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.