Beyond the five paragraph essay
This is a post originally from T Burke at Swarthmore. I found the link via del.icio.us
Beyond the
Five-Paragraph Essay
When I hand back
analytic essays, I try to leave room to do a collective post-mortem and talk
about common problems or challenges that appeared in a number of essays. I think
it helps a lot to know that the comment you got is a comment that other people
got, and also to know how some people dealt more successfully with the same
issue. All anonymous, of course, and following my Paula-like nature, nothing
especially brutal in terms of the actual grades dispensed.
I usually base
my comments on some scrawled meta-notes I keep as I work through each batch
of essays. Sometimes there are unique problems that arise in relation to a particular
essay question, which is sometimes a consequence of my having given enough rope
for certain students to hang themselves in the phrasing of the question. Often
there are problems I’ve seen before and commented upon.
1) Some
of these perennial comments concern smaller but important stylistic errors and
misfires, such as:
Choice of
tenses, which can be difficult in history papers if the student is writing
about contemporary texts as well as past events.
Point-of-view.
The only thing I strongly discourage is the use of the “royal we”,
though there are ways to make it work rhetorically if used with care. The
other thing I mark is switching randomly or rapidly between point-of-view.
Endless unbroken
paragraphs.
Weirdly arbitrary
capitalization.
Psychotic
misuse of commas and semicolons.
Sentences
that I label “awk” (awkward) or “ugh” (ugh), where
there’s just something really aggravatingly roundabout if not absolutely
grammatically forbidden in the structure of the sentence or where the sentence
or phrase is plain-old butt-ugly.
"Purple
prose”, e.g., wildly overwritten or florid. The template I have in
mind here is an actual paper I graded some years ago that began, in apparent
seriousness, “Verily, the colonial state in Africa indeed formulated
a versilimitude of societal establishments…”
"Blocky
prose”, the opposite of purple prose, with every sentence a completely
unadorned subject-verb-object monotone. The composite effect is like reading
a telegraph message. “Africa was ruled by Britain, France and Portugal.
They constructed colonial states. Most colonial governments were based on
indirect rule. Indirect rule was based on Africans having their own customary
rules and rulers. Colonial authorities controlled customary rules and rulers.
There were many conflicts over these rules. Indirect rule was an unjust system.” And so on.
Confusion
over the difference between different sources or materials. On a recent
assignment, for example, some writers ended up comparing a contemporary scholar’s
work with a primary source from the 1920s and acted as if the two sources
were contemporaneous with each other and written for more or less the same
purposes.
Arbitrary,
purely “structural”, use of evidence or supporting material,
where an essay has the feel of having been written with “blank spots” for evidence which the student then fills by more or less randomly pulling
out quotes from a text.
“Kitchen
sinkism”: an essay that indiscriminately throws every scrap of potentially
relevant material and information at a problem, organized serially as it occurs
to a student during the writing process. This is especially bad at shorter
lengths, where making good decisions about what to include and exclude is
critical.
Words and
phrases that implicitly or explicitly assert mastery of the entire corpus
of material related to the assignment, often through language that compares
a source text to all other source texts of the class X from which the text
comes. Every once in a while, I get an undergraduate who has some justifiable
reason to assert this sort of authority, but most of the time, it is a mistake,
though often an unconscious one.
Bad introduction
that doesn’t do any sort of useful job stylistically or structurally.
A writer can have an introduction that doesn’t do any structural work
but is stylistically compelling, or a writer can have a plain-Jane intro that
gets the structure set, but having neither is a problem.
Bad or nonexistent
paragraph transitions. At its worst, this makes me feel like I’m
reading the private confessions of a schizophrenic.
2) The
most important fundamental issue I see again and again is a paper which is largely
descriptive rather than analytical, which proves that a student has “done
the homework” but not taken ownership of the material and crafted an argument
of their own. Sometimes I see an argument in the first paragraph or in the last
paragraph (the latter often appearing to be a last-minute discovery) that is
cut off from the rest of the essay, unexplored or unsupported. I often comment
that papers lack what I call “flow”, a sense that they are moving
relentlessly and naturally from one assertion to the next, building towards
some goal or overall point.
I often suggest
some pre-built analytic structures that go beyond the usual five-paragraph essay
that students are taught to write in K-12 schooling. These are hooks, conceptual
heuristics that I hope can help a student find an argument, a structure, a “flow” to the analysis. Here’s some of the structures I often suggest for history
papers written in response to a professor's prompt or question:
Simple compare
and contrast. This is often the next step up from the plain five-paragraph
essay. I sometimes call it the this-and-that paper. The essay can be written
around a block comparison, where the two (or more) things to be compared are
discussed separately in longer multi-paragraph sections, or on a point-by-point
basis, alternating each paragraph. The key here that makes this structure
rise above the purely pedestrian is the conclusion. A compare-and-contrast
paper that concludes with an unresolved or rhetorical question about the meaning
of the comparison is banal and descriptive, but a paper that concludes with
an emphatic resolution of the comparison or contrast can be excellent.
Close reading.
An essay built around a very tight interpretation of a single word, phrase,
metaphor or other linguistic component of a source or scholarly account, or
focus on a tight comparison of several related passages. The implicit hope
here is that the writer will find a potent enough metaphor or passage to hang
a larger argument on if they pay close attention to the language of their
sources or material.
Chronological.
A structure that is more precisely fitted to historical writing, where it
traces the development of a theme or issue over time. This is also very simple,
and often produces a mediocre paper that is purely descriptive and non-analytical,
but if it is done well, can be very sophisticated. The key to doing this paper
well is picking a theme or issue where tracing its development over time is
itself a potent or pointed analytic choice, where pursues a chronological
dimension to an issue repudiates some other way of understanding it. (The
reverse, by the way, works equally well, namely, taking an issue that is commonly
understood as changing considerably over time and arguing that it actually
is quite static.)
Contrarian.
A paper built around a full-scale attack on the source material or even the
assumptions of the essay question. The key to doing well here is tight discipline
and focus, remembering that this is for “argument’s sake”—but
also making sure that the criticism on offer isn’t arbitrary, a wildly
inconsistent grab-bag of fault-finding or a mouth-frothing disproportionate
polemic. The best essays under this heading will identify some deep axiom
or assumption made by the source material and ask, “But what if this
is not the case?” and go from there. Incidentally, I tell students that
just thinking about a contrarian essay is a good way to clarify the argument
in any essay—if you aren’t offering an analysis that is potentially
arguable, that you can think of ways to attack or counter, you don’t
have a good argument.
Thematic. Hard to describe: this is a catch-all term for an essay that isolates a single
theme or issue in response to the professor’s initial prompt, and focuses
exclusively on it. On a recent assignment, for example, I had one very good
paper that took a general prompt about development policies in colonial Africa
and zoomed in very tightly on agriculture and gender. The good thematic writer
just needs to have enough faith in the heuristic they’re using to isolate
a single issue or problem—a thematic essay goes wrong when the theme
is very badly chosen or when the writer loses confidence and switches halfway
through to something else.
Set-em-up,
knock-em-down. When it’s done right, this is just about my favorite
kind of short analytic essay, and it is one of the structures well worth learning
for its general utility outside of the college environment. In this structure,
the writer explores some simplistic or banal assumption or argument for the
first part of the paper, carefully bracketed off as a sort of “Let’s
suppose that X is true”, where it is clear that the author is just thinking
it through. Then halfway through the essay, the writer pulls the rug out,
revealing that the initial argument is totally wrong, and substituting some
other argument or line of analysis in its place. In the end, the reason I
like set-em-up, knock-em-down essays is that they are so clearly focused on
the purpose of analytic writing, at least in my classes, and that’s persuasion.
This is why I grade descriptive essays so relatively low: they only prove
that someone did the reading. An essay that is persuasive is an essay that
shows a student has command of the material, has taken ownership of it. It
doesn’t matter if their knowledge is less than encyclopedic in that case.