Balanced Essays: Quantity, Quality, and Attention to Detail, Part 2

In my last post, I addressed the issue of Balance, how it is difficult to teach, but it is important to know because it promotes looking for the purpose. How then should you keep an eye out for it?

It’s ultimately a matter of purpose. Don’t ask yourself how long a paragraph needs to be and gauge that by an arbitrary standard; rather ask yourself how long the paragraph should be based on the kind of information it’s addressing and its purpose in the rest of the essay. For the Annotated Bibliography, the paragraphs summarize (or evaluate or assess). For the Five Paragraph Essay, each paragraph represents a different topic that needs just as much attention as the other ones. So it isn’t just balance in terms of words, but in terms of content and purpose.

There are no hard and fast rules for the purposes paragraphs have, so rather than providing guidelines, here are a few questions to ask yourself if you’re worried about balance:

What is this paragraph’s purpose in the essay? Take some time to understand the purpose the paragraph has in the essay as a whole, what information is says, and why it is important. If you can’t explain to yourself why you have a paragraph in your essay, then you need to do something about it. 

How much detail do I need here? The simple answer is however much you need to prove your point (the one in the topic sentence). However, because each paragraph will have a different purpose, the amount of detail and words can vary. There may be brief paragraphs amid longer ones so the author has time to stop and collect their ideas, summarize those complex ideas, or signal a shift in the essay.

Do I have other paragraphs with similar purposes? This is where the problem in Part 1 really comes up. You should be able to look at your essay and recognize when the different paragraphs have similar purposes (even if the material is different). If two paragraphs both address related and equally important topics, it doesn’t make sense for one to be significantly longer than others.

How do I approach each paragraph? This deals with style more than information. We adapt our writing styles to different purposes, so when reading for purpose, make sure you’re consistent in the style you use. There may be times to change styles in a piece of writing, but it, like the information it conveys, should reflect the purpose of the essay.

Balance is a matter of detail, information, style, and reading purposefully. Not length. And I’ll be honest: I like it that way. It may make it more difficult to teach it, but it requires closer attention to detail and critical thinking on the part of students.

Balanced Essays: Quantity, Quality, and Attention to Detail, Part 1

I want to start this post by saying that balance is an important thing, and yet I never see it addressed. Not in a composition classroom, textbook, conference, or meeting, and if I have, it's been ensconced with other topics as something incidental rather than essential. It's a concept I've stumbled across and, the more I think about it, the more I realize it's an important part of learning how to write.

So what is balance?

Simply, it's the attention a writer gives their material. And yes, I'm being intentionally vague when I say “their material”.

Let's consider it in the context of a 5 Paragraph Essay, about 1000 words long, no tangents, and each paragraph addresses its own specific, related topic. The expectation is each paragraph averages about 200 words. But let's say this essay's paragraphs are, respectively, 200, 400, 150, 100, and 150 words. The enormity of the second paragraph in comparison to those that follow makes it stand out. If it's a decent paragraph, it will identify its topic and then explore it in detail. This is all good, but the other paragraphs being a about a third or fourth in length will pale in comparison. They may be well written paragraphs, but their brevity suggests a few things. The author cared much more about one topic than the others, and these other topics were not addressed to the same extent. This can weaken the overall essay, no matter how good the longer paragraph was.

The solution may or may not be to simply make the other paragraphs three or four times as long: the issue would be if the author can or needs to make these paragraphs as detailed as the first one. If they find the first topic much more interesting than the rest, and the others are there to fill space, then they may be able to produce more words, but the writing won't be as strong. The solution may be scrap the other paragraphs and break the long one into more specific topics.

A great example of this is on annotated bibliographies. I will see a long, almost lyrical summary of a source followed by a few haphazard sentences of evaluation. This is not a reflection on the source but on the author's attention to the sources: the better summary shows the author paid careful attention to one source, but not to the rest of their research. 

Issues of Balance are more prevalent in heavily structured forms, like annotated bibliographies and rogerian arguments (for example: a few sentences are spent on the opposition and a few paragraphs on the author's stance), so I try to emphasize it more when teaching these forms. It's easier to point to the length or number of paragraphs and show how and why the longer and shorter ones, generally, have more detail and show the author was more careful and attentive to one more than another.

However, length is only a superficial indication. Some paragraphs need more detail and attention and will therefore be longer. Others may just need a few sentences to get their job done. The real issue is how the paragraph is written, which is why I used the 5 paragraph essay in my earlier example: each body paragraph has basically the same purpose, so each should have about the same amount of detail and attention, which will likely reflect in their all being close enough in length that none appears significantly longer or shorter than another. You need to read your own writing purposefully: what purpose does each section and paragraph have does it have the detail needed to meet that purpose?

Looking beyond the word count and thinking about purpose and function is important, and I think that focusing on Balance is a good way to teach and emphasize this kind of reading. It may be hard to quantify, require a fair amount of specification, and vary from situation to situation, making it hard to teach, but that’s no reason not to. The overall lesson is to ask yourself what the purpose of the paragraph is and if it is getting the attention and detail it deserves.

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.