The Word Count Game

I call it a game. Others might not. Nevertheless, it is something that’s helped me improve my writing tremendously. In a nutshell, here's what you do: check the number of words in an essay, paragraph, or sentence, and then set a goal of how many words you want to condense it down to. So if you have a paragraph that is about 220 words long, you set your sights on getting it closer to 190 words, or maybe 150, or you have an essay that's 1200 words long and you want to get it down to 1000.

Now, this is not a matter of finding the least important sentences in a paragraph or essay and deleting them. This is all about training yourself to scrutinize your writing closely by forcing you to ask just how important every single word is. Suddenly, the individual words are not simply a cluster of words dealing with a central theme, but each one suddenly serves an integral purpose to the structure and presentation of the information. When you play the Word Count Game, every word is accountable for its role in the sentence, and if there's a sentence that can be written with fewer words without losing any important purpose, style, or emphasis, then revise it to have fewer words.

Here's an example from my other blog, Narrative Nuance post “A Brief Introduction to Theme”:

Survival is an abstract concept. Any instance where you have a narrative where the characters are placed in a situation where their main concern becomes one where they need to either find food and shelter or die, it is safe to say that you're dealing with a theme of survival. This abstract concept is a theme because it is shared with plenty of other narratives that don't unfold the same way, like The Lord of the Flies or Hatchet.

That selection of 79 words was revised down to 62 words as:

Survival is an abstract concept. Any narrative where the characters are placed in a situation where the main concern is to find food and shelter or die, is safe to say it’s a tale of survival. Because survival is an abstract concept and because it appears in other narratives, like Lord of the Flies or Hatchet, we can call it a theme.

This revised version removes unnecessary clauses and phrases like “where you have a narrative” and the third sentence is entirely rewritten, but, most importantly, it gives the same information.

There is, however, much more to this process than just finding unnecessary words or swapping out groups of words with fewer words. It is about a close reading and looking for the purpose of your essay. You shouldn't go about this asking yourself “what words can I do without” but rather, “is this the best way for me to say what I want to say?” It makes you go back and think about the purpose of every word, and as you think about the purpose of every word, you'll think of the sentence these words add up to, and from there, the paragraph. It can help eliminate fluff and tangents as you create a clearer, more streamlined piece of writing.

One of the best things that can come from it, though, is getting more ideas. Sometimes, I end up with more words than I started, not because I failed at the game, but because as I looked so closely at what I was writing about I came across ideas and concepts I didn't think of the first time through. The next thing I know, I put the Word Count on hold and explore this new idea I came across.

“Who: Everyone!”: Misusing the Six Journalistic Questions

Here is my opening metaphor: you're at a restaurant. As you are led to your table, you see all of the food everyone else is eating. You don't know the names of the different meals, nor what are appetizers, entrees, or even desserts. It's all food. And it all looks good. So when the waiter hands you a menu, you don't thank them and look for something you want. You simply respond by saying you want everything. Every salad, every soup, every steak, ever sandwich, every pasta, every drink, every desert, every appetizer, every special. 

This is what happens when you are establishing criteria using the Six Journalistic Questions and use the words “every” or “all” or even anything all-inclusive like “Americans” and “parents”. It's misusing a tool by not using it for its specific purpose. Anytime you say, “Who am I writing about? Well, everyone of course” you make serious assumptions that neglect aspects of humanity.

Saying “Everyone” takes every single possible permutation of human demographics and lumps them all together. It's trusting that all of humanity has the same perspectives, backgrounds, histories, cultures, economic statuses, medical conditions, blood types, diet habits, political affiliation, religious beliefs, living conditions, education levels, etc. It's a claim that everyone is the same. As one of my students once said, “it includes the babies in India.” I'll expand this to say it includes the babies that were in India thousands of years ago. Everyone means everyone is alive, will be alive, and has been alive.

The purpose of the six journalistic questions is to avoid these kinds of fallacious decisions by providing a means to make distinctions between criteria and narrowing one's focus. Going through the Six Journalistic Questions’ process is not a slapdash matter: it requires serious consideration.

There are two solutions to this. The first is to recognize you may not need a “who” as part of your Six Journalistic Questions. Not every criteria has to be filled and forcing criteria in can do more harm than good. When a physicist researches and writes about physics principles, they're not concerned with groups of people or demographics, so they wouldn't have any.

The second is the most important and goes back to what the Six Journalistic Questions are for in the first place: asking who does this involve. In these situations, it would be wise to put “who” on hold and go over the other criteria. Once the what, where, when, how, and why are filled, it can be easier to go back and determine if you even need a “who” and look at it in the light of the rest of your criteria.

There are, however, issues that do involve humans, but not demographics. These deal with issues like health, nutrition, education, safety, etc.. I've never seen a Nutrition facts label divided up by demographic or economic level. In these situations, as counterintuitive it may be, there still is not a “who.” This is because the focus of such studies is on the efficacy or validity of certain things.

There are issues, like medical conditions, that can require differentiation. For example, if you're writing about diabetics, “Diabetics” will appear in the “Who,” and if you're dealing with a control group, you'd also have “not diabetics.” But for a health oriented study looking at diabetes, this works because you've singled it down to specific criteria and other “who” may or may not factor in. Good guidelines for one diabetic generally will be good for another. There are of course other ways to focus the study, like looking at how diabetes appears and affects people of different racial backgrounds, but not ever study of diabetes needs to take that course. Odds are, if it is something affecting people in general, you don't need to specify a “who.”

I chose to focus on “who” for this post because it seems to be the main offender, but the same issue can appear anywhere else in the Six Journalistic Questions. Don't make hasty generalizations about the breadth of your topic or misunderstand the purpose of this tool. Like anything, it can be misused. The final piece of advice on this matter is take your time, ask yourself questions, and use this to narrow it down. It isn't a matter of checking off boxes: it’s a matter of refining your writing.

Research All Grown Up: The Literature Review

All Annotated Bibliographies want to be Literature Reviews when they grow up.

So you’ve done your research, you’ve developed your thesis, you have a good idea of what you want to do for your research essay. You have all this helpful research, but you’re at a loss of how to incorporate it it, and prove you’re not just spouting random things, that you’re ideas are grounded in the work of the experts.

This is why we have Literature Reviews. The granddaddy of the Annotated Bibliography, this is a form of writing that fulfills many of the same purposes of the Annotated Bibliography, but while putting them into the essay itself. This isn’t literature as in fiction; rather, this refers to the influential works and writings of the scholars and experts in a field. Basically, you’re taking what the experts have said and bringing it all together.

Both genres, the Annotated Bibliography and the Literature Review, are ways for researchers to present their research. However, Annotated Bibliographies are preliminary pieces, done before the main ideas and concepts are formed, generally so the author can catalogue and make sure they have a basic understanding of their topic and what the experts say about it. Annotated Bibliographies are rarely published and remain a resource for the researcher as they work on a larger piece. The Annotated Bibliography is work researchers do for themselves, which is why it is a popular assignment in writing classes: go through the process of understanding and evaluating your research early on.

Literature Reviews are different. First and foremost, they get published, though not usually independently; they are significant parts of larger pieces of research and fulfill specific purposes. Find a major scientific study and the first couple of pages will likely focus on work other people have done, identifying current theories and concepts. They won’t be comprehensive, i.e., bringing every piece of research ever that’s related to the topic, but it will focus on more recent and more significant ones.

The Literature Review, though, is not where authors provide and discuss their own ideas and conclusions. The Literature Review opens a piece as a kind of information genealogy. In a way, you are taking your Annotated Bibliography and sorting the information by theme or concept (generally using a graduated or comparative method of organization), and showing how different scholars and researchers have addressed similar issues that contribute to your own work. It is a matter of showing how you can take other’s ideas and concepts and synthesize them. Therefore, Literature Reviews generally do three closely related things.

First, it’s how researchers can demonstrate their expertise. Major research pieces can have bibliographies that go on for pages, but some of these sources can be mentioned a handful of times in a research piece. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s the researcher’s opportunity to show the work they’ve done, and the extent of their knowledge and familiarity with the information.

Second, it is where the researcher traces how they developed their ideas, and that their work fits with the rest of the literature. They can take different ideas and synthesize them, bring them together to generate new knowledge and information, tracing the history of their topic, within their own research, and contextualize their work within the greater picture.

Third, it shows how your research fits in the bigger picture. You don't want to just know a lot of stuff, but show you can fit your work in with the work of others. Writing and research don’t take place in a vacuum, and if you try to, or even if you only do some research, you’ll likely just make claims others have made, and done a better job making, before. It’s a good way to showcase your ignorance, and you don’t want to do that.

There’s a lot riding on a Literature Review. It’s an exercise in establishing your credibility and showing the people who know about your topic you’re worth taking seriously. A bad Literature Review can break your piece faster than a bad idea. You could have a great idea, but if you can’t show where it fits with the rest of the research being done, nor can you demonstrate your own familiarity with the discipline, it’s going to be really hard for those who do know to take you seriously.

Why in that order? Methods of Organization

Let’s say you have bad news to pass on to someone. What approach do you take? Do you blurt out the bad news and then run? Do you give a letter and then run? Or do you scuttle up whatever good news you have in order to cushion the blow? Do you consider your timing, delivery, and what other information you have to mitigate the damage?

Welcome to Organization, the simple art of determining what information goes where.

Unfortunately, it sometimes seems like organizing an essay is little more than Paragraphs go here! In all honesty, I blame the 5 Paragraph Essay and the teaching of Transitions. The 5 paragraph essay because it can promote the idea that order doesn't matter: so long as there are three paragraphs addressing the overall topic of the essay, all is well. And Transitions because it takes organization from a significant part of essay writing and turns it into sentences that begin and end paragraphs forced to resemble one another.

Reducing organization to having transitions is kind of like saying there's no difference between a Main Coon, a Sphynx cat, and a Chartreux cat because each one was put in the same funny hat (thank you internet). Each has distinct traits and for accuracy should be recognized individually, as opposed to being just cats in funny hats.

Organization is quite complex. It can be as instrumental in conveying information than any other aspect in a piece of writing because it determines the order the information is presented. It is not enough for information to be there, but knowing where and how to present information influences how later information will be received. Once information is presented, it influences the way other information will be received: how a piece is organized sends messages.

The next step is to make sure your organization sends the right message. For this, I turn to a number of different Methods of Organization. Each method has its own purpose and in turn, conveys a specific message about the information. Not only is it helpful in using these to figure out the order of the paragraphs, but it helps make those pesky transitions easier to write and more fluid because it gives the order purpose.

The methods themselves can be divided into three groups: Sequential, Graduated, and Comparative.

The first, Sequential, deals with the relationship of topics in time:

• Chronological: Organizing events in the order they occurred without considering connections between them.
• Cause and effect: Identifies how one event or situation leads to another.
• Procedural: Identifies specific action to be taken in a specific order.
• Problem to Solution: Explores an issue in detail before exploring ways to resolve it.

The next group is Graduated and deals with information presented in scales from more important to less important, more detailed to less detailed, etc:

• General to Specific: Begins with basic ideas and then explores them in greater detail.
• Familiar to Unfamiliar: Introduces basic, acceptable information before introducing new or controversial topics.
• Climactic: Starts out with simple topics and leads to the most important or exciting detail or information.

Each form of Graduated organization can be reversed. For example, a piece can start out specific and then become more general, etc.

The last group is Comparative and deals with identifying similarities and differences across and between topics:

• Thematic: Organized by distinct topics or ideas.
• Classification: Groups related topics based on similarities.
• Spatial: Identifies the relationship between physical properties.
• Block Compare & Contrast: Explain all of the aspects of one topic before another.
• Point by Point Compare & Contrast: Alternate between specific aspects of two or more topics.

Picking a method of organization can depend on the form and genre of the essay, and its audience, usually dictates what methods are appropriate. There are even situations where an essay will need multiple forms of organization at different times. When considering what methods to use, think of the kind of information you're dealing with. From there, it becomes easier to structure an essay and move from paragraph to paragraph because the form of the essay has a purpose, and transitions become easier to write. 

I like to say that every paragraph has two purposes. The first is to prepare the reader for the next paragraph. The second is to prepare the reader for the rest of the essay. Determining and using methods of organization just helps you figure where and why each paragraph goes where it does.

The Toulmin Model

The Toulmin Model is a way to structure arguments to best understand what the information does, and the relationship each bit of information has with everything else. It helps us to dissect or prepare an argument by demonstrating how each bit of information relates to the claim being made: the model is made up of the following parts:

• Claim: The basic argument being made.
• Grounds: The facts, data, and evidence the claim is based on.
• Warrant: The logical connection between the claim and the grounds.
• Backing: Evidence that establishes the credibility of the warrant.
• Rebuttal: Restrictions placed on the claim,
• Qualifier: Words that denote how certain the claim is, like “probably,” “rarely,” “certainly,” etc. These are made to accommodate the rebuttal.

You'll notice each term has a direct connection with another, even the claim. When forming an argument, or constructing a Toulmin Model, these components are best expressed as brief statements to simply demonstrate the corresponding information, which in turn, shows its relationship to everything else. Here's an example based on the cost of college textbooks:

• Claim: Textbooks are too expensive for college students.
• Grounds: Individual textbooks can be more than a hundred dollars and students need to buy a couple of books for each class.
• Warrant: Students rarely have a lot of money and have to deal with tuition, so several hundred dollars in textbooks strains already limited funds.
• Backing: Increasing tuition costs; delayed graduation rates as students take time off of school to work.
• Rebuttal: Some students have scholarships. Not all disciplines have very expensive textbooks.
• Qualifier: Most textbooks are too expensive for many college students.

The Toulmin Model can be used for any level of argument: fact, definition, value, and policy. The above example is a fact level argument because the grounds and warrant seek to clarify whether or not textbooks are in fact too expensive. Consider it again as a policy level argument. Please note this is all hypothetical!

• Claim: Because textbooks are too expensive for college students, the university bookstore should lower the prices of textbooks.
• Grounds: Individual textbooks can cost more than a hundred dollars and students need to buy a couple of books for each class. The University Bookstore has a considerable profit from other sales.
• Warrant: Students rarely have a lot of money and have to deal with tuition, so several hundred dollars in textbooks further strains their limited funds. With a sizable profit elsewhere, the bookstore can lower textbook prices and still be solvent.
• Backing: Increasing tuition costs. Delayed graduation rates as students take time off of school to work. Profit and income statements of the university bookstore.
• Rebuttal: Some students have scholarships. Not all disciplines have very expensive textbooks.
• Qualifier: Because most textbooks are too expensive for college students, the university bookstore should lower the prices of many textbooks.

As the type of argument changes, the claim naturally changes also, and because the claim changes, the other information has to change to accommodate it. 

Note it is possible for the rebuttal to entirely refute an argument. If the rebuttal had been the bookstore profits fund scholarships and other academic programs, which in turn help students, the claim would have to change along with it, either being dropped entirely, or the argument would need to suggest eliminating or funding those programs another way to benefit more students a little, rather than a few students a lot.

Ultimately, everything pivots around the claim: it is the focal point of the argument and is to be defended or refuted. While Toulmin is not an organizational method for writing an essay, it provides a strong basis for analyzing, understanding, and developing arguments by giving every bit of information, whether hard evidence, logical inferences, or potential rebuttals, a specific place.

Introduction...or exposition?

I think some writers feel a need to introduce their subject matter when introducing their essay, to give exposition, which is basically providing background information. This issue shows itself in two major forms: in the introduction, and as the body of an essay.

Essays with expository introductions are when an author, rather than using their Six Journalistic Question criteria to guide them, insists on giving a broad background on the topic, referencing important figures, events, and developments, few, if any, of which will be explored later in the essay. A sentence here or there is bad enough, but the entire introduction being commandeered for the sake of exposition makes it an introduction to the subject and not an introduction to the essay. I think this issue stems from a misunderstanding about what an introduction is for. Introductions don't introduce the whole subject matter to the reader, just the specific topics the essay is focusing on.

You resolve this by taking audience into consideration. First, does your audience need the exposition? An expert in the field wouldn't. A teacher might ask for some exposition, though. If there has not been a request (or requirement) for exposition and if you can reasonably assume your audience will be familiar with the topic, then no exposition. If the situation does call for exposition, keep it out of the introduction. This can create a false sense of the essay being about the broad history of the subject itself.

Expository essays are worse. This is when the exposition is the body of an essay. Note that I didn't say in the body of the essay, I said is the body of the essay. I have read essays that have an interesting and engaging introduction and thesis, only to be met with stifling exposition that ends in time for the conclusion, usually addressing topics new to the essay. Paragraph after paragraph, page after page of it. I'm reading a different essay than I was led to believe I'd be reading. Than the introduction promised me I'd be reading.

I can't be as generous with this one when guessing at a cause. These essays always seem to me like the author has something to say, but isn't even trying to give it in any detail. It's as if the construction of the thesis and its introduction ought to be enough, so the rest of the essay is just fluff: something needs to go there, so how about background information?

These essays almost exclusively outline the chronological events behind the subject itself and suggest that rather than doing analytical work, the author has simply regurgitated details about dates and events. The major culprits behind this are essays about historical events or breakthroughs, anything from pirates to computers, where, rather than offering new insights or interpretations on a historical situation, the author simply traces the events leading up to the situation they should be analyzing. The introductions and conclusions of such essays usually suggest an insight or interpretation, but the essay isn't interested in developing any. Sometimes, the conclusions address topics quite alien to what was in the introduction.

In both these situations, whether an expository introduction or essay, the result is an essay with mismatched introductions, conclusions, and bodies. A hodgepodge of related but unnecessary information where critical thinking should be.

However, there will be times when you need exposition. If so, you should keep it down to a paragraph or two. If the situation calls for exposition, wait until the introduction is done (so never the first paragraph), and then take some time to give only the absolutely essential details. If you discover your first paragraph is more exposition than introduction, then bump it from Slot 1 to Slot 2 and write a new introduction. If the body of the essay is the problem, take those pages of exposition and get them down to a paragraph or two so you free up the rest of the essay for more important information: presenting and defending your own thesis. I would say even if your audience is an expert on your subject and even if exposition wasn't required, a little can help show your expertise and familiarity with the subject. But no matter what, keep it brief and keep it relevant to the essay topic.

There is certainly merit in being able to summarize and paraphrase; it demonstrates familiarity with the research and the topic. However, the ability to develop one's own ideas and conclusions from that information and present and defend your ideas coherently, is of a much greater value.

Don't sink too deep: Inappropriate Topics

When I first started teaching composition as a graduate student, some of my colleagues openly encouraged their students to write about sensitive, controversial issues: gun control, abortion, gay marriage, etc... Others forbade students from addressing these topics. It seems standard composition teachers will go one way or the other. On the surface, this can seem like the instructor's bias: they don't want to get a lot of essays that disagree with their own personal beliefs or opinions, or they have an agenda they want to push. While I'm sure there are instructors that do take such an approach, there are more practical reasons for restricting available topics.

For example, a student of mine once proposed writing about No Child Left Behind. Granted this isn't as sensitive a topic as those listed above, but it's still significant. I emailed the student saying if they were to write about No Child Left Behind, they would need to start by reading the law itself. I provided a link to the 670 page document.

And No Child Left Behind is just a simple example. Doing gun control, abortion, or gay marriage would require careful analysis of decades of legislation, court cases; and then accompanying sociological, psychological, biological, and chemical research, before diving into the world of ethics. To complicate matters, the myriad of opinion pieces on such topics found in newspapers, magazines, and blogs are highly subjective and therefore questionable, resulting in a continuation of Confirmation Bias on any side of the issue. So, properly addressing one of these topics would require hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of research; not all of it reliable, spanning decades of both primary and secondary sources, to be in a situation to authoritatively say something about it. Not many freshmen feel like putting that much effort into three pages.

When you consider the scope of research, this actually broadens inappropriate topics into less controversial areas, like childhood obesity and organic farming, and even more mundane, less controversial areas. Let me share one of my favorite examples. A colleague of mine said that a student of hers wanted to prove who Jack the Ripper was... in a freshman composition course. At the end of the semester but before the final essays were due, my colleague said she asked the student who Jack the Ripper was. The student hadn't come to a conclusion.

Personally, I’m not a criminologist, but I don't think there's a branch of anything that hasn't contributed something to the resolution of this Victorian murder mystery. Psychology, sociology, biology, chemistry, even literature has offered conjectures. There have been hundreds of books on the matter, and, I'm sure, many more articles, all of it ranging from the fanciful to the serious. To definitively prove the identity of Jack the Ripper in a matter of weeks would be to try and do what hundreds or thousands of experts have tried to do for more than a century.

Whether or not a topic is or is not appropriate should be determined by the structure of the class. Some topics, because of their scope and the research it would take to handle them, go far beyond the demands of a general education composition course. Education should be challenging and students should rise to that challenge, but it can be far too easy to get yourself in too deep.

I want my students to push and challenge themselves. I want them to branch out, learn, and grow; but my students are college undergraduates taking a course that is designed to give them writing tools for other courses. Many haven't settled on what to major in and are taking three or four courses in addition to mine, as well as their own social lives, jobs, and family obligations. I want to challenge my students; not set them up for failure.

Returning to my colleagues who encouraged students to write about controversial issues. After a year of teaching, pretty much all of them had changed their tune: they forbid their students from such topics. They hadn't undergone a moral or ethical change, but they had a better understanding of what their students could handle.

Keep your Promises: Introductions

A lot of people ache over writing introductions, but not a whole lot gets said about them. Outside of leading an introduction with a “hook” of some sort and closing it with a thesis, with a number of sentences in the middle, there seems to be little else said about introductions. Sometimes, I've seen students take the topic sentences of their paragraphs and put them, in sequence, for an introduction.

This scares me. It scares me because it offers either no guidance about what should go into those sentences, or, it offers bad advice, suggesting there's little difference between an introduction and an outline.

Rather than hook, sentences, thesis, or outline in paragraph form, I prefer to think of an introduction as a promise: when details are placed in an introduction, an author promises their reader that these topics will be addressed in more detail throughout the essay. Let me describe this in terms of the Six Journalistic Questions.

As I have discussed elsewhere, the Six Journalistic Questions are a powerful tool in determining what goes into an essay and a thesis; this holds true for introductions (and conclusions) as well. This leads me to the first lesson about introductions and the Six Journalistic Questions: if it isn't in the essay, it isn't in the introduction.

Allow me to elaborate. You have the the Six Journalistic Questions that give you the criteria for your essay. Anything in the essay that goes outside of these criteria constitutes a tangent – going beyond the circle of your essay. Placing information in an introduction that is not relevant to your criteria is kind of the opposite: you lead your reader to believe that the scope of the essay is actually broader than it really is.

For example, you're writing an essay about electrical batteries and you drop a sentence into your introduction stating, that

Alessandro Volta invented the first modern electric battery in 1800, building on Luigi Galvani's discoveries regarding electricity.

Seems harmless enough of a statement, and perfectly relevant. And then the rest of the essay only discusses modern batteries or the concept in general. This is bad. Bad because the introduction introduced Alessandro Volta, his battery, and Luigi Galvani (who experimented with frog legs and electricity) into your essay. This then gives readers an expectation these individuals will be addressed in more detail later.

Imagine delivering a presentation on mono-crops, and you place a banana and a potato on a table on the stage. They're there. Everyone can see them. They are relevant and pertinent examples to the topic at hand. But you never do anything about them. They linger on the stage waiting to be included. More importantly, your audience is staring at them wondering when you're going to address them. In the end, their presence is more confusing and distracting than helpful.

The solution is then to check every statement – every detail – made in the introduction against your criteria as outlined in the Six Journalistic Questions. If you can't fit something in, it means you need to either revise your introduction to fit it in, or revise the essay to get it out. If everything fits, then you'll have a more coherent lead to your thesis than a chain of topic sentences and more time to clarify what these topics have in common, properly introducing your subject matter to your reader.

There's a natural outcome of this: the introduction may need to be written last. I once showed a draft to a professor who pointed out my two-sentence introduction. I responded that I needed to figure out what I was writing first. As you work on an essay, ideas will get weeded out and new ones will crop up. Just as you have to revise and write reverse outlines to accommodate the growth that an essay undergoes, you have to monitor the Six Journalistic Questions and make sure the introduction, thesis, and essay do not deviate. If you do so, you’ll be making a promise you can keep.

And then there's conclusions: as it turns out, the same basic rules apply. There are some differences, but I'll address another time.

Foster a desire to learn

Sooner or later, every instructor is presented with the question: “Why do I need this?” Or its accompanying statement: “This is useless.” These are frustrating for someone who has devoted their lives to teaching a discipline, and valid explanations for any discipline can be made. But what's frustrating to me is the very mindset that allows these questions to formulate.

Rather than demand practical explanations, we should take advantage of the opportunity to learn.

We should want to learn.

Once when tutoring with a fellow tutor (who was earning his MA in Pure Math) a student protested that geometry was worthless. We then proceeded to point out the building we were in, the doorways we walked through, the tables we sat at, and the chairs we sat on were possible because of geometry. I think it’s safe to say, though, that the issue wasn't geometry. As a teacher and tutor, I have seen plenty of exacerbated students who wanted to give up but didn’t. I believe the problem was that the student wasn’t interested in learning.

Without a desire to improve, our learning will likely remain superficial: we may know important facts and details and figures, but only be able to reproduce them. Without continued learning our knowledge will become trivia, relics of an antiquated past as new theories, proofs, concepts, and technologies pass us by.

Somehow we've gained this perspective that learning takes place in classrooms with our noses in textbooks and filling in worksheets, as if the rest of our lives are something we're being barred from until we've completed the arduous task of education. We plow through classes we need for the sake of a piece of paper with shiny lettering.

I don't mean to say earning a degree isn't important: it's a testament to your formalized education, the specialized work that qualifies and shows you are capable in a specialized field, but it should not stop there. It should never stop there.

If you're in college, and don't have a desire to learn, you should either get out of college or find that desire. Why study something if you don't have a desire to be knowledgeable of it? Why spend years of your life and thousands of dollars to foster something you don’t have a desire for. I think we've forgotten that learning can be a pleasurable experience. Rather than shutting ourselves up in our fields of study or perceiving education as a temporary need, never to be revisited once the diploma is obtained, we should approach education with joy and enthusiasm and continue seeking it even after the tassels change sides.

This is fine and well for your own discipline, but what about general education courses? I've had students going into the sciences and engineering who consider their composition and humanities courses to be a waste of their time. And, in a melancholy way, I agree with them. Not because the humanities are useless for the sciences and engineering, but because it’s self defeating: if you don't think you'll get anything out of course, you won't. On the contrary: my advice would be to approach every opportunity to learn with excitement and not get so preoccupied with how you'll use it in the future.

If you don't value what you learn, you'll discard it, and whatever personal, powerful contribution it could make later on will be lost. Don't go into your world culture or survey of jazz class and bemoan the wasted time and money when you could be studying core classes towards your chemistry degree. I can't tell you what you'll learn, because learning is deeply personal. What I can tell you is if you perceive it as wasted, then it will be. So don't waste a powerful opportunity to become a more informed, capable, and happy person.

As for my students, I don't expect them to become English majors and study literature, nor do I expect them to devote their lives to research in their disciplines. But I do hope they will see their education as a joy and an opportunity, so when I assign them research projects and as they choose their majors they will pursue something they want to know and learn.

Reverse Outlining with Topic Sentences

An outline is an essay condensed into a list of its topics in the order they appear in the paper. On the other hand, a reverse outline is when an author reads over a draft and identifies just what it is they are saying. Reverse Outlining helps you see just what it is that you wrote.

Putting together a reverse outline can be an interesting experience. We can see how our ideas actually came out, how they changed, and even how our perception on our topic changed as we wrote. Or, we can miss the point and end up just seeing what we want to see in our drafts, as opposed to what’s really there.

Let me elaborate. You did your outline and it went well. You wrote a draft and it went well. But when you go to do your reverse outline, you know what you wanted to say in each paragraph, and so rather than writing what your essay says, you write down what you want it to say. This is only going to cause problems. Instead, I recommend trying the following when reverse outlining:

1. Identify the topic sentence in a paragraph. Look for the sentence in the paragraph that best explains what the paragraph is doing: which could work as a paraphrase of the paragraph. You may be surprised to find that this is not always the first sentence; it may come in the middle or the end, and you may find the paragraph ended up addressing a different topic than you had anticipated. No matter where it is, copy this sentence into your outline as is.
2. Reread the paragraph for tangential sentences. I'm not talking about tangents from the essay thesis: I mean tangents from the paragraph's topic sentence. It is when a paragraph does things or addresses issues we didn't originally expect, but these things still may be relevant to the essay as a whole. Take the sentences that best represents the shift or tangent and make it a subtopic of the paragraph's topic on the outline.
3. Repeat until the essay is done. Do this process for each and every paragraph. Don't fret too much over the essay thesis, but focus on identifying the sentences that mark changes in topic throughout the essay and within paragraphs.
4. Revise. If you've done it right, you've just identified topic consistency issues in your essay, which will help you go back and make the necessary changes. This may be as simple as revising the topic sentence to accommodate a concept introduced in the paragraph, or it could require hefty revisions.

I recently did this with an essay of mine, and while most of my paragraphs were fine, a few introduced tangents. I had to use a variety of strategies to fix these issues. Almost all of them required some revision to the topic sentence, and while a couple didn't need anything else (to resolve the tangent), most needed more attention. I had rewritten sentences, and deleted some unnecessary words.

Thankfully, though, no paragraphs had more than one tangent. With one exception.

After I identified the topic sentence of one paragraph, I identified four tangents.

Four. An essay as a whole shouldn't have any. I had a paragraph with four. I identified the issues, so that as I moved to the next draft, I could outline properly and make the necessary changes. But had I never taken these measures, I probably never would have found and fixed these tangents, and would have only made the matter worse when doing normal revisions. I probably would have encountered this paragraph and would have known there were problems, but without identifying the topic sentence and tangents, the issue would have remained muddled and my attempts to mend it would have just made it more confusing.

The main lesson to be learned from this is outlining is more than just summarizing what a paragraph says or what you want it to say. Readers don't have the luxury of knowing what you're thinking. They have to go off of what you have written. So, make sure what you give readers is clear and coherent, from sentences, to topics and paragraphs, to the thesis.

For clarity's sake: Topic Sentences

Imagine going to a different city for the first time. You could be moving, meeting friends, starting a new job, whatever. You have a goal in mind, but when you get to the city, you're confronted by a lack of street signs. No matter how neat and orderly the streets are, there's little more than the unique features along the streets to help you find your way. Stuff like, brick houses with blue roofs, or black wrought iron fences, or the house with a stone lion occupying the porch. You have a vague idea where you want to go, but even if you stop and ask directions, they're vague and indirect, relying on specific landmarks you've seen a dozen times.

The thesis is the destination. It gives you an idea of where you're going and how to get there when reading or writing an essay. But topic sentences are the distinct, more specific directions letting you know the precise path to take. The thesis may be the address, but the topic sentences are the finer indicators of when to turn and which way to go. Just as the thesis tells you what the essay is about, topic sentences tell you what the paragraph is about.

This means an essay can be subdivided from the thesis into more specific subtopics, each one explained in its own paragraph. The same principle even applies to sentence structures: a sentence has a single, specific idea it’s trying to convey. Any less and it’s an incomplete sentence; more than one and it’s a run on sentence. The same applies to paragraphs and essays; an essay with a split thesis is basically a run on sentence.

Topic sentences generally appear at the beginning of a paragraph. Not necessarily the first sentence, but odds are it will be close. By placing a distinct topic sentence at the start of a paragraph, it gives readers a lens through which to interpret the paragraph. Like I said above: it gives direction and creates expectations. When those expectations aren’t met, we run into breakdowns in organization, essays and paragraphs that say more than they should, and that means tangents. Topic sentences that do not directly support the thesis are defined as tangents. Keeping track of one's thesis and topic sentences is a good way to make sure an essay is not diverting and the sentences stay on topic.

Lining up theses, topic sentences, and paragraphs makes composing an essay manageable because, with them, you can worry about an essay in sections and paragraphs rather than as a whole. Once you can identify the purpose of a paragraph in the bigger scheme of the essay (with, of course, a topic sentence), it makes it easier to focus on the individual sentences. Each sentence plays an integral role in developing the thesis of the essay, but tying one sentence to dozens or hundreds to the thesis is intimidating, especially when they need to fit in the flow of the rest of the essay. Instead, line up the topic sentences with the thesis, and the individual sentences with the topic sentences of their respective paragraphs.

Clear topic sentences are an important way to make the otherwise daunting task of writing an essay manageable: it makes it easier to keep track of what goes where, which helps with organization and revision. With topic sentences, you can create better outlines, manage organization, and eliminate tangents. Most of all, though, it helps you go from writing long essays to writing manageable paragraphs, each with a distinct topic.

Show that you Know: Source Integration Overview

Source integration is a matter of properly introducing, referencing, citing, and explaining research sources. On the one hand this is important for coherent writing. On the other, it's an important way to demonstrate familiarity with the research itself. If a source is poorly integrated, it suggests the writer didn't understand the information.

So, when you embark on a research project and are faced with referencing your research in your essay, take the following into consideration.

• Research First: When starting a research project, you shouldn't start with drafting the actual essay. Instead, invest in research and learn more about your topic.
• Active Research: Good source integration means good research, and good research means taking the time to read closely, take notes, and evaluate your sources.
• Take Notes: Jotting down interesting information, highlighting or bookmarking intriguing passages, and otherwise making personal records of what you learn from your research.
• Introduce & Explain sources: Any time you put research into your own writing you are repurposing and recontextualizing it. Therefore, it is essential to take the time to explain your research before summarizing, paraphrasing, or quoting it (also, see Hit & Run Quotes below).
• Summarize: Explaining the main points, thesis, and arguments of a source.
• Paraphrase: Taking a selection of a larger piece and reiterating the main points in your own words.
• Quote: Using the exact words of a source in your own piece.
• Blended Words: Carefully integrating a quote with your own words.
• In-Text Citations: Knowing where to place in-text citations, and why they go there.
• Synthesis: Finding and recognizing where your sources have related points so you can reference them together.

Knowing how to integrate sources is important, but sometimes a good way to figure out why we do something is to understand how not to do it.

• Hit & Run Quotes: This term comes from a book entitled They Say/I Say, and it refers to improperly introduced and explained quotes.
• Patchwriting: Paraphrasing and quoting at the same time and without quotation marks. This involves taking a selection from a source, changing a few words here and there, and not treating it as a quote. This can be borderline plagiarism. Instead, quote or use more of your own words.
• Just the first few pages: Don't just rely on a few pithy statements from the opening pages of a book or article; take the time to go through the entire piece and you'll find more useful information.
• Excessive Integration: There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Sometimes, it's easier to just quote ad nauseum or even give too much supplementary information.
• Plagiarism: The failure to properly acknowledge research, or, taking the work of another passing it off as your own. This is one of the worst things you can ever do.

Improper source integration can harm an essay. Sometimes it’s easy to just drop in quotes or citations and call it good. However, good source integration is more than just a stylistic issue. Coherent writing means a coherent thought process, so coherently integrating sources suggests a better understanding of the material. An author who drops in quotes willy-nilly probably just found and crammed them in there and doesn’t understand what they are saying. Taking the time to introduce, explain, synthesize, and blend shows you know the information well enough it is part of your own thought process and knowledge: it shows you are confident in your knowledge and you can control the information.

Disrespect, lies, deceit and...typeface

I normally strive for a pleasant, jovial but serious tone in my posts. If I can develop a joke or appropriate analogy, I’ll use it to lighten the mood and as a teaching moment.

This is not one of those posts.

Sooner or later, every year, I hear someone say something about making slight, seemingly imperceptible changes to the typeface to make an essay seem just long enough. Why use font size 12 when 13 will remove a line or two on every page? Why have inch margins when a tenth and an inch will shorten those lines?

Well, there's a lot of reasons why not.

For starters, there's the issues addressed in the post “Why The Page Count?” to explain the logic behind a page requirement. I'm not going to rehash those here. Ultimately, maintaining the typeface isn't a matter of assignment requirements: it's a matter of trust and respect.

In my own experience, my first year teaching consisted of 4 courses of about 20 students writing 15 typed pages each: 1200 total typed pages. The next year, 5 courses of 20 students writing 20 typed pages: 2000 total. Now I was just a graduate student, I wouldn’t be surprised if full-time professors, after a decade of teaching, have graded as many as 30,000 typed pages.

So I wonder what goes through student's heads when they triple space an essay, or set the margins on the left and right to be an inch and a quarter rather than just an inch. Thinking an instructor won't pick up on alterations to the typeface is like expecting a golfer to not know the difference between woods and irons.

When a student does this it shatters, literally breaks, whatever trust and confidence the instructor had in them. It is cheating. It is a student assuming the rules and expectations instructors establish don’t apply to them. I stress to my students that this is important not just because it’s an arbitrary standard, but because it keeps grading fair. Having a page formatted with 1.25 inch margins instead of 1 inch can increase the length of an essay by about 1/7th. Almost 15%. That is, in terms of grading, the difference between an A- and a C+. Should a project be accepted when it openly skirts around 15% of the work?

So what if someone forgets? I’m open to this possibility and I’ve seen it happen, but it usually depends on the circumstances of the situation. I had a student once who, after a great track record made one significant formatting mistake late in the semester after having done theretofore pristine work. We discussed the issue, the student revised, resubmitted, and all was well. Lesson learned.

Sometimes, though, even drumming and hammering the lesson won’t do. I’ve had students submit every essay incorrectly formatted. I reminded them in the feedback. I plead with them indirectly when addressing the class, and some still didn’t fix it. My approach in these situations was simple: if after weeks and months of my instruction and feedback, a student still has not figured out the need to change the typeface it really makes me wonder what they learned. Forgetfulness is one thing, but at this point, it’s negligence.

It upsets me when people suggest doing this so flippantly, but more so when people actually do it. Take the length specifications seriously. Skimming on the length of an essay is not too different from, say, ignoring test questions and expecting the instructor just to ignore them when grading. Most of all, though, this is disrespectful to peers: those who did the work, who filled their pages and followed directions. I rigidly teach formatting not because I’m obsessed with it, nor because students need to know MLA or APA or Chicago, but because it keeps grading fair. It keeps everyone’s three, five, or ten pages the same three, five, or ten pages. But insisting four pages is indeed five, is a deception, a lie, and a blatant act of disrespect to instructors and peers.

Rogerian Argumentation

Rogerian Argumentation addresses some of the main misconceptions about arguments: that they are confrontational, oppressive, and center around at least two competitive, incompatible perspectives.

On the contrary. Rogerian Argumentation is centered around principles of mutual understanding, sympathy, and corroboration. Its purpose is to find a common ground between the two parties: a balance where both sides of the issue can come to an agreement. It is a much more amicable way to discuss differences.

Rogerian Arguments follow a four-step process designed to both ingratiate yourself to opposition and to help you better understand and sympathize with them:

• Address the issue. It's important to identify that there is an issue – not that you have an issue or someone else has an issue but that an issue exists. While being careful not to take sides, you should address the issue by taking a serious look at the situation from a neutral perspective and address what both sides can agree on.
• Identify positives and negatives of the opposition. You aren’t trying to bring down your opposition: you are trying to show your understanding. This way, you present yourself as concerned about the issue and sympathetic to their concerns without tearing down their entire argument. Sometimes, we can feel inclined to point out every fallacy and short-coming, but rarely are things so simple and convenient. Instead of tearing down, build them up, and show you are sympathetic to your opposition.
• Identify positives and negatives of your own stance. Rather than lift your own stance on the issue as a paradigm, you should own up to its shortcomings: making your own stance seem ideal can be just as off-putting as tearing down an opposing side. Instead of championing your own stance, approach your stance as if you were a third-party. Be objective and be honest.
• Compromise. Having established that you understand and are sympathetic to both sides of the issue, it is time to work out a compromise: propose a plan that employs the strengths and positive aspects of both sides, while simultaneously minimizing the weaknesses and negative aspects. By suggesting a compromise, you recognize your opposition has a voice in the matter, and you disagree with but still respect, as opposed to disregarding all different opinions.

Analyzing both sides of an issue can help us understand the complexities of a problem and others' perspectives. It’s all too easy to limit our own perspectives, rather than consider the opinions or concerns of others, or even take a serious look at the problem itself, but we can mire ourselves with our preoccupations and prejudices. Rogerian Argumentation gives us a way to reevaluate just how we see and deal with problems or topics.

By way of disclaimer, I want to add, while the principles behind Rogerian Argumentation can be be applied to any situation, compromise is not always an option. One side may not be willing to concede to a compromise, or a mutually beneficial option simply is not feasible. 

However, no matter what the situation, take time to explore, understand, and in particular, articulate the positions of your opposition.

Is It Worth Using? The Appropriateness of Sources and The Rhetorical Triangle

Not all sources are created equally. Some sources are better than others.

This post deals with research, but not how to use research. Rather, whether or not the sources are worth using. Unreliable or inappropriate sources can actually hurt your credibility because it suggests your research is insufficient, and if the information you are using to develop your argument is bad, then your argument will also be bad.

The hard part is in determining whether or not a source is reliable. Granted there are some indicators that will almost guarantee good sources – government web pages, peer reviewed journals, university publications – but these aren't the only reliable sources, and only deal with one aspect of reliability: who published it? While this can be a good start, it is important to evaluate a source from multiple angles. The angles I recommend evaluating from stem from the Rhetorical Triangle:

• Ethos: In a way, Ethos is how an author presents themselves in their writing: their ability to demonstrate their authority in the text itself. They may do this by referencing their own research or referencing their experience and work in the field, which is sometimes evident through their terminology and style. In short, whether or not the text presents itself authoritatively.
• Logos: If the source's conclusions don't make sense, or if they rely on logical fallacies to support their claims, then the source is not reliable. The source should move easily from topic to topic, without any jumps in logic, and should be in agreement with other sources on the same topic.
• Pathos: For whom was it written? This actually returns to the issue of publication; peer reviewed pieces will be written for experts. It is possible to identify the intended readership of a piece based on how detailed it is, or on the terminology used. A piece that appropriately uses specified vocabulary will be for a more educated audience than one that doesn't, and one that misuses terminology will be one to stay away from.

Evaluating sources is a matter of looking for textual evidence showing the author's appropriate use of Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. For a classic example, I turn to Wikipedia. Wikipedia gets a bad rap because it is collaborative - anyone and everyone can go and make changes to it and it is frequently shot down on that basis alone. However, like I said before, that’s only looking at it from one perspective: it’s important to consider it from multiple angles:

• Ethos: Despite the collaborative, anyone-can-do-it nature of Wikipedia, most Wikipedia pages have references lists and citations, like any decent piece of research. These pages are also checked and double checked by users who make sure that the information is correct and accurately presented. Whatever few bad vandals there are, there are many more that make sure the information is good.
• Logos: The information on Wikipedia tends to make sense: it's logical, and users can keep the information straight. With this in mind though, it's a good idea to go back and double check Wikipedia pages in case there was faulty information. So, it could not be reliable on this basis, but it isn't the nail in the coffin for this resource.
• Pathos: It's an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are designed to be neutral and provide readily understandable information for people who have even a superficial understanding. This means the information on Wikipedia, while likely trustworthy, will not go into any substantial depth. The information is cursory; superficial. It's basic information that someone doing serious research should already know.

In short, Wikipedia is a reliable source – but it is not an appropriate one. It’s information is accurate, but superficial. You can do better.

Once we stop and understand that just because something is reliable does not mean it is appropriate, we can look at our research differently. It's like when I have students who count fact sheets as resources: lists of dates, figures, and sometimes fancy info-graphics without any serious analysis. The information may be perfectly reliable, but if you are committed to doing serious research, leave the sundries aside and focus on the sources that explore the concepts in detail.

Active Research: An Overview of Research

Every composition course I’ve ever taught has had a research component, and in some it’s more prevalent than others. With each course, I hope my students understand that they take composition classes not just to learn to write but to be better prepared to work in the disciplines they're studying. I want my students to understand research is an important part of why they’re in school. We don't just research to satisfy assignment requirements, but to learn: it’s the same reason we go to school.

Good research requires more than skimming a few sources and quoting a few quaint lines. It involves a lot of work to properly read and understand the research being done, so here’s a few things to bear in mind:

• Selection: Taking the first few results on a Google search or books from the library shelf and only using these is not research. It's important to read, or even skim, through a plethora of sources to determine which ones are worth taking a closer look at. It may take some time to find sources pertinent to your topic.
• Close Reading and Note Taking: Skimming is okay when selecting which sources to use, but research requires more than just that. Research involves reading closely and taking notes to help yourself understand, process, and, most importantly, retain the information.
• Authority: An expert in a field can tell when someone who isn't an expert tries to pass themselves off as one. Having authority as a researcher and writer means you recognize and understand the breadth and complexity of your field, while also understanding there is a lot you just don't know yet.
• Hypothesis: A hypothesis is what you expect your thesis to be. In order to properly hypothesize, you need to have a basic understanding of the topic – and you need research to do that.
• Quoting and Paraphrasing: It isn't enough to just read something and cite it; you need to take the information and fairly and correctly present it in your writing and develop upon those ideas.
• Summary: Similar to quoting and paraphrasing, but rather than selections from a piece, summarizing involves describing the entire piece, cover to cover.
• Evaluation: Determining whether or not a source is worth using. This is more than the aforementioned selection because it’s going from if a source is worth reading to considering its reliability or how it can be used.
• Citing: Making sure you are showing credit where credit is due. Properly citing shows your understanding of conventions in your discipline and respect for those whose work you are using. Any time you use the ideas, concepts, or words of others, you show where it came from.
• Plagiarism: Failing to cite. Not showing where you got your ideas from is tantamount to stealing. Don't do it.

In addition to relevant topics, a few genres deal specifically with research.

• Annotated Bibliography: A list of sources with accompanying commentary, general summaries or evaluations of the sources in question. These are rarely published but are extremely useful tools in research.
• Literature Review: These can be stand alone essays, but are generally the opening pages to research pieces. They address the research going into the piece itself, demonstrating how the writer developed their conclusions and hypotheses, while simultaneously establishing their authority through their familiarity with the research.

When you approach research assignments, don't just stop when you have enough to fill a works cited page and scatter a few citations in your writing. Research is an invaluable opportunity to learn, to become more knowledgeable and expert about your topic, to hone your interests in specific ways, or to even learn just where your interests lie. Research, therefore, cannot be passive: it has to be active, involving multiple steps and hard work, not because it's important to do research assignments, but because it is important to learn.

The Rhetorical Triangle

Once, I invited a friend to give a brief presentation to my Freshman composition students. I had attended his presentation at a conference; I had attended for moral support. He presented on an engineering topic. It took about three minutes for me to be lost.

After my friend presented to my students, he repeated it in layman’s terms. He refrained from his complex formulas and terminology, and simplified his methodology. My friend didn't adapt his subject or findings, but rather his rhetoric.

Rhetoric refers to the forms and techniques writers and speakers use, and helps us better understand who is writing, for whom it is being written, and what is being written. This concept dates back to Aristotle, from whom we have the corresponding terms Ethos, Pathos, and Logos, which make up what is commonly called the Rhetorical Triangle. By identifying and focusing on each of these individually and in relationship to one another, it is possible to make sure our writing has a purpose and, rather than simply being an amalgamation of words, it can achieve that purpose.

Ethos – Who does the writing; authority. This refers to the author and, by extension, their authority. 

This is not as simple as the author identifying their credentials, but is done by their handling of the information and their research. It would be awkward in most pieces for an author to flaunt their training, experience, degrees, certifications, etc. Instead, a stronger use of Ethos comes from demonstrating an understanding of what is going on in the field. A surgeon who brags about how many lives they've saved, but is unfamiliar with recent advances in surgical practice isn't the best surgeon. It would be better to go to someone who stays on top of their field and deftly uses current and reasonable information.

Pathos – The writing is written for whom; audience awareness: how the piece is written for its audience.

Using Pathos involves appealing to the interests and concerns of the target audience, as well as considering their own level of expertise. This can range from the language used to the amount of detail: the more expert the audience, the more technical the language and the more detailed the information. Good Pathos will consider, and even involve researching, the intended audience so their specific concerns are addressed. Bad Pathos will either make something too complicated, too simple, or not make it relevant enough for the audience; it can alienate your audience, or worse, disrespect them.

Logos – What is written; logic. Refers to the logic of the piece of writing – the arguments and ideas being put forward in the writing. 

In its purest sense, logic is If A, then B, or If A and B, then C. Therefore, logos is how well the essay itself articulates the important aspects of its topic and draws them together into a conclusion. Logos will manifest itself primarily in the content, thesis, and organization of an essay; and in how all three interact. An essay with weak transitions (an organization issue) likely has a weak thesis as well, because the arguments presented in the essay are not clearly going from topic to topic and building towards a solid conclusion. The essay may say if A and B then C, but if the essay does not make it clear how the combination of A and B yield C, then the audience will be lost and confused.

Conclusion

Different situations and genres will call for different approaches to the rhetorical appeals, but this does not mean they are never present. Each genre and situation will require a different approach. A research essay will employ Ethos differently than a personal essay, and a piece intended for amateurs will need to present its logic differently than one for experts. Rhetoric helps writers assess their entire situation by considering knowledge, the communication itself, and the intended recipients. Different situations will require different appeals, even if Ethos, Pathos, and Logos will always be used. While it is important to consider each of these rhetorical appeals, it is more important to keep them appropriate for your context and purposes.

Get a new doorman: Transitions and Transition Statements

On the Organization Overview page, when I listed transitions I stated it is “an issue with which I have mixed feelings.” This is because I understand and hope to teach that transitions are an essential part of writing. However, in my experience, transitions aren't what gets taught; it's transition statements. These are two very different concepts.

I tutored a student once who claimed to have a problem with those quaint little statements that sit at the end of paragraphs like doormen prepared to mark the move from one locale to another. The student recognized the need for cohesion in his writing, for that elusive “flow.” After a few minutes looking at his essay, it became clear that he understood his topic, was articulate, and had a firm grasp on the issue he was writing about. It’s just the doormen closing each paragraph were locking the door rather than opening it. Each transition was painfully abrupt, stalled the writing, and made every paragraph feel like an introduction rather than a continuation. It was bizarre that a good writer like this would have such a unique and individualized problem.

I proposed an experiment: we read through the second to last sentence of every paragraph and the first sentence of the next paragraph. We skipped the transitions. it worked beautifully. The essay was improved ten times at least.

The problem wasn't that he had bad transitions, it was that he had forced transition statements. He explained he had been taught to use token transition statements, and while that's fine for beginning writers, it ends up doing more harm than good for mature writers.

The red line is a tangent.

I see transition statements as a device to force otherwise tangential pieces into an essay. Pardon the geometry, but a tangent is a line that intersects with a circle at only one point. So, in writing, a tangent is when the essay suddenly starts talking about something that is related but irrelevant to the piece as a whole. It's a portion that just doesn't fit with the rest of the piece. “Transition statements” make it easy to go into a tangent and then force it back on track. It's a bad practice.

Therefore, forced transition statements (or weak transitions) are a symptom of two interrelated issues: the first is poor organization. The second is a weak thesis.

The thesis is the main point or argument and organization is how that point is delivered and presented. A well organized essay will flow from paragraph to paragraph, i.e. from topic to topic. A well organized essay will designate each paragraph with a specific topic directly related to the thesis. Anything related to a different topic goes in a different paragraph. Paragraphs that deal with similar information go before or after one another. And, here's where transitions come in: paragraphs with related topics will transition easier into one another. Strong transitions should be a natural by-product of adhering to the thesis and careful organization.

Transitions bring topics together much more than they bring paragraphs together, and a statement alone isn't enough to do it. It's more a matter of how the essay as a whole develops ideas as it progresses from introduction to conclusion: each paragraph should prepare the reader for the paragraph that follows it.

Unfortunately for me, this makes transitions a much harder topic to briefly address. There isn’t a set list of acceptable sentence structures and forms that can be interchangeably used to solve a problem. Good transitions show strong writing, strong organization, and a strong understanding of the subject matter: you haven’t put an arbitrary doorman down who may or may not do his job properly. You want a doorman who knows the building, the people, the clientele, and the situation. Someone who will let people know that all is well and you are welcome in the building.

What makes it Argumentative? An Overview

I want to start this post off by saying the words argument and persuasion have very close definitions, but can be interpreted quite differently. I try to avoid any confusion by using them interchangeably. My interest here, however, is not to draw distinctions between being argumentative and persuasive, but between being argumentative and informative.

Most of us are familiar with informative writing. We encounter it all the time in textbooks, news sources, blogs, documentaries, etc. This causes problems when students need to move to argumentative writing.

I’ve had students insist they will argue by merely being informative. I take this to mean they haven’t caught on to the issues regarding argumentation I’ve covered in class. The distinction is as follows:

Informative writing just gives information: facts, details, observations, research, etc.

Argumentation makes recommendations and proposals about what to do with that information.

To further describe the difference between informative and argumentative is to use the Stasis Model, which is a kind of hierarchy of argumentation. Each aspect must be addressed, or at least clear, before moving to the next:

• Fact: Determining whether or not something exists, did or did not happen, could or could not happen, etc. This is generally a yes or no question. Sometimes called “Conjecture.”
• Definition: Describing characteristics and attributes of the Facts.
• Value: Determining the quality or severity of the issue or topic – if what has been defined is good or bad, better or worse, etc. Sometimes called “Quality.”
• Policy: Proposing active change based on the discussion of the Values: if a better option exists and its implementation is feasible, then recommendations how to pursue it should be made.

Argumentation address all of these: Facts are considered, defined, and weighted against actual and hypothetical situations, culminating in the proposed change. 

Informative writing stops anywhere before Policy: a proposal isn't made, a plan of action isn't discussed, plans aren't made for improvement.

While the Stasis Model is the first step in differentiating between informative and argumentative writing, argumentative writing also necessitates a number of considerations:

• Take a stance: Perhaps the most important. Being argumentative requires a clear stance on the issue.
• Rhetorical Situation: Aristotle broke rhetoric down into a number of different aspects. These are, primarily:
• Ethos: Author's authority; how does the author demonstrate their credibility.
• Pathos: Audience awareness; how is the piece written for its audience.
• Logos: Logic; the structure and coherence of the argument itself.
• Audience Specificity: Not exactly the same as pathos. Audience is always important. In Argumentation it is very important. Argumentative writing necessitates writing not just for an audience, but an audience, people, persons, or groups, that can enact the recommended change.
• Opposing viewpoints: Others will recommend different policies, interpret the research or situation differently, or think nothing needs changing. Acknowledging opposing viewpoints and countering them can strengthen arguments.
• Advocating active change: By “active” I mean it should be more than just “people need to know.” Knowing something is being informative. Argumentation entails making recommendations about the action that specific (see “Audience Awareness” above) people need to do. Best case scenario, if the proposal were accepted, there should be observable, measurable changes.

These may still be present in informative writing, but sometimes informative writing just weighs the sides of an issue without taking a stance or proposing a change. Just as the Stasis Model becomes more and more argumentative as it goes from Facts to Policy, informative essays may adopt some aspects of argumentation. There isn't anything wrong with that. The important thing is an argumentative essay does significantly more, regarding audience, opposition, and proposing than an informative piece.

Argumentation: Write for a specific, powerful audience

Once, in a persuasive writing class, I had students write down their intended audience. Then I had them write down their proposals for their essays. Then, I had them put the word “should” between the two:

[Intended Audience] should [Proposal]

It was an eye opening experience as many of my students looked at the sentences they had written and realized the people they were writing for were not in positions to make the changes they were arguing. They quickly realized they needed to either change their proposal to fit their audience or change their audience to fit their proposal.

Picking an audience varies from genre to genre and purpose to purpose. Unfortunately, students frequently default to “parents,” “teachers,” and (this one makes me want to break things) anything that starts with “people who...” The problem with these audiences is it’s difficult, if not impossible, to address them as a whole because there will be so many different groups within the larger body. Writing for them can mean relying on logical fallacies and broad assumptions that reflect your own bias more than your understanding of the demographic you're trying to write to.

On the other hand, a specific audience (one that has a formal name, whether it's an individual or an organizational body) is a far better option.

This leads to the next important aspect of picking your audience: what power or authority do they have? For example, if you think the local high schools should change from a semester to a trimester system. Writing to the teachers would be a bad idea because they're too far down the administrative hierarchy to make the decision. The administrators may value their input, but the teachers won't be making the decision. So, the next step is to go up the hierarchy to the powers-that-be.

The next two options are either the principal or school district personnel. Unfortunately, principals won't be able to make the change themselves, but they are closer to those who make the decisions and are in a valued position to give feedback.

Therefore, if writing to principals, you'll be arguing they should go to the district and convince them – but you'll have to convince the principals first.

Information like research, pedagogy, interviews, and surveys of the student body and faculty will be useful. However, where the principals will be more invested in the teachers and students, and would have to deal with scheduling on a regular basis, the administrators at the district will be more concerned with policy, legislation, and the public reception of the change. Two different audiences, two different sets of interests and capabilities.

Different information, appeals, and research will be needed in each situation; there will be some overlay, but not enough to simply cross off one set of names or titles and replace them with another. Every audience is going to have different concerns, regulations, and authorities, and an argumentative piece or any piece of writing must be written to a specific audience’s interest and ability.

What "Page Count" Means

You might want to read “Why the Page Count?” before taking a look at this post.

Beware! Math logic below.

As both an instructor and student, I frequently hear some variation of “What constitutes three (or five or ten or however many) pages?” The answer has always been the same: Fill the last page, and the works cited page does not count.

On the one hand, clarification is important. After all, if assigned a five page essay and you have a dozen words on the fourth page and you have your works cited page, then do you have a five page essay? Well, I haven't met an English teacher who would accept that for a five page assignment. Why the rigid assignment requirements? 

One example. You are assigned a four page essay and you write and write and write until you have three pages and about a quarter of a page, so we can reasonably say your essay is three and a quarter pages long. At best this would round up to three and a half. At worst, it'll round down to three. Well, your essay is a half a page short. Half a page doesn't seem like much, right?

A half of a page for a four page assignment will come to 1/8 of the overall length: 12.5%. That's a lot. If we’re talking grades, that’s the difference between an A and a B-. If you were taking a math test with 40 questions and left five of them unanswered, you won't get full credit for them – so why should you on an essay? 

This still leaves an irksome question: what does fill mean? Just how much is that? Some instructors may specify a word count or range; others may want so many lines on the last page, or even inches. I try to shy away from word counts and other solid numbers, but I do tell my students the last page should have enough text to fill well over half of the space. If an essay falls right at or just over half a page, I won't reject it, but it's not going to get full credit. After all, it’s a writing class with certain expectations and falling short on requirements means not meeting those expectations.

The safe thing I've seen students do is write just up to the edge of the last line of the last required page or just go over. When I see this, I think it's overkill and I expect there to be a couple of inflated sentences. There may even be an odd expository paragraph somewhere. The best course of action would be to have an essay of a reasonable length and sufficiently detail, but if it's between a vacuous paragraph or a couple wordy sentences, it at least shows an effort to meet the requirements.

Know the rules of the genre

Let’s say, you’re starting your first semester of college and you’re sitting in your freshman composition course. You’ve had plenty of English classes before and you’ve written a fair bit about literature, and you’ve done some research essays and essays on exams. But your composition instructor announces the first writing assignment is a Personal Essay. You’ve never heard these two words together. Writing for school has always been about either literature or research, and you’ve never written anything personal at least not for a class before. You write about a personal experience from your own first-person perspective, thinking you finally have an English teacher that’s okay with first person pronouns. So, when you get a research essay, you think you can write in the first person again, only to be marked down for doing so.

I wonder about students whose teachers scold them for writing in the first person, and the same teachers turn around and give the students personal accounts, journals, or even first-person fiction stories and novels that are not brought down with the same scrutiny. Suddenly, the rules that govern writing, or rather the student's understanding of them, become convoluted and inconsistent. It leaves students confused and frustrated.

Welcome to genre.

Without an understanding of genre, all writing is the same and anything goes. The result can be messy. Objective research with out-of-place anecdotes, awkward personal essays that never really say anything personal, and even job applications that give a fine description of the job but say nothing about the applicant. If you don't understand the rules of the genre, then you'll probably do it wrong.

Genre shapes the rules of writing. It is a complex topic and we don't really get much exposure to it outside of fiction. When we read a science fiction story or watch a science fiction film, we have certain expectations. The same applies when dealing with romance, fantasy, tragedy, comedy, etc.. Different genres have different rules and it's important to follow those rules.

For example. You're watching Lord of the Rings and Gandolf, in all of his trope-setting, magic casting, staff waving glory...takes out an energy weapon. Like a light saber: a mechanical apparatus that uses sophisticated technology to develop and release concentrated energy.

Out of place, much? I'm not saying it wouldn't be awesome. I'm just saying that, in a world with magical rings, dragons, and immortal races, an energy weapon is out of place. When we engage in a fantasy story, we expect fantasy.

Genres outside of fiction operate the same way. Based on the kind of reading we're doing, we'll have different expectations. If you pick up a detective novel, you'll expect mystery, intrigue, red herrings, and a protagonist who says less than he knows until the end. If you read something more personal, like the author's preface, you'll likely find the author referring to their writing process, their emotions – something more personal.

The same issue with expectations applies in all writing. The aforementioned personal essay will deal with personal experiences, beliefs, and give the reader a personal perspective on the author. It isn’t the best time to explore serious scientific issues and research: that's what research essays are for.

Bear in mind, however, the rules aren't arbitrary. Like fiction genres, they have developed over time to fit specific needs and purposes. Therefore, writing for a genre, whether of your own volition or because you're required to do so, you are fulfilling a specific purpose. The rules in question govern the way to structure a thesis, argument, organization, style – almost anything and everything.

Genre and Purposeful Theses

The form of a thesis varies depending on the genre and the purpose of the piece of writing. Different forms of writing have different conventions and much of the time we pick a genre to serve a specific purpose, or a teacher assigns a specific genre because there's a form students need to learn. These conventions and our own purposes dictate how we will write the essay and the thesis.

In other posts on the Six Journalistic Questions, I addressed how they can be used for developing a thesis and selecting a topic. For example, let’s say your six journalistic questions map out like this:

• Who: High school students, American authors with different cultural backgrounds
• What: Multi-cultural, American literature
• When: High School years
• Where: American high school literature courses
• How: Studying multi-cultural literature
• Why: To gain a better understanding of other cultures

This establishes criteria to focus on. Your essay should address these topics in detail and nothing else.

The next issue is what genre you’re writing in. A few examples include: 

• Persuasive essays are aimed at specific audiences with the intention to change something. They outline the issue and give reasons why it needs to change or improve, as well as specifying steps that should be taken to make the change happen. Theses for persuasive essays identify who needs to do what.
• Personal essays are introspective and may involve reflecting on past experience and interpreting it. Most of all personal essays talk about and explore and explain who you are: your beliefs, convictions, and practices. Theses for personal essays identify what was gained or learned from the experience.
• Academic research essays gather information from a variety of credible sources and involve some primary research as well. Most writing done in schools is this kind. Theses for academic research essays focus on a significant fact or detail and use the research to support and substantiate it.

The issue is then how to take that criteria identified in the Six Journalistic Questions and phrase them in a single sentence that matches the functions of the appropriate genres. For example:

• A persuasive essay might say “The local school district should use high school literature classes as a way to improve young people’s understanding of different cultures that exist within America by having students read books written by authors of different backgrounds, in addition to the English canon.”
• A personal essay won't do that, but instead will look more like, “From my high school literature classes, I gained a greater understanding of different cultures that exist within the United States than I would have just by reading from the English canon.”
• Or an academic research essay: “High school students who read literature by American authors from different cultures gain a better understanding and appreciation of the complexities within their country.”

The different genres will change the approach. In neither the persuasive not the research essays will the author address themselves, and instead the focus is on the subject matter. In a personal essay, first person is acceptable because the author is part of the subject. Similarly, the persuasive essay is much more concerned with the audience than the others are: a persuasive essay needs to be directed at a specific audience. However, academic essays are prepared for conferences or publications intended for experts in a scholarly field; personal essays may have a broader audience yet.

Understanding the demands of the genre is an important way to properly assemble your information and prepare to write about it. It gives you a way to structure and understand your purposes, and therefore, what goes into the thesis as well. It isn’t enough to simply gather your topics into a sentence: they have to point the reader in a specific direction.

Writing Exercise: Reflection Essay

I was nervous the first time I stood in front of a classroom to teach. The chairs were arranged in an arc around the perimeter of the room, creating a stadium like atmosphere, cutting me off from the door. I was either the grand master, or the hapless victim.

Regardless of your definition, it would be hard to promote this to story or narrative. It sets the stage for something more, but as is, it’s pretty basic. If I were to continue and write about how the day went, my efforts to engage the class in a discussion, falling back on a writing prompt to take up time, and feeling like a fraud as I fumbled about, it would be a story. But what if this followed it:

I quickly learned three things. The first was about having to smile and feign being an expert in composition. It didn't matter that I had never taken a composition course before; everything I knew of it I had gained piecemeal over my years as an undergraduate literature student. The second thing I learned was I had the knowledge. I could answer their questions and, as scattered as some of the early ones were, put together a lesson. But most of all, I learned that I could teach.

This is the makings of a Reflection Essay. What separates this kind of writing from anecdotes or stories is you interpret the events you are describing. Hence the reflection. Reflective writing is when you think back to a time, instance, or experience – something significant in shaping who you are and addressing both the circumstances of the event and what you gained from that experience.

This means reflective writing can be an odd combination of creative writing and interpretation.

On the one hand, it is important to recreate the experience, and if appropriate, provide sensory detail to create the experience for your reader. Write about what you saw and heard, as well as what you felt (both physically and emotionally). The purpose is to relive your experience so that the reader can understand your position.

Other people may have stood in front of their first classroom with enthusiasm. A lot of people will never have that opportunity. Therefore, I need to let the reader know that I was nervous, and what it was that made me nervous (in this case, the fact I was teaching a subject I had never had a class in myself), but if I can give more description of the place, the mood, and most importantly, my mental and emotional state, it will make it easier for my reader to understand my interpretation.

The interpretation makes a reflective essay what it is. After giving the details to set the scene, whether physical or mental, internal or external, you have to consider what you gained from this experience: how has it shaped you into the person that you are? In a “and knowing is half the battle” sort of way, the interpretation is the moral of the story: what you gained from it and what you hope your reader understands as well.

We may not always know what we gained from an experience until we reflect on it. Sometimes, especially when we're in school, we don't take time to stop and think about where we are and how we got where we are. Reflective writing, whether required or not, is a valuable endeavor. It’s an opportunity to stop and think things through, and a chance to get to know yourself a little bit better.