). Maybe part of being a student is exercising your truth-seeking faculties, and maybe, just maybe, the essay-writing process is one of the most tried and true ways of thinking through your ideas very, very thoroughly.

(And, as a convenient corollary, maybe writing like this makes things easier, not harder. Maybe it will take less time, not more. Maybe I’ll find another excuse to say “maybe” before I close out this post. Who knows?)

There’s more to say on this topic, and plenty other topics besides. It’s also worth noting, here at the end of this first post, that the ideas I want to talk about aren’t really mine, in a fair sense. I’ve benefitted from having plenty of great teachers (including my parents) to whom I owe quite a lot, and I’ve benefitted from reading plenty of great writers who said much of what I’m saying now long before I was born. Something something something shoulders of giants.

But even if I’m just repeating what others have said, I figure it can’t hurt having one more person saying it–even if that person barely knows how to operate a WordPress blog.

A Theory of Everything, via Essay-Writing

So, here’s a theory of everything that I’m getting to by way of talking about writing. This is a post that is going to sound very grandiose, possibly somewhat arrogant (though not intentionally), and will also probably get some stuff wrong. Just bear in mind that this is something I was wavering back and forth on writing, mainly because it’s such a strange and grandiose thing that it seems simultaneously obvious and crazy in my own head, so I have no idea how it will actually be received.

It’s not really a theory of everything, of course, just…a sizable chunk of everything. Basically, what I want to talk about is the fact that the kinds of epistemological tools that sit at the bottom of the kind of truth-seeking writing I’ve talked about in other posts are the same tools that sit at the bottom of every other academic discipline and indeed every other human attempt to figure things out. But it’s actually deeper than that, because these tools—the “figuring things out” tools—are the best, most generalizable way of dealing with a world that fluctuates between order and chaos. (See? Told you this would be getting grandiose.)

What I mean is something like this: you’ve got a thing to do. The environment in which you’re doing that thing is stable in some ways, and changing in others. You’re not sure how or how much the environment is going to change next, but you can make a fair wager that some of the stable things will still be stable as you set about doing the thing that you have to do. In other words, you make a plan based on what the world is like—the ordered part—because otherwise, you’d have no clue at all how to start going about doing your thing.

Of course, when you start following your plan, one of the aspects of the world that you expected to be stable ends up changing on you. Suddenly your plan no longer accounts for the world as it actually is, and thus it no longer works. What do you do? In the face of this chaos, you adapt the plan on the fly, working the new reality into your calculations as rapidly as possible so you can continue toward accomplishing your thing.

Okay, so in some basic sense, you have plans based on order, and you have adaptation in response to chaos. Three quick quotes come to mind when I think of this.

The first is a paraphrase of a quote by the nineteenth-century Prussian general, Helmuth van Moltke. The paraphrase, which you may have heard is, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” The second quote is Mike Tyson’s: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” The third is my mother’s: “Whenever you make a plan, expect one, two, three, four, five things to go wrong. Then you can get upset.” (1)

All of these are a recognition of the fact that plans go wrong. No structure, built on the assumption that the world is a certain way, will survive forever when the world inevitably changes. Rigid structures tend to break, because the ground shifts beneath them.

Okay, but here’s where things get a bit weird: this principle works for trees. A tree needs a trunk that’s fairly rigid and strong. If it didn’t have one that was solid enough, the whole tree would collapse and die. But if that trunk doesn’t have enough flexibility to it, it may break in a storm. The tree grows up in a certain environment, and as such it predicts (in a natural selection-y sort of way) what that environment will be like. But it also builds some flexibility into that trunk to account for unforeseen but inevitable changes in that environment. And when it can’t bend enough to accommodate those changes—say, when a lumberjack puts an axe through it—the structure breaks, and the tree’s goal (i.e., to survive) is lost.

The principle works for skyscrapers, too, especially the ones built in California on fault lines. That thing about rigid structures breaking when the ground shifts beneath them? That’s not a metaphor. Turns out if you don’t build your building with enough bend, it’ll break instead the moment an earthquake comes through and introduces massive change to the environment in which you first established your plan/structure.

It works for civilizations, too. In this context, too much adherence to a plan is authoritarianism. Too much deviation from a plan is anarchy. Neither is very much fun (unless you’re an authoritarian or an anarchist, I suppose).

And, as I’ve been saying in others ways in other posts, this principle—the principle of plans and adaptations—works for essays, too. If you stick to your original thesis, your original plan, too closely, you will find it quite difficult to accomplish the thing you are trying to accomplish when you run into some new idea and the ground shifts under your feet. The extent to which your thesis did not predict what the environment would end up being like as you went through your writing process—to exactly that extent will your thesis fail you as a plan. You’ve got to be able to roll with the punches to accomplish your goal. (2)

And that’s the thing: your thesis isn’t your goal. It’s a means of accomplishing it. And what is your goal, then? Well, your goal is whatever the assignment is asking you to do. In this case, I suppose I’m assuming you’re being asked to write a thesis-driven essay. (3) The thesis you choose at the start is one plan for accomplishing the task of writing a thesis-driven essay. It may be that the particular environment you’re working in is not what you expected it to be when you began. It may be that it changes halfway through your progress toward your goal. When that happens, you need to be flexible enough to adapt your structure—i.e., your thesis, your plan—without losing sight of the goal.

All of this grandiose stuff is why you, as a first-year writing student, absolutely need to be willing to plan and then adapt that plan. It’s not because essay-writing requires it. It’s because existence itself requires it. You need to work the principle of plans and adaptations into your writing because it is so fundamentally true that, without observing it, trees die, buildings crumble, civilizations collapse, and literally none of that is exaggeration. The magnitude of the problem that is essay trouble may be significantly smaller, but that doesn’t mean that the principle isn’t at play. If you don’t account for it, you’re asking for a headache.

Footnotes:

(1) This particular quote has a visual element, as well. The speaker curls their fingers into a fist along with “one, two, three, four, five,” the implication being that you had better hope you’re not one of the reasons that things went sideways.

(2) Hopefully, Mike Tyson is not coming around socking you in the face while you write your essay. All these different ways of talking about this can get mixed up, sometimes.

(3) But what if it’s not a thesis-driven essay? What if it’s a personal narrative? Presumably you have some plan for accomplishing the goal of writing a personal narrative. Also presumably, that plan will fail halfway through when the environment changes or you realize that the environment was something different than you thought it was at the beginning.

Solidifying Ideas into Words

I want to talk about the basic mental action that you’re performing while writing an essay. That is, when you’re writing an essay, what is it that you’re actually doing, mentally speaking?

The short version is this: that when you write, you are taking ideas out of that foggy, nebulous region on the fringes of your mind—where everything registers as a feeling or flashing impulse—and you’re grabbing a piece of that fog and wrestling it back down into the region of your clearer, crisper thought, and then wrangling it into some defined shape so you can put it on the table in front of you, look at it, and maybe knock it into other solidified ideas.

And that’s basically what you’re doing when you’re writing an essay.

At this point, you might (quite reasonably) be thinking, “Alright, Fain, that’s an interesting metaphor, but what does that mean in real life? What does a ‘solidified idea’ even look like?”

Well, words. Solidified ideas look like words. Because that’s what words are; they’re solidified ideas (1). When you’re wrestling with that fog in order to put it into a manageable shape, what you’re trying to do is to put something into words.

And the thing is, you know this. You know this on a visceral level. It’s what happens when you’re struggling to write a sentence in your essay in a way that captures what you’re trying to get at. It’s what happens when you’re annoyed at something that your friend or family member has done, but you can’t quite put your finger on what it is—you can’t quite explain what the person has done in a way that feels quite right—and when you finally do put it into words, it feels satisfying. And you probably hang onto those words that you’ve said, because the next time the person does that thing, then you have those words to cling to when you’re confronting the issue.

As far as I can tell, this struggle of articulation is a universal human experience. For some, it’s more of a struggle than for others, but the process remains basically the same: you’re taking ideas from the fog of feelings at the edge of your mind—because feelings are ideas, just in another form—and you’re working them into a usable shape, and that shape is words.

Okay, fine. But what’s the use of knowing this? How is any of this helpful to you as a first-year writing student? Well, at the very least, I hope it helps you realize that the confusion you feel while writing is as normal as it is possible for something to be. Indeed, encountering and making sense of confusion is the whole purpose. What would be the point of essay-writing if you weren’t ever confused about the ideas you were working with? So be confused, and then work through it. Just don’t be confused about why you’re get confused.

Also, talking about this solidifying-ideas-into-words things is another way of pointing out that you shouldn’t expect to have all of your ideas sorted out before you’ve tried to write them down. After all, if putting things into words is how you solidify ideas, then that means that writing your ideas down is part of the thinking process. So, write a rough draft: not because your teacher in high school told you to, but because the importance of writing a rough draft derives from a basic principle of human psychology, and, in this instance, you would do well to play by the rules that your brain has set for you.

At this point, if you’ve found this argument intuitively convincing so far, then you probably don’t need to read further unless you’re interested. I’m going to try to prove this idea—that solidifying ideas into usable form means putting them into words, and that this is a fundamental process in human psychology—by reference to empirical evidence that supports the effectiveness of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Frankly, I think it’s pretty interesting stuff, because it suggests that putting things into words is such a deep psychological process that it can help treat an incredible range of psychological disorders. That said, I’m mainly offering it as more proof for the idea I’ve already laid out. If you’re already sold on the idea, and you’re not interested in the connection to CBT, then you’re probably fine stopping here.

Anyway, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a very complex subject, but definitely one worth knowing about, given that it’s incredibly successful as a family of psychotherapies. It’s actually crazy how wide of a range of disorders it treats—everything from depression to schizophrenia to Tourette’s Syndrome to chronic pain (and much more). It’s not a panacea by any means, and it’s often used in conjunction with medication, but there’s no disputing the veritable mountain of empirical evidence supporting its effectiveness (2).

I’m not going to lay out all of CBT’s principles right here (3), but one of them is this: you hold deep, unspoken beliefs about the world and how it works (core beliefs) that, with enough careful attention, you can articulate into words so that you can examine them consciously. For example, someone with depression might hold a core belief that, as he worked with the therapist, he might eventually articulate it as “I am incompetent.” And then he could actually think about that idea more directly instead of letting it sit at the deep foundation of his thoughts, unexamined, where it would give rise to various maladaptive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors without being recognized as the source of such. (As I said, this is in no way a comprehensive overview of CBT’s principles, and you should not treat this as definitive psychotherapeutic advice.)

In other words, one of the things that CBT operates on is this notion that you can take thoughts that are only dimly registered—and I mean very dimly—and, by putting them into words, you can play with them and even, with time and thoughtful effort, change them. Here, again, we see this basic principle: that all (or at least the vast majority) of your unspoken, unformulated thoughts can be rendered into usable, examinable shape by putting them into words.

And what’s more, this principle seems to be so right, so fundamentally true, that it continues to operate in minds as wildly different as those with schizophrenia, depression, OCD, and a whole host of other psychological disorders (and indeed, does not seem limited to psychological disorders, as such). Generally speaking, when a strategy continues to work in basically the same way across such a wide range of differences, chances are that the strategy has got something very right on a very deep level. What that means for us is that the thought-articulation process—the process of taking confusing, foggy feelings and wrangling them into the shape of words—is embedded very deep in the human mind.

Footnotes:

(1) As I get further in my studies of rhetorical theory in my PhD work, I am becoming increasingly aware that there are some well-respected rhetoricians who would cry foul at me categorizing words as solidified ideas. Their reasons for disagreeing would vary; to some I might partially concede, and to others I would not. Right now, though, the bottom line is this: if any of these rhetoricians ever want to take their ideas about the rhetorical constitution of consciousness and reality, or about the irreducible signifying power of the sentence, or what have you, and try to boil those ideas down into a form that is both understandable and practically useful to first-year writing students, then they are more than welcome to start their own WordPress blog.

(2) In case you’re wondering about this evidence, Stefan Hofmann et al (2012) did a meta-analysis of 269 meta-analyses of studies on the effectiveness of CBT, and concluded that, yeah, it really works. In case it’s not clear what that means, a meta-analysis of studies is when you look through a bunch of studies to get a sense of the empirical findings on a certain topic. Hofmann et al. did a meta-analysis of those meta-analyses (a meta-meta-analysis, if you will). What we’re talking about is effectively a review of hundreds if not thousands of individual studies on the efficacy of CBT in all different situations, for different disorders, with different demographic groups, you name it. And the conclusion was that CBT was, on the whole, quite effective. That’s what I mean by “veritable mountain of empirical evidence.”

(3) I actually did this in my Master’s thesis, which you can find on the University of Virginia’s library website. The title is “Learning to Learn to Write: Adapting the Principles and Practices of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy into First-Year Writing Curricula.” That said, I think it’s actually restricted to members of UVA community until May of 2025, so in the meantime, I suppose you could look up sources from, you know, the people who actually invented CBT (Aaron Beck) and practice it as therapists. I mean, if you wanted to settle.

On Research: Moving from Topic to Question

I’m writing this one late at night after a long day, so you’ll have to forgive me for rambling (and any grammar errors, as usual).

What I want to talk about for this post is a step of the research process that can be pretty tricky, but which I see few people actually talking about how to do: namely, moving from a research topic towards a research question.

You’ve probably heard something about what makes for a good research question: not so broad that it would require hundreds of pages to answer, and not so small that you won’t be able to find enough sources or meet your word count. In other words, you want to ask a question that’s just the right size for whatever length of paper you’re doing. If it’s an eight-page paper, you want a question that needs eight pages to investigate and answer thoroughly.

Okay, so that’s what a research question should look like. But how do you get there? How do you actually go about developing a question like that?

The short answer is “messily.” You go about it messily. As it turns out, that’s the short answer to a lot of questions about how the writing process works.

The longer answer is…well, longer—long enough that it needs a blog post to tease out, I guess.

I phoned a friend from undergrad on this one (1). He was a history major (and a good one), which I figured meant he was a bit more used to the research process than an English major (or at least more used to it than me). I asked him this question:

“What would be your advice to a first-year student who has chosen a topic for his research paper, and now has to start narrowing down to a real research question?”

This was his answer:

“Two things:

“First, stay flexible. Your understanding of your topic is alive, and you should be open to it changing in front of you as you work.

“Second, one sentence. Don’t worry about writing a whole paper, don’t worry about researching a whole paper. Work on the question in the same way you would work on a thesis statement. Heck, half the time the question ends up becoming the thesis statement.”

So, everyone please give a big thank you to [NAME REDACTED] for that advice. I think it’s quite helpful.

The second bit is especially interesting, I think. The first bit, I could have told you. Really, it’s what I have been telling you in various posts (cf. Writing Honestly). But the idea of keeping your attention on just a single sentence is quite an interesting one.

I don’t know if I endorse it universally—but then, I doubt my friend would endorse it universally, either—but I like the idea of keeping your eye on the prize, so to speak. It seems to me that just figuring out the one big thing you want to say will focus your research efforts. And what’s more, I expect that once you figured out a sentence you were really satisfied with, all the work you had done up to that point to figure that sentence out would become the rest of the paper.

In other words, the sentence (the research question, the thesis, whatever) becomes the focal point of your research. It doesn’t mean you’re not thinking about anything else. It doesn’t even mean that you’re not doing any more writing. What it means is that all the thinking and writing you’re doing is centered on that one thing, on answering that one question, on writing and rewriting that one statement of something you think is complicated but true.

It also gives you concrete things to do, not just abstract goals to achieve. Whenever you’re stuck, go back to that sentence. Figure out what more you need to do to it. What parts aren’t you satisfied with? What more do you want to say? When you can look at it and be honestly satisfied with it as something to put up as the centerpiece of your paper, you’ve probably arrived at something worth writing a paper about.

Of course, all of that is speculation on my part. I don’t usually use this particular method of research or writing. Knowing my friend, however, and having traded these sorts of ideas around with him before, I think I’m on the right track in picking apart what he means by working on one sentence.

…

Alright, a day has passed in between this paragraph and the one before it. I sent everything above this point to my friend to see if he liked my assessment of his one-sentence advice. He said it looked good, and he added one other thing, which I’ll end with:

“Basically the one sentence rule is a scaffolding exercise I picked up from screenwriting, where themes are often a lot muddier than in an essay. The concept of the exercise centers around the fact that all writing is fundamentally about ideas, and that human beings have a very short attention span for those ideas. So if you want to communicate, whether on an emotional or intellectual level, you have to simplify your ideas to the point where someone else could read a single sentence and know exactly what you wanted to talk about. Like a thesis statement, but without the answer. So, like you said, it’s about focusing on what’s important, on why you’re writing.” (2)

In other words, I was apparently getting a screenwriter’s opinion, when I was looking for a historian’s. Oh, well. It’s actually worth noting how well the screenwriting advice applies to academic writing. There’s a lot to think about in that. Someone should probably write a blog post on it or something.

Footnotes

(1) I actually asked two friends, but in hindsight, really shouldn’t have asked the other one. This is what he said, which I told him I’d include in this post for comic relief:

“On the night before it’s due, flip through any sources that mention your topic, pull out any quotes that you can twist to somehow fit your preexisting thesis, and maintain a steady caffeine intake by any means necessary. Guaranteed B/B-.

“Also, listen to [other friend] and NOT ME.”

(2) Right here, he’s actually getting at a point that I make in one of my other posts, where I talk a bit about the difference between what you’re saying and why you’re saying it. (Cf. One of the hardest things about learning to write: separating out your ideas). Namely, you’ve got to know not just what you’re saying, but why you’re saying it—because the why is just as much a real part of your argument as the what. Your argument is composed of both kinds of things: the raw content information, or the what, and also the rhetorical purposes you have for bringing up that content, the why.

Research in the Age of the Coronavirus

Why it’s Tricky to do Good Research Without a Physical Library

(and What to Do About That)

I’m writing this partly to work my way through the challenge of helping my students develop their research papers when they can’t actually go to the library, given the whole Coronavirus situation. Pretty much everything hereafter is addressed directly to them, but if you’re not one of them, you might still find some interesting stuff about the pragmatic reasons for using physical libraries to do research.

The research problem here is a weird one, in that you can’t go to the library. In fact, I had originally scheduled a homework assignment that asked you to go to the library. The idea was that you would go to the library to find a book on a subject that interested you, but before you left, find another book on the same shelf (and therefore on the same general topic), and grab that book, too.

The point of this exercise was going to be to show you the benefits of actually going to the library as compared with only finding sources via search engines online. Specifically, I wanted to show you that libraries’ shelving systems are set up to help you find information that may help you, but which you might not have known you needed if you only searched for things online. Online searching is great, and you should make full use of it, but to a large extent it only shows you results based on the keywords you already knew you had to put into the search bar.

In other words, it’s only going to show you things you already knew you didn’t know. It’s not going to show you the things you didn’t know that you didn’t know.

I’m not suggesting that going to the library is morally superior, or something, but rather that it lets you cast a wider net around the area you’re looking into, in a way that an online search isn’t really built for.

But we’ve been booted off grounds and can’t access the library. Okay, what now?

Well, one thing that kind of helps is that UVA’s library website has a function that lets you see titles on the shelves nearby the source you’ve found in the search engine. (The button is supposed to look like books next to each other on a shelf, but it’s so small that it doesn’t look like much at all. It’s mostly green, and it pops up in the search results next to the call number of the book in question).

The problem with this at the moment is that it only helps you if you can find eBook versions of both the thing you searched for and the book that’s supposed to sit near it on the shelf. After all, you still can’t get into the library to find physical books.

So, what does all of this mean when it comes to how our class manages research? Well, you’re effectively cut off from the easy ability to cast a wide net in your research efforts, to search for information you didn’t know about before searching for it. This may seem trivial until you remember that the whole writing process I’ve been trying to teach you all involves running into ideas you didn’t know were there in the first place. I had this whole thing prepared where I was going to point out that research, done properly, is just an extension of that same principle, and that the only difference is that you’re finding the new ideas outside of your own head, instead of locked away somewhere in your long-term memory or waiting to be assembled out of two other ideas that you already have. It was going to be great.

That’s the problem, anyway; you’re cut off from a method of searching for information that is really helpful for research endeavors, especially in the early stages when your topic is still vague and undefined and casting a wide net might really help you find something more specific that you could start drilling down on. To a large extent, you’re stuck with the questions and ideas you already know that you need.

Now, what’s our solution? Well, the short answer is, “Good question.”

The longer answer, at least in my current thinking, is probably threefold:

1) Ask a lot of questions about the questions you’re asking.

2) Use bibliographies liberally.

3) Talk to your classmates and get them to ask you questions where they’re confused or curious about what you’re researching (and later, what you’re arguing).

One at a time, then:

1) Ask a lot of questions about the questions you’re asking.

Basically, you’ve got to be really, really open in your thinking about your research topic. The nice thing about researching widely at the start of your project is that you can’t help but run into unexpected information. The very act of reading widely puts that information in front of you, even if you weren’t cognitively open to the idea in the first place. You do have to be somewhat open in your thinking to cast that wide net, of course, but it’s not a difficult thing to make yourself do, even if you’re already ninety-five percent sure you know what your question and argument are going to be.

Now, you don’t have that easy cure to the pitfalls of narrowmindedness (to which the researching mind is always subject, to some extent). Yours is the hard road: you’ve got to do the hard work of questioning the assumptions implicit in your own questions. It’s hard if you’ve got certain pre-commitments in your head about how things will go. You’ve got to be your own research-bias checker, in other words.

When you ask your main question, is it really a question, or is it actually a thesis that you’ve just phrased as a question? What kinds of things are you assuming in your questions from the start? (1) Are you really asking that question, or do you already have your answer and are just asking the question for show?

Doing this sort of thing should at least distance you a bit from your own preconceptions, at least enough to be more open to those unexpected ideas when they come in from the other two methods or from your own writing. Remember, your job is essentially to posit a hypothesis and then, through research and the writing process, to figure out what the real truth is, to the best of your ability. You are not beholden to your original thesis. You are beholden only to the truth.

2) Use bibliographies liberally

Maybe someone in high school told you that Wikipedia wasn’t a good source to cite, but its references section could point you towards a lot of good sources. If someone did tell you that, that person was right.

What’s more, you can (and definitely should) do the same sort of thing with your academic sources. Lots of times, when you’re doing research, it’s tempting (and sometimes the best call) to skip the part of the source where it lays out the literature review and go straight to the point of the article. It may be worth going back to the literature review, though, just to see who else has said stuff in the ongoing conversation of which the thing you’re reading is just a part.

Bibliographies and citations are how academics track conversations. Even if you don’t have the luxury of going into the library and seeing everything that’s been said about a topic laid out in front of you on the shelf, you can still start from inside that conversation and work out a bit. This won’t usually mean much more than seeing who your current source cites and why it cites them, looking online at one or two of them that seem promising or relevant to your research question, and then skimming the intro and conclusion of those pieces to see if they’re actually worth using more thoroughly. (In other words, it probably means about the same amount of time you would have spent walking to the library, looking through the books, and then walking back to your dorm room.)

3) Talk to your classmates and get them to ask you questions where they’re confused or curious about what you’re researching (and later, what you’re arguing).

It’s usually a good idea to have other people tell you what confuses them about what you’re saying. The nice thing about other people is that they sometimes think things that are different from the things that you think. Your classmates might be able to point out holes in your research, promising areas to explore and expand your topic, flaws in your logic, or just places where things are a little confusing or something. Our schedule is already going to have you talking a lot with your group members about your research progress, but feel free to talk with them (or me) more than the course itself already prescribes.

In any event, those are my off the cuff, barely proofread thoughts on the matter. More than anything, I want you to at least be aware of the problem, because it’s not one that I think a lot of students are aware of. So many students (myself included) are used to doing research entirely online that we don’t even have the experience of going into a library and seeing the information-seeking allowances that the shelving system provides. Now that we’re all locked out of the library, it’s difficult to make that point clear without just straight up telling you.

So…consider yourself told.

(1) There’s a classic example of this kind of loaded question: “When did you start beating your wife?” This is a trick, of course, because unless you’ve already established that the person has beaten his wife, the real question should be, “Have you ever beaten your wife?”

The Mind on the Other Side of the Writing

Starting with this one, the next few posts are going to be specifically addressed towards my first-year writing students of spring semester of 2020. If you’re one of those students, go ahead and skip down to where it says “MY STUDENTS: SKIP DOWN TO HERE.” (1)

For anyone else—perhaps you are one of the thousands of people who will be flocking to this blog years from now after I’ve become famous—a bit of context for this change in audience might be useful.

Again, it’s the spring of 2020, which means we’re in the midst of the Coronavirus outbreak. The University of Virginia (the school where I teach and study) has moved all its classes online. In a definitely not self-promotional move, I have decided to take all the things I would have wanted to say to my students in lecture-ish format in the classroom and start putting them on this blog. I figure it gives my students a way to access my ramblings (or quietly ignore them), and it gives me a way to actually keep thinking about this stuff as we move through the semester.

Really, the only thing this changes is the topics I’ll be discussing for the next few posts, which I’ll use to focus on the things my students and I will be working on each week. I still plan to write these posts in much the same way as I’ve been doing. Probably, I could have not mentioned anything and no one would have noticed. If you were smart, you probably skipped down to where I told my students to go, even if you weren’t one. But if you’re reading this, I guess you didn’t.

MY STUDENTS: SKIP DOWN TO HERE

Anyway, I figured the first post in the midst of this Coronavirus brouhaha would be about a problem—but, conversely, an opportunity—that I see as we’re moving a discussion-based class online. I’ll frame the problem first, and then move into why I think it’s an interesting opportunity.

The problem, as I see it, has to do with the difficulty in remembering that there’s a human mind on the other side of everything that you read. Put it this way: I refuse to believe that textbooks are actually written by anyone. Their language is far too dry, far too robotic for any human mind to have produced. Although I don’t have a good countertheory about where textbooks come from, I believe it’s far more likely that they fall out of the sky, fully formed and done up, like strange natural artifacts. (2) Then the teachers go around, picking them up and handing them to students to decipher, as if they were reading rings on the inside of a tree trunk to determine its age. It’s information, but not communication.

By contrast, when I text my friends on my phone, I can feel that they’re actually there on the other side of the language they’re sending me. It’s not even something I have to concentrate on. It’s difficult not to feel their presence. The text is clearly—viscerally, even—an act of communication from another human mind.

So, there’s a weird difference between readings textbooks and texts, and it’s a difference in how you feel when you’re reading them: do you feel like you’re deciphering an impersonal, almost natural object (i.e., not something man-made), or does it feel like you’re listening to what another human mind is telling you?

The truth, of course, is that all language that you read—from textbooks to traffic signs to the really small print on the back of your credit card—all of it came from another human mind to give you information. But depending on how it feels while you’re reading it, on what you imagine you’re doing while reading it, you’re probably going to process that information differently. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find it much easier to process even very complex information when I feel that I’m listening to someone as opposed to trying to dig information out of an uncommunicating block that happens to have word-shaped scribbles on it.

Okay, but why am I telling you this? What does this have to do with first-year writing and moving it online?

Exactly this: my concern as my course moves online is that most of the academic writing that students read in college—even writing that comes directly from their classmates or professors—feels more like the textbook than the text, more like an impersonal object to be studied than an act of communication to be listened to. (4)

Most of this writing probably doesn’t feel as uncommunicative as a textbook, but if any of you have ever had to write a weekly post or something for class, and then had to read one of your classmate’s posts and be prepared to comment on it (or something like that), do you know what I’m talking about? Or if you’re reading something by someone long dead, like the source by the Confucian philosopher Mencius I gave my students in the first part of the semester, does it ever really feel like you’re listening to someone as they talk to you? (5) Or does it feel more like you’ve been given a stone that was found at the bottom of a river, and you’re supposed to determine from the markings in the rock which way the water was flowing, or how long the rock was there, or what the sediment composition of the rest of the riverbed was? (6) In other words, does it feel like you’re prying information out of what you’re reading, rather than being given that information by person who wrote it?

Well, if I’m right about this being a tendency in reading (and I think I am right), then that presents a problem for online communication in a discussion-based course: it might be harder for students—now that they’re not actually in the same room as each other and must communicate largely via writing—to remember, at a gut level, that the comments they read from their fellow students on the material being discussed are, in fact, thoughts being communicated by another human mind.

I mean, this is hard enough to remember in person. (7) I don’t think this is something my students would ever be confused about, in a conscious sense. But it’s like when you watch a movie; it’s not that you really believe that all the magic or whatever is real. You just forget in your gut for a while that it isn’t real. Same with this: you obviously know that your classmate wrote down that thought about this topic…but when you’re reading information writing in an academic style, it can be hard to remember that in your gut. It can be easy, by contrast, to slip into analyzing what you’re reading instead of listening to it.

To be sure, analyzing what your classmate writes is great, but not if you’re removing it from your classmate’s mouth in doing so. Your classmate probably had other thoughts, or may not have worded things properly, or whatever other problems often crop up in the course of human communication. None of that nuance of human communication enters your thinking if you’re not thinking about it as communication.

I think this is especially difficult to work around when you disagree with the information being communicated. If you think of it as just information, then you receive it on its own, just as it is, without any understanding that it probably has a lot of connections to other things that the writer thought but didn’t end up saying. A statement tends to be simpler than the thoughts of person who said it. You’ve got to remember that the person who said it probably has things going on in his head that you’re not seeing. Maybe he’s not even seeing them fully, himself—but then you’ve got those sorts of thoughts, too, the ones you don’t have quite pinned down. Turns out other people are just as complicated as you. But if the information just seems to be information in a vacuum, you probably won’t feel all of this.

As an aside, I wonder what the textbook writers decided not to put in the textbooks?

Alright, so there’s the problem. Where’s the opportunity? What am I trying to tell my class (and, I suppose, people more broadly)?

Well, this whole thing about forgetting that what you’re reading comes from another human mind—don’t do that.

Forget, I mean. Don’t forget. Don’t forget that you—oh, whatever. Look, I’m pretty sure the opportunity part of this is more or less clear, right? This is a problem that we (and here I’m talking directly to my students of spring 2020) have to deal with as we move to online discussions. In dealing with it, you have an opportunity, an opportunity I don’t know you’d have in the classroom. You’ll have the chance to learn how to really read—or rather, how to listen, how to look through the words on the page and hear the person on the other side.

(1) Or don’t. Up to you.

(2) I expect this probably happens somewhere in North Dakota, where no one is around to see it and spill the secret. (3)

(3) For that matter, are we sure that North Dakota exists? Has anyone really ever seen it? Can we send someone to go check?

(4) I talk about some of this in my post on “Writing to Perform versus Writing to Communicate.”

(5) I give this source to my students when we work on summarizing. Their objective is to summarize what Mencius says in a way that he would agree with. The point of the assignment is partly to make it clear that it does not matter that the guy is two-and-a-half millennia dead. Indeed, he wrote stuff down to circumvent the inconvenience of death. You’d better believe his mind is on the other side of that writing, speaking to you right now. And you’d better believe that you’ve got a responsibility to him, one person to another, to get his ideas right before you talk about whether you agree with him or not. That’s not just a useful way of thinking about this to make summarizing dead guys easier. It’s true.

(6) Geologists, I assume you can do this sort of thing. If not, get on it. I don’t want to look like a fool.

(7) Especially when it’s that one really stupid classmate talking. You know? That one? Ugh.

Writing to Perform versus Writing to Communicate

Figuring out What to Say and How to Say It, and Why You Shouldn’t do Both at the Same Time

Fun with Footnotes

This post has given me some trouble—partly because it’s a very big topic with a lot to cover and I didn’t know what to include or cut out, but also partly because I think my other posts already touch on this in some way or other. That said, the connection between this and my older posts might only be so obvious in my head, so this might be worth mentioning on its own.

When talking with students, I often find myself summing up essay-writing—or what it is, or what it’s about, or something similar—like this: you’re telling me stuff, and you’re telling me why you think that stuff (1).

You could probably phrase this much more formally: something like “expressing in clear terms your original thoughts on an important matter.” I like to keep it simple, though, because I try to demonstrate in the definition the very thing that I’m trying to get students to do: communicate, not perform.

Lots of first-year students (and older students, too) seem to regard writing for their professor like a performance of some kind, as if they have to get everything right or “correct.” They often worry that they have to make a choice between writing something that interests them and writing something that will get a good grade. What they fail to realize is that writing earnestly and thoughtfully about something that interests them usually is the way to get a good grade.

It’s a sort of tension between form and substance. Students worry that they need to get the form just right, but they don’t realize that the form can only fall into place in the process of trying to convey the substance.

To put it another way, here’s a piece of advice I have given (probably literally) hundreds of times: never worry about what to say and how to say it at the same time (2).

By “what to say,” I mean the ideas you’re actually trying to convey to the person to whom you’re writing. By “how to say it,” I mean the actual words, paragraph structure, sentences—i.e., the form—that you’re using to convey what you’re saying.

Do not try to figure out both of these at the same time when you are writing an essay. Each one is a very complicated thing.

Take the what to say part. As I mentioned in my post on separating out your ideas, the ideas that you’re working with in college essays are not simple. It will take basically all of your concentration to work out the shape of those ideas in your head.

And as for the how to say it part…well, how many people do you know who, when they open their mouths, know every word that’s going to come out?

To everyone whose answer is “None,” I say, “Yeah, me too.”

To everyone whose answer is “One,” I say, “That sounds like a very impressive person.”

And to everyone whose answer is “Two or more,” I say, “Liar.”

The point is that figuring out how to say things is also going to take up pretty much all of your concentration. And that means that, if you’re trying to figure out what to say and how to say it at the same time, then you’re trying to do two things at once, each of which requires all of your concentration.

So…good luck with that.

Now, how does this tie into the whole “writing to communicate” versus “writing to perform” divide? Well, I find that when students are obsessing over how to say things before they’ve even figured out what they’re trying to say, they’re often doing so because they think that they’re job in writing an essay is fundamentally to put on some kind of academic performance or show. They’re trying to appear as if they’re fully fledged academics (whatever that means).

This means that these students don’t let themselves do the bad writing that is a prerequisite to good writing. In their heads, there’s no reason to put down any words that don’t sound academic, because the whole point is writing an essay the checks the boxes of what an essay should look like. Meanwhile, the real and interesting ideas that these students have—the ideas that most professors actually want to hear—never get worked out thoroughly. In short, the student is too focused on figuring out how to say things that he never pays enough attention to what he’s actually trying to say in the first place.

Below is a short dialogue that represents a conversation I’ve had with quite possibly hundreds of students. It’s a sort of aggregated or generalized version of the conversation, but the variation from one student to the next is often startlingly small (3).

Me: What’s your thesis statement?

Student [eyes glazed over, trancelike]: By comparing the two texts by the authors… No, by evaluating the effects of literary devices in the texts by…

Me: Okay, stop. Look…what are you trying to tell me?

Student: Oh, just that when you look at these two texts together, you can see that one of them is employing the same devices as the other, but it’s just using them for different purposes.

Me: Okay…why not write that?

Student [after a stunned pause]: Oh.

To be fair to the students, here, I am pulling a bit of a trick when I do this, if only to help them see what I’m trying to get them to see. By first asking for their “thesis statement”–such a loaded term, isn’t it?–I’m trying to trigger their performing habit. Then, by just asking them, in a more casual tone, what they’re “trying to tell me,” I’m hoping to get them to shift mindsets into just explaining to me…well, what they’re trying to tell me. After all, that’s all a thesis statement is.

The point of doing this is to show students that if they come at their writing in a spirit of performing, they’ll get bunched up as they focus too much on how to say things. By contrast, if they come at their writing in a spirit of communication, the form will fall into place. In other words, you’re actually getting in the way of sounding good if you worry about sounding good first. This is why you shouldn’t go around putting carts before horses; neither the horse nor the cart can go anywhere like that.

And, really, this touches on one of the biggest secrets of writing that no one is actually trying to keep a secret, but which everyone who knows it is apparently terrible at sharing: bad writing is a prerequisite to good writing. Or, as I like to say it, all writing sucks before it’s done (4). In the dialogue above, the actual phrasing that the student came up with when he was just trying to communicate might not be great academic prose, but he can work with it. Moreover, that talked-out phrasing will probably be a hell of a lot closer to great academic prose than what he wrote down when he was obsessing over writing great academic prose.

Does this mean that things like good grammar and style are pointless? Of course not (5). What it means is that, although grammar and style are necessary considerations, they should be your second concern. Your first concern is figuring out what you’re trying to say in the first place.

Anyways, the moral of the story is that you should bother your roommate into letting you explain your essay ideas to him/her. Turns out that people are much better at using language to communicate when they’re actually trying to use language to communicate, instead of to perform.

Footnotes

(1) This is the most important line in the entire post. Now stop dawdling down in the footnotes and get back to reading…unless you’ve already finished, in which case what are you still doing here?

(2) Yes, I bolded this line, because it’s the most important line in the entire post.

(3) This happens all the time, especially in writing center conferences. One of the things I’ve had to do as a tutor over the years is figure out very condensed ways of communicating complex writing lessons, given that the average writing center conference is only an hour. This little trick is one of the oldest and most reliable I’ve come up with. I like it particularly because it gets the student to notice the shift in their own mindset as it happens. Like I mention in the post on separating out your ideas, one of the difficult aspects of a lot of writing-thinking problems is that you don’t notice they’re even happening. This little maneuver is designed to force students to notice the difference in how they feel when they’re trying to sound good versus just trying to communicate.

(4) Yep, bolded that line, too. It’s the most important one in the entire post.

(5) Nor does it mean that you should take any grammar errors on this blog post as an excuse to be lazy in your own essays. If you want the privilege of publishing essays without thoroughly proofreading them, pay for your own WordPress blog.

One of the hardest things to learn about college writing: separating out your ideas

Your average first-year student—but I’d wager almost everyone is like this—seems to hit a point in his writing process where he’s just had some inspiration about what he wants to say, but all the different ideas that make up that larger argument are so jumbled together in his head that it’s hard to take them apart and deal with them individually.

A lot of times, this ends up with the student putting way too much into a single paragraph, because he couldn’t quite tell where one idea ended and the next began—it all just flowed together in his head. In fact, this is such a powerful thing that often, when I ask a student (usually in writing center conferences) to run one of his points by me, he ends up telling me not just the point I asked about, but also what comes before it and what comes after it. If I don’t stop him, he usually keeps going through more or less his whole argument. That’s because—at least as far as I can tell—to him, the individual parts of his argument are much too connected to be talked about without filling in the surrounding context.

You can probably try this yourself: take an essay that you’re working on or have already written, and pick one paragraph. Try explaining just that paragraph to another person—nothing else, just that paragraph. Don’t even mention anything else within the essay.

You might find doing this somewhat hard. You might find yourself wanting to explain the context that leads up to that point, or what comes after it. It probably feels a bit wrong to talk about just one piece of what’s really a bigger puzzle.

Of course, it’s largely a good thing that you want to give the context. It indicates that you have a good grasp of how the ideas in your essay form a cohesive whole. The thing is, if you want to be able to think clearly about those ideas during the writing process, then you have to get to the point where you can separate each idea from the larger whole and examine it on its own. It’s not helpful if you can only think about everything all at once.

To speak metaphorically, it’s a bit like dealing with a ball of Play-Doh where all the colors have been mashed up together, and what you’re trying to do is separate out the colors from one another. Anyone who has ever attempted this knows it is no mean feat. It’s hard to find exactly where the green ends and the red begins, and you can’t pull on the blue part without bits of yellow coming with it, and whoever did this managed to get the purple Play-Doh to weave through the entire thing. Probably he rolled it into a snake, first.

In other words, pulling your essay apart into its component ideas is tricky on a cognitive level. Indeed, I’m pretty sure it’s one of the hardest things to learn about college writing, and I think there are two reasons it’s particularly difficult.

The first one, I’ve already touched on, at least implicitly. To put it directly, it’s hard to solve a problem you don’t know exists. For the student who runs through three major ideas in a single, giant paragraph, or the student in the writing center who can’t help but recite his entire argument when I’ve just asked him for a piece of it, the difficulty is that the writer isn’t even aware that separating out his ideas is something that needs to happen. It feels natural to string everything together, so the need to take each idea in turn never really registers in his thinking.

The second reason separating out your ideas is difficult is that it demands a lot of concentration—which is a problem because your concentration already has its hands full with, you know, every other part of writing an essay. And “every other part of writing an essay” is an enormous cognitive load, especially when you’re dealing with ideas as complex as the ones you’ll find in college writing—because, let’s be clear on this, college-level essay ideas are not simple ideas. “I want a sandwich” is a simple idea. Nothing you’re asked to write about in college is going to be simple; even if you’re comfortable dealing with the subject at hand, you’re still dedicating most or all of your concentration to a large cognitive burden when you’re actually in the process of thinking and writing.

Alright, so you’ve got two problems when it comes to separating out your ideas. First, it’s hard to notice that you need to do it, and second, actually doing it requires cognitive resources that are already bound up in other tasks. What can you do about all of this?

Well, probably you can do a lot of things, but I’ll offer two possible…solutions? I only hesitate there because the solution to the first problem—that it’s hard to remember that you need to separate out your ideas—isn’t really a thing you can do, exactly. It’s more a mindset that I’m suggesting you try to take up. On the other hand, the solution to the second problem—that is, the problem of not having the cognitive resources available to separate out your ideas—is much more actionable. (It’s just part of my writing process.)

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that these two solutions are the only options. I’m more hoping that, by going through them, I’ll be able to give you some sense of what kind of thing I’m trying to do in my own head when I’m wrestling with that big ball of mashed-up, abstract Play-Doh. (As a side note, if anyone’s looking for a band name: “Abstract Play-Doh.” You’re welcome.)

Okay, first up is how to deal with the problem of not knowing that you need to separate out your ideas.

You are now aware that you need to separate out your ideas. Well done.

…

Alright, here’s my real advice on this problem, because obviously just flat out telling you to remember this isn’t very helpful. That said, this piece of advice really does boil down to trying to remember something. Hopefully, though, it’s a bit more…well, memorable.

What I’m suggesting is this: that you try to remember that the connections that exist between your ideas are just as real as the ideas themselves. What I mean is that, when you’re writing an essay, you’re not just telling me stuff. You’re also telling me why you’re telling me what you’re telling me, and the why is just as real as the what.

Just to make the point more clearly, here are two versions of the same short argument, which is totally real and not at all something I made up on the spot:

Firstly, blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Secondly, blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Finally, blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah.

That doesn’t actually tell me why those ideas are there. It just tells me that they’re there. Here’s the same (again, definitely real) argument with the logical connections actually articulated:

The most important thing to consider is that blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Because of this, blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. That said, blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah.

Even though you don’t know what the actual content of the argument is, the sentences in the second version probably felt carefully delineated. In fact, the first version doesn’t actually lay out an argument at all, because an argument doesn’t just consist of the individual points; it also consists of the connections between those points. You wouldn’t build a house by just stacking bricks on top of one another; you’d put in mortar, too. (It’s mortar, right? That’s what goes between bricks in a house? Look, I’m not an architect.)

On to the second problem—namely, mustering your concentration to separate out your ideas when you’re already weighed down by the cognitive load of every other part of the writing process. Here’s the solution I use: my current writing process. Bear with me for a bit.

The first thing I do to help myself untangle my ideas is to write out (by hand) everything I want to say, all in a rush. I figure if I’m at a point where my ideas are so jumbled together that I can’t take them apart inside of my head, I’ll put them onto paper where I can look at them outside of my head. After that, I’ll usually put away what I’ve written for a while (a day, if I have the time, or else just a few hours). When I come back, I’ll read the thing through just to get it into my head again, and then I’ll take a different colored pen and start bracketing things off according to the major ideas that I see.

I might begin at the top, start reading through and realize I see the first major idea that a bunch of sentences seem to be supporting. Okay, bracket off that bit of writing and label it all idea number 1. After that section, something new seems to be developing; it goes on for a bit and then seems to trail off into something else. Okay, mark it off where it stops—in the middle of a sentence if that’s where the shift happens—and call that chunk of writing idea number 2. Rinse and repeat for the next section of writing that seems to be talking about one major idea; there’s idea 3. And maybe after that there’s something that’s really just talking about idea number 1 again. Alright, label it accordingly. And so on and so forth until everything I’ve written is visibly labeled according to which major idea it seems to be talking about. I probably won’t keep all of those major ideas, but at least now I can make a more clear-minded decision on what to keep.

The writing probably sucks at this point—it’s repetitive, clumsy, and may even swear once or twice if I was particularly frustrated while I was doing the initial writing. Fortunately, I don’t care if it actually sounds good just yet. Its only job right now is to help me think.

The newly grouped ideas go into a Word document. For each group, I write a header that says basically what idea that section is trying to convey. These are like early drafts of my topic sentences. Again, they’re not finalized, polished topic sentences. They’re just labels that remind me what major idea the stuff in that section is trying to get at.

By doing all of this, what I’ve done is take the jumbled-up thoughts in my head, toss them out onto a piece of paper, and then make visible, physical separations between them so I can address each one independently on the screen. Doing this takes a lot of cognitive load off of my mind: the page remembers the larger argument for me, so I can focus in on refining just one idea at a time and ignore the others until I’m ready to deal with each of them, too.

In any event, it’s probably time for this post to start petering out, so just to recap: separating out your ideas is hard because 1) you have to notice that you have to do it, and then 2) you have to marshal your concentration to get the job done when you’ve got a thousand other cognitive jobs to do, as well. You can probably address these problems by 1) remembering that the relationships between your ideas are just as real as the ideas themselves, and by 2) displacing your ideas onto the page so you don’t have to bear the cognitive load entirely in your head.

So, yeah. Something something elegant conclusion. Bye.

Writing Honestly

I want to ramble a bit on the importance of writing honestly, and using the essay writing process to discover ideas, not just report them. There are a lot of avenues (really, a lot) by which we could approach this topic, but I’ll start here with the fact that students often seem to get locked into absolute arguments when writing essays, and are subsequently unwilling to change them. Getting locked into absolutes is, I think, a smaller problem that we can use to talk our way into a discussion of the importance of writing honestly. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do for now.

Anyway, let’s start. Students, it seems, often get themselves locked into arguing for very absolute positions without much nuance. Take the following prompt question for an assignment (which I couldn’t figure out how to indent properly in WordPress):

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which character is the more honorable one, Brutus or Marc Antony?

This was an essay prompt I gave my tenth graders, once upon a time. As you might expect, their answers were mostly “Brutus!” or “No, Antony!” They set their answers at the start and stuck with them. None that I can recall gave the equally reasonable and probably truer answer of “Well, it’s complicated.”

As it turns out, there’s a lot to be said on either side of the question. Brutus may seem the obvious choice at first; although he participates in killing his friend, Caesar, he seems to do so for reasons he genuinely believes are good, and he’s the one that comes out and explains to the public why it was a necessary act. Perhaps he was misguided in his honor, but Antony himself closes out the play by praising Brutus’ good faith. Next to him, Antony seems a shrewd political manipulator, taking advantage of Brutus’ trust in him to stir the people of Rome to riot, moving behind the scenes all the while to establish what will eventually become the second triumvirate of Rome.

But, then, are Antony’s motives honorable, even if his means are not? After all, he punishes the conspiracy for their murder of Caesar. Sure, he breaks a few eggs along the way, but he gets the omelet made. Instead of a cynical politician, perhaps he is a man who sees what needs to be done for the justice of Rome and, working in a world of plots and assassinations, realizes he must get his hands dirty for the sake of what’s right? Meanwhile, Brutus’ intentions may be good, but he assassinates his best friend. And yet he’s honorable? Really?

And so on and so forth. Even with just a few minutes of work, the answer to the original question—which character is more honorable—is starting to look more like that third option: it’s complicated. But I can only get there by asking the question, not by assuming I already have the answer.

You can see this same sort of absolute arguing when you ask students to compare two books (or poems, or plays, or miscellaneous works of literature). Usually, you get one of two kinds of answers:

1) The difference argument: “Book A is like this, and Book B is like that.”

2) The similarity argument: “Books A and B are both like this.”

In almost every case, this kind of absolute arguing will be wrong. (Or incomplete. Maybe that’s a better word.) For the difference argument, Book A probably is mostly like this, but it probably has a little bit of that going on, too—and vice versa for Book B, which probably has more of that than Book A does, but has its own share of this, all the same. For the similarity argument, it’s almost certainly not a one-to-one comparison. Probably, a more accurate statement would be something like “Despite their differences with regards to that, Books A and B still share a strong connection in terms of this.”

In other words, as my undergraduate Shakespeare professor pointed out to me, it’s okay to argue in terms of degree. You do not have to claim that a thing is completely this way and not at all another way. It’s okay to say the thing is more one way than another.

As I said at the start, I think this issue with adhering to absolutes is actually a part or symptom of a deeper problem: the feeling that when you, as a student, choose your initial stance in an argument, you should be completely right—or at least you should strive to appear completely right. There is no room (students often seem to think) to admit fault with one’s argument at any point in the writing process; to do so would be to admit to a failure of that process. As a result, students often write themselves deeper and deeper into positions they know full well to be flawed or contrived, trying desperately all the while to sweep each new realization under the rug. The writing process becomes miserable, basically a cover-up job. The final product reflects ideas the student does not believe but feels compelled to show belief in—indeed, feels compelled to stand on a structure he knows is shaky and maintain that it is firm.

What if, instead, you wrote what you actually believed? What if, instead of trying to sweep everything under the rug, you actually considered new ideas when you came to them and, if it seemed necessary, incorporated them into your argument? What if you even let yourself change what you were arguing if you realized your initial thesis was mistaken?

For those of you who worry this would take too much time, that it would require you to rewrite everything have already written, I offer two thoughts to consider.

The first is that changing your thesis halfway through writing usually (although not always) takes less rewriting than you might expect. Mostly, it requires reframing the raw information you present in your paragraphs to suit the new thesis, which can be accomplished largely by writing a new topic sentence for each paragraph that you want to reframe. At each paragraph, your new topic sentence tells your reader how the information in that paragraph supports the new thesis, or why it is important to consider that paragraph’s information while discussing your new thesis.

Probably—again, not always—the raw information in the paragraphs will be able to serve as evidence for your new thesis just as well as and perhaps even better than it served as evidence for your old thesis. After all, that raw information is the series of thoughts and ideas that led you to realize your new thesis, and isn’t that what evidence is? Information that leads you to a certain conclusion? All you need to do is go back and clean up the path of thought, to go back and clarify how that information leads to the logical conclusion that is your new thesis.

You may find that you need to add or remove certain ideas as you go—this would be rewriting. While you’re cleaning up the path, perhaps you find a spot where it goes off in the wrong direction for a while (so take out the detours) or perhaps a spot where the logic of the path seems to be missing a step (so write in the explanation that bridges the gap). This is what it means to discover new ideas while you write. Everything you’ve already written is not wasted; most of it will be the logic and thoughts that have led you to where you are now. What you take out is just all the side paths you needed to venture down a little ways to see that they were going in directions that were either wrong or irrelevant to the purposes of your new thesis. In other words, it probably won’t take you as long as you might think to switch gears and support your new thesis, because you’ve probably already done most of the work.

The second thought I would offer (to people who worry that revising their theses will take too long) is a question. Which do you think you could do more quickly and with more energy: painfully construct a sham argument while struggling to push down all your new realizations, or explain an argument you believe and already mostly know?

Obviously, I am expecting that most students will answer that the latter option would be easier, but I may well be wrong. If you think the former would be easier—and you know yourself and your situation better than I do—then I sincerely wish you the best of luck. Write like the wind, and may you find solace sleeping in late on the one day of the week when you don’t have class at some ungodly hour in the early morning.

If your answer is the latter option, if you indeed think it would be easier to explain an argument that you believe and already mostly know, then I would point out that this is exactly what I mean when I suggest that you write honestly (which I mentioned in the previous post, “The point of this blog”). This kind of writing requires putting aside the desire to be right and taking up the job of finding out what’s right. It really is a shift in mindset. Don’t start your essays expecting to know exactly how things will play out. You won’t know at the start, and in any event the whole point is to find out things that you didn’t know when you began. If you’re doing essay writing right, in other words, you will discover things later on in the process of writing that you didn’t think of when you began.

You should write honestly, therefore, for two reasons. The first is that it allows you to accomplish the real purpose of essay writing, which is to discover new ideas and not merely to report on ideas already known.

The second reason is if you use an essay for the purpose it was designed to accomplish, it will (surprise, surprise) make your life as a student a lot easier. Trying to use the essay writing process to report on ideas you already know is like trying to use a hockey stick to play lacrosse. A hockey stick is built for playing hockey, and if you use it for that purpose, you’ll have a lot more luck and a lot less frustration. Towards the end of my previous post, “The point of this blog,” I referenced a plaque at the University of Virginia that instructs students to “Seek the light of truth,” and I suggested that maybe seeking the light of truth wasn’t just a possible thing to do, but actually your job as a student. I would point out now that the essay has been given to you as a tool to accomplish this job of seeking the light of truth. It was not built for proving things you already think, and it will probably not serve you well in that endeavor.

To illustrate what I’ve been talking about, that last paragraph (the one just above this one) is certainly not something that I expected to write when I began drafting this blog post a few hours ago. Actually, this post started out by talking about debate and courtroom argumentation. As you can see, none of that made the final cut—it didn’t seem relevant in the final analysis—but writing through those ideas moved me towards the ones I’ve published in this post. There were certainly more edits, too; I nearly even proofread this post before publishing it. On a larger scale, though, I was worried that the whole thing about getting locked into absolutes wasn’t going to make sense and that I might need to cut it. It ended up staying, just reframed by the introduction paragraph, which I wrote only just before writing this paragraph. My hope in writing that introduction was to help prepare you, as the reader, for the path of thought that my writing ended up taking. And after everything else was said and done, I wrote this paragraph, just to really demonstrate that it’s okay to change things while writing, to show you (again, thinking mainly of first-year students, here) that you will actually have an easier time with college writing if you let yourself be honest and argue the things you come to believe over the course of the writing process.

Maybe my efforts have even paid off.