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.