Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities

by John Warner

Writing Experiences

Each writing experience contains the following dimensions: A question the writing seeks to answer The problem that will be solved by answering the question The audience for whom the writing is meant A process that will lead toward an answer A reflection that will help reinforce the metacognitive dimensions of learning and lead toward transfer of writing knowledge from occasion to occasion

How Do I . . . ? Try to think of some procedure or activity that you’re expert in. Maybe you make the perfect cup of coffee. Maybe you can sew a dress or dress a deer. Can you defeat that impossible level on some video game or tell someone how to play “When the Saints Come Marching In” on the harmonica? Everyone has some kind of expertise they’re capable of sharing with the world. Someone also may have occasion to need that expertise. PROBLEM

Someone needs to learn how to do what you know how to do, but you can’t be there to tell them how to do it, so you have to write it out for them. By following your solution to this writing-related problem they should be able to successfully do what you already know how to do. For our purposes you can use only words and descriptions. AUDIENCE Someone who has never done what you’re telling them how to do.However, they probably cannot and should not be a blank slate. One of the first steps will be to more deeply consider who your audience will be. Consider their needs, attitudes, and knowledge regarding what you’re going to ask them to do. PURPOSE The audience has a need—for a good cup of coffee, to play “When the Saints Go Marching In” on the harmonica, or something else—and they have turned to you as an expert in helping fulfill this need. Don’t be shy about it. Be the expert you are. PROCESS 1. Spend some time inventorying your own expertise.

What are you good at? What do you enjoy doing? What do you take pride in? 2. Select your subject. What one thing do you think best lends itself to this particular writing-related problem? Why have you chosen that? 3. Plan. A good way of preparing to write the solution to this writing-related problem is to do the action itself while taking careful notes along the way. 4. Audience analysis. Who is your audience? We know their need (to do what you already know how to do), but what might be their attitudes toward the task? Excitement? Trepidation? Something else? Additionally, what about their knowledge? What will they need to know or be able to do prior to engaging with your solution to this writing-related problem in order to successfully execute the mission? 5. Find and analyze models. Look for models that solve this kind of writing-related problem. Stay away from ones too closely related to your own task. You don’t want to risk copying, and also, remember that you’re the expert here. You don’t want to be unduly influenced by someone else’s approach that may actually be inferior to yours. Look at how these models are formatted and structured. How do they begin? How is the information conveyed? What techniques and choices will you use in your own instructions? 6. Execute. Write your solution to this writing-related problem. Do any necessary revising and editing as you see fit.

In teacher-speak, my comments were almost entirely summative (here’s what happened), rather than being formative (here’s what we can do about it).

What do you know now that you didn’t know before? What can you do now that you couldn’t do before? How did you learn these things?

Should I . . . ? Should I go see that movie? Should I buy that app? Should I listen to this album or go to that concert? Should I read this book, check out that museum, or eat in that new restaurant? Decisions, decisions everywhere. Important decisions. Your audience needs help in making one of these decisions. PROBLEM Your audience wants to know if something (music, movie, book, TV show, app, clothing, food, restaurant, concert, play, video game, and so forth) is any good. They have come to you for your opinion, which they will rely upon to make their decision. AUDIENCE Your audience is someone your age in roughly the same circumstances and having had similar experiences. It’s not you, but people similar to you, your peers. PURPOSE You are helping them make the right decision for themselves, which makes for an interesting challenge. On the one hand, you’re going to need to be opinionated.

tell students they’re after something better and certainly more stimulating for them than objectivity: “discovery.”

Worries about achieving “objectivity” quickly fade as we’re now more concerned with values like “openness,” “transparency,” “fairness,” and “accuracy.” Students recognize a need to gain the audience’s trust and speak with authority likely grounded in those earlier values.

format and have used it in the past, but very few understand the underlying purpose of academic citation. It’s another one of those things to be done because the teacher said so, a toll to be paid on the academic road, where you have no idea why you’re handing over your money. You should hear the groans when I tell them that the citation scheme produced by the Modern Language Association is not a universal standard but is confined to the discipline of English and that they will have to learn other citation methods if they write researched essays in courses in different departments. To students it feels like a terrible bait and switch.

Instead of teaching “MLA format,” Thomas teaches “citation as a concept in real-world essays” by focusing students on Internet-published essays utilizing hyperlinks for sourcing. The essay is an argument requiring evidence, but the evidence must be linked. This need creates problems students must solve while considering the audience, rather than worrying about teacher prohibitions or disciplinary rules. Students must decide which words to link, as well as how to frame the evidence, knowing that many readers will not click the links.

Who Are They?

The figure below is a picture of some keys: You can tell a lot about a person by their keys. Imagine these keys have been left behind by a “person of interest” to a crime and you have been hired to do a profile of this person in order to better understand who they are, as well as their attitudes and beliefs. Assume that any identifying information that could lead the authorities to this person has been exhausted. All we have are the keys and whatever you can glean from them. This is how Sherlock Holmes works to solve mysteries: he makes observations no one else can see and then draws inferences from these “hidden” observations. Your next experience is to practice this method, not to solve a mystery, but to understand a person . . . and to see the limits of observations in drawing those conclusions. PROBLEM Based on very little information, you need to try to describe a person who is a stranger to both you and your audience. AUDIENCE A nosy, curious person who is looking for insights into the subject of your study. Think of them as a client. PURPOSE The purpose of the writing is to catalog your observations and inferences in a way that will be understandable and accessible to your audience. PROCESS 1. Observe. Spend about ten minutes looking at the keys. Write down as many different observations as you can. Observations are directly observable facts, such as: there are two regular keys, two car keys, and one keychain. Don’t make any judgments about these observations; simpl...

what is there, you should also be thinking about what’s absent. What sorts of things that people put on keychains might be missing? 2. Draw inferences. What conclusions can you draw based on your observations? Who is this person? What is their gender? What do they like? How old are they? What do they do (or not do) with their time? What are their attitudes and beliefs? 3. Extend inferences. Based on those initial inferences, what other conclusions can you draw? What does this person do with their weekends? Who are their friends and associates? This will require speculation, but make sure it’s speculation grounded in observation and earlier inferences. 4. Report findings to client. Consider an approach and format that delivers the information in a way that will be useful to your client. Be sure to be mindful of connecting your inferences to your observations so they can appreciate your evidence. Also, they’d probably like to know how much confidence you have in your various conclusions. What do you know? What do you suspect? What’s merely possible? What’s wild speculation? 5. Compare notes with fellow investigators. What did others see that you didn’t? What did you see that they missed? Why do you think this happened? Are there inferences you disagree with? Where there’s disagreement, hash it out through discussion. Which conclusion seems more likely based on the evidence available?

Impossible Argument Some arguments are impossible to “solve.” That is, there is no single answer that will be satisfactory to everyone because the “truth” is likely somewhere in the middle. This may be true of all arguments, but let’s not think about those other arguments for now. Let’s think about an impossible argument. Is a hot dog a sandwich? Yes, absolutely? No, of course not? I bet you already feel passionately one way or another about this pressing issue and think those that differ are horribly misguided. Good, let’s argue.

Using a problem-solution format allows students to take charge and lead with their own argument, rather than defer to their sources, as they’re often tempted to do when confronted with a “research paper.” If there is time, I give them a short, ungraded assignment that asks them first to “rant” about their subject, where they’re encouraged to rhetorically let loose. Following the rant they usually recognize the limits of unhinged complaints in persuading others, and they adjust to making an argument that appropriately employs ethos, pathos, and logos, the base material of academic argument. Also, it’s fun to write rants. The solution then becomes a way for students to work with sources in combination with their ideas without too much deference to those sources. When students use their own experience to solve writing-related problems the results are simply better, and even when the writing artifacts themselves aren’t as good as one might wish, students are still learning. They’re building their writing practices, they’re learning skills that will transfer to other writing tasks, and there

ask two questions: (1) Which sentence is most “correct”? and (2) Which sentence do they like the “best”? I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21000 pounds of hot flesh. I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21000 pounds of hot skin. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 21000 pounds of hot flesh. Again, just about universally, students agree that sentence three is the most “correct” sentence. The repetition of “smelled” and “smells like” just seems “wrong.” And they’re right, I suppose, but when I ask them which sentence they like best, somewhere between one-half and two-thirds choose the first sentence, which may be mechanically awkward, but at the same time has an oddly pleasing quality because of that awkwardness. It seems to fit the author’s mood and experience to sound a little awkward as he’s sorting through what was an apparently disorienting experience.

“This class was graded using a grading contract instead of normal letter grades per assignment. I liked this much better because it allowed for more freedom and room for growth and development during the assignments; I wasn’t so focused on getting an A, I was focused on getting the most out of each assignment and enjoying the writing process.”