Great Expectations

Unit 1 is the most difficult and exhausting unit of the semester. First there are just the logistical issues--When is this due? What’s the difference between our prelims and the conference draft? What’s a conference? Where’s your office? When is the final draft due again? And why is Plato so worked up about writing anyway???

Somewhere, in all of this, I am supposed to answer this question:  What exactly, is an academic essay?

If I seem breathless in class, it’s only because I’m trying to preview an entire semester’s worth of ideas about expository writing.  Now’s the time to take a bit of a breather, let some of this settle down and focus in on the two key aspects of writing an academic essay that are most important for essay 1--and, I would argue, probably the most fundamental elements of academic essays in general.  They are your argument and your use of sources.** Get these right, and (almost) everything else follows.

Use of sources.  The academic essay starts with the assumption that there are ideas in the world outside of your head. Your sources are not just providing “quotes to back up your ideas”; rather, they should help you to develop new ideas and new ways of thinking about problems. Generally speaking, if someone does research with an "answer" or argument in mind, we would probably suggest that that person is a bit close-minded, maybe even biased. So, when working with sources keep an open mind, learn from them, and let them teach you something. At the most basic level, this involves being able to neutrally summarize.

Your argument.  But thinking should never stop with thoroughly understanding a source--rather it only starts there. Moreover, argument goes well beyond simply agreeing or disagreeing. As you build an argument in conversation with your sources, think about how ideas are useful, or how perspectives might be limited or qualified. Think about how an idea might be right, but only in some cases, or up to a certain point. For this first unit, I ask you to consider what you, as a person living in 2011, can add to Plato’s concerns about writing.  We live in a culture that places enormous significance on writing and yet many of Plato’s concerns and warning ring true.  So how do YOU add to our knowledge about the world by building on and extending his ideas? 

So, to sum up, here’s the bottom line for unit 1:

Argument/ project.  Do you know what you are arguing? Does your essay follow through on that? Strong claims throughout help--that’s why we’ve focused on them so much. Do you state your argument (thesis statement) early on? Does the opening move (a paragraph or two) of your essay help set up your argument and what’s at stake in your argument? Are there places along the way where it is echoed in your claims? Why should we care about your argument? Do you suggest an answer to the “So What” question? Does your essay take a position that moves beyond summary and even beyond simply agreeing or disagreeing to work in conversation with your source?

Sources: Do you explain your source/s to your reader? Do you show how your thinking builds on, develops from, or works in conversation with sources? Do you show how your thinking is different from your source? All of the work with context, orienting (or framing quotations) and explaining and analyzing passages is part of this process of moving from the source to your own ideas.

To reiterate, here’s the list:

Strong opener that sets up argument and suggests why your argument matters.

Thesis statement.

Strong claims in most paragraphs that echo the thesis statement.

Framed, or contextualized citations (set up the source for your reader).

Explanation or analysis of the source (show how you interpret the source and how it relates your argument).

* They Say/ I say is a deceptively simple book, but you should notice that these two elements are the ones represented by the title of the book.

Why I Love My Job

Conferences. Really. It's true that conferences mean that I might have to get up at 5 am to read and comment on drafts and I'll still be talking with a student at 7 that evening, but conferences are the best part of my job. I get to talk to people about ideas--and I get paid for that!

In spite of the work they require, and the exhaustion that sets in after talking and listening for hours and hours, conferences are are exciting because they allow us to glimpse those great ideas that are behind an essay--and that, no matter how much it's revised, an essay only partially captures. Conferences are all about potential.

Even though we talk about how to capture those fleeting ideas in writing, in the conference that frustration is held at bay for a while.  Likewise, the fact that I eventually have to grade each essay (something I hate) can be pushed aside as we focus on thinking and developing thoughts.

It also seems that conferences model the exchange of ideas that is, I believe, the best reason for the existence of universities--knowledge being created as individuals listen to each other and build their ideas.

Well Wrought Urns

In my last post I talked about how disordered the world seems because my vision is temporarily impaired.  At the same time (and somewhat ironically), in class last week I tried to describe how one might think about the overall shape of an essay--and all the different parts of an essay--as a building.  In other words, I was trying to provide a visual metaphor for thinking about essay structures and organization. 


Because I think about and read and write essays often, this kind of thinking comes fairly naturally to me.  In my building metaphor, I suggested that we might see the elevator shaft as the central thesis, while each floor could be a different source (or a different aspect of the same source).  The ever changing view from each floor evokes the way an essay can look at different angles of a problem--explore a complication or an implication, acknowledge the validity of a counterargument, or turn to look more closely at, and define or explain, what a key term means. The building metaphor also allows us to think, importantly, about the way our view of the initial problem is very different when we are at the top of the building than when we were on the ground floor.


People sometimes compare essays to roads.  Again we can see again the way the image allows us to see  development along a  pathway, but one that allows for side trips down smaller pathways, an ever changing view, and finally a destination that is not the same place we started.

When I think about my own writing and revising process, however, I most often think about my draft as a lump of clay that has to be smoothed and shaped; at some places odd bits of clay must be tossed aside while at others fresh clay needs to be added.  The traditional shape of a vase works well with the idea that an essay opens itself, by the end, to some new perspectives, while remaining closely bound to a central argument.  I'm thinking here of the way vases narrow at the neck and then bloom open again; in fact vases do that twice--starting with a foot (motive?), narrowing a bit (thesis?) and then opening up most fully in the middle (where I imagine the fullest discussions of a topic to occur).


But, all roads are not straight, and all buildings are not modern, straight up and down skyscrapers and all vases are not symmetrical.  What does your essay look like to you?

There brians posses grate abilties

There? Their? 


No, this isn't going to be a post about commonly confused spellings--or other 'pet peeves' of writing instructors. (But, if you want some excellent, easy to understand advice on commonly confused words and spellings, punctuation rules, and so on, check out the Grammar Girl.)


I have a recurring eye condition that causes blurry vision and pain.  But even before the pain starts--even before I consciously know that this inflammation has flared up again--I start misspelling words, like 'there' and 'their.' Believe me, it is extraordinarily disturbing for a person who reads, writes, and teaches reading and writing for a living to suddenly find herself making 6th grade level errors! Or do we learn that in 4th grade . . . .?

 I only know a bit about what happens in our brain when we read--but, as Stanislas Dehaene writes, reading "starts in our eyes."  The image of the word is processed by-or travels through-- several different areas of our brain as our complex "visual system progressively extracts graphemes, syllables, prefixes, suffixes, and word roots" (11;  if you are interested, Dehaene's Reading in the Brain is an accessible discussion of this subject). We spend years training these pathways as we learn to read. 

Cognitive neuroscientists often discover how the brain works by studying people with problems.  For example, by looking at the brain of someone who has lost the ability to read after a stroke, they can more closely pinpoint areas of the brain that is involved in the reading process (Dehaene 54-71).  So, I’m sure they could tell me more precisely what happens when I lose my ability to spell as my vision becomes compromised. They could also explain why you probably understood the title of this post even though each word is misspelled.

But, since I'm not a cognitive neuroscientist, I'm more interested in the implications of this problem at a moment when our culture seems to be moving away from written words. Losing the ability to spell seems minor, but the fact that it happens so quickly on an individual level, in someone who spends so much time with words, seems to have disturbing implications.

Reading isn’t natural for humans (isn’t that one of Plato’s points? Interesting that he saw that well before the neuroscientists.). Suddenly losing part of this ability makes it seem very fragile, indeed.  How fast could an entire society lost their ability to read if they didn’t practice it frequently?

I find that not only is my spelling bad during these spells, but my sense of logic and organization feels fuzzy--somehow I need to have a visual sense of how ideas are laid out, and blurred vision blurs the order of the world for me. To gesture again toward larger implications, if we spend lots of time with images--which can come at us all at once, or be arranged in juxtaposition, rather than linearly--does that change our sense of how the world is ordered? Is that necessarily bad?

Avoiding the blank page

Last winter I wrote about finally finishing an article after working on it for about seven years (you can read about that here). I am now in the position of finding and working new writing projects.  Although I love research and working out new lines of thinking, I much prefer the revision process to getting started. A blank page is daunting! 


Many students don't like the fact that I assign the essay topic and direction.  But what would you write about if I just said, "Go off and write an argumentative essay"? How would you make key decisions:  What is the topic of this essay? What is the scope of this essay? What other voices and sources should I bring in? To whom should I imagine I am writing? What is the central question I want to explore?  At one point should I stop reading and start writing? If you think about all of these choices, you might thank me for limiting your options some!


Since I'm no longer a student, no one is telling me what to write, or giving me deadlines.  My writing is all self directed and that actually makes it harder to get started.  Right now, I'm trying to make a start on several different projects:  a conference paper, a new course,two journal articles, and revisions to a longer book project. I'm a bit overwhelmed as I try to bite off little chunks of this work, and do the research, narrow my focus, and find my arguments.  


Some of what I do might be useful for you to consider as you get started on your first paper for this class. For example, I spent some time this weekend talking over one of my ideas for a new course with someone. It sharpened my focus and let me see some unproductive directions and dead ends.  I also keep a notebook handy whenever I read anything--even if it's not "officially" research.  No matter what I read, I find that ideas crop up that I can use in my own writing and I want to capture them right away. In fact, I keep my notebook handy all the time since relevant ideas tend to appear in the most unusual places.  While riding the bus, or waiting at an appointment, I often work on idea maps--just words clusters or lists that I later review when I am actually writing.


Since I try to do bits of writing and thinking all through each day, when I sit down to write, I don't have to face a truly blank page. It takes a bit of the pressure off . . . 


I like pens and paper notebooks for all of this, but can the many tiny new devices we all carry now help us keep track of our thinking as well as helping us keep track of--and in touch with--the people in our lives?

Writing On Plato

Earlier in this blog I wrote about my love of (obsession with?)  office supplies.  I especially like colored ink pens and I really, really like using colored ink pens to write on xeroxes of readings!  Why? Well, colored pens are easier to read than pencil.  When I was an undergraduate I used to write all of my marginal notes in pencil--I guess I had more respect for books back then?  But now I go back to those texts and I can barely read the faded notes.  Maybe that's not so bad, maybe that forces me to carefully re-read and make new notes. Are notes a way of responding and questioning?  That's one of the questions I was getting at in my last post.  I sort of think they are--although I'm not convinced it is really the same as being able to talk to the writer of a text in person. (Which writer would you like to talk to?)

Here's what part of this week's reading looks like in my copy of the course packet. I'd like to continue the argument I made in class about the importance of annotating by taking you through some of the process I went through.  


We never really read the same text twice because what we bring to the text changes.  For example, in planning this semester, I've been thinking about problems of serious discussion as opposed to entertainment (look for this in Unit 3!).  In reading this page of Plato, I saw the distinction between earnestness and play in a new, and newly important (to me) way.


What else happened as I read?  The first thing I underlined is the word father; here I was reminding myself that Plato is comparing artists or writers to fathers; artwork or texts are like children. This isn't a complicated metaphor--it's used all the time--but since he keeps going with it, it seemed key to give myself that visual reminder. It's a sort of mental shortcut.


As you can see, I got kind of excited in the middle of the page when he started talking about a word that "knows to whom it should speak and before whom to be silent."  This is the thinking, or prethinking, that went into my last post. You can see that I was trying to make connections between the different uses of "know" and the issue of living people, or living audiences:  knowledge, as Phaedrus comments, that seems to "mean the living and breathing word of him who knows."  At the same time, I started to see a connection between these ideas of audience and the distinction between the writer/ speaker's intention as either earnest or delightful and amusing.  


Is all of my thinking worked out?  Absolutely not, but when I went back to my notes to write up the last post, I found I had alot to say!

(Re)Reading Plato

Although I've known about the bit of Plato's Phaedrus known as the critique of writing for years, I didn't actually read it until I started teaching it a  few years ago (a terrible admission!).  But every time I re-read it  I am amazed and happy that I finally discovered it for myself.  I genuinely learn something new every time I read it.  This time around I've noticed two things about my response to Plato:  that this is a critique in the true sense of that word and that Plato is very concerned about audiences--or, as I would think about it, readers.


Many people may consider a 'critique' to be something that just points out weaknesses. But to think critically about something (and then to produce a critique) means, of course, to be skeptical and reveal problems or flaws, but it also means acknowledging what is good and right in a work (textual or otherwise).  So while it is true that Plato is worried that people might start valuing writing more than real, embodied knowledge, he also admits that there can be serious intentions in writing and that it might be useful to have a written reminder sometimes.


This way Plato characterizes the relationship between writer and reader, though, is what really struck me this time around. The line of thinking appears throughout, but emerges quite clearly when he compares writing to painting--both paintings and texts are 'silent.' The key difference between audience and reader or viewer hinges on this silence--audiences, composed of living people can clap, or cheer; in a live performance (let's imagine a musical performance), the performer might become more animated and give a better performance, send a shout out to the audience, take requests.  Or, to take another example, isn't the excitement of the crowd why football teams do better at home games? How does this work at movies? Does the responsiveness of the audience matter at a play?


Plato follows this up later by suggesting that written discourse that doesn't allow "opportunity for questioning or teaching" should not be "treated very seriously."  Here he seems to suggest the importance of that living response--the questions, the teacher responding to questions. Writing stops that live process--or so he seems to suggest. Does writing have to stop our questioning even if the writer can't talk back? Do books stop our questioning? Does new media?