English and English Education in the Tower of Babel, Part 2: The Dread Five Paragraph Essay and Teaching Expository Writing

They are bad words: Five. Paragraph. Essay.

Last year, I assigned three full-length expository or persuasive essays to my honors students per semester, and two to my regular-level students per semester. That was about all I thought we could do in a year, and the grading still nearly crushed my spirit. I began to discover that my students almost routinely wrote one very good "body" paragraph, along with several less-good ones--something of a waste, it seemed. But then I figured that even these "summative" assessments could have a "formative" component: in other words, I could assess my students on their ability to write an organized and thoughtfully argued paragraph, while still having them practice writing an organized and thoughtfully argued essay, a skill to be mastered next year, or even further down the line. People learn how to write slowly by emulation, feedback, repetition, and coaching, and when you have between 28 and 35 students in each of 5 classes, that kind of work turns into formulas all too easily. If all a student is expected to do on, for example, the Illinois State Acheivement Test, or the ISAT, is to write a "three-part response," then that is what we will teach. And we have terrific formulas, and mnemonics, as I noted above. Here are some more:

For an introduction:
A. Attention Grabber
B. Background information
C. Claim

For a body paragraph:
P. Point
E. Evidence
E. Explanation
E. Evaluation

But here's the kicker: when I was teaching my first class of AP literature students a couple of years ago, and I wanted to prove to them that these formulas were Useful to Know in the Real World, I was able to point to any number of editorials in the Chicago Tribune or Chicago Sun-Times that look exactly like this. I was also able to point to one of the chapters of my dissertation, which as a five-page introduction, but still follows the ABC formula:

A: intriguing Anecdote, followed by a "close reading" of the anecdote.
B: Background of what other scholars have thought about the problem presented by the close reading of the anecdote, and why they're wrong about the problem (in the "Little Red Schoolhouse" style of the University of Chicago, this is called "stasis/destabilization").
C: Claim: my "take" on the problem.

In the two pedagogy courses I took for my English PhD, I was told again and again how silly the writing instruction in high school is. When I took the University of Chicago's course called Pedagogies of Writing, they were very intent on insisting that the "stasis/destabilization" introduction was extremely different from the "inverted paragraph" introduction. Likewise, they hated the words "topic sentence" like they were the work of the devil, but they used the words "paragraph-level claim" or even "point sentence" as if these were new inventions.

In Pedagogies of Writing, the instructors were really brutal toward high school English teachers, which, as a Once and Future high school English teacher, I found insulting. They actually showed us a graphic organizer from a Nebraska high school and everyone had a huge chuckle about it! They also showed us a sample essay from a student who had been taught the inverted-pyramid formula for an introduction. The essay was about Beloved. The introduction started with a generalization: Life is full of choices. It then went on to explain that in the novel Beloved, Sethe has a choice about whether to murder her baby or not murder her baby.

I certainly hope that this student never knows that his or her essay is used in this way to teach this course, year after year after year. So little teaching of writing goes on, even in freshman intro courses, that students are more often than not left to their own devices (in this case, literally: the rhetorical device of the inverted pyramid, general-to-specific, which, in this one case, turns out to be quite bathetic). By the time they get to some colleges, students are expected to show up already knowing how to write the way their professors want, or else they are given just one writing course, taught by an exasperated English professor, in which they are told that everything they learned in high school is hopelessly, worthlessly, wrong. It's deflating to the students, to say the least.

The worst part is, high school teachers combat the superiority complex of English professors by giving their students arbitrary rules: "don't use 'I.'" Use "transition words" like however, moreover, thus, and--be still my soul--in conclusion. I have taught my students, more than once, to begin an essay of literary analysis with the phrase "In [author]'s [novel/play/poem] [name of novel/play/poem]...."e.g., "In Richard Wright's novel Native Son..." Gag me with a chainsaw! But it sure is better than seeing something like "In the book Native Son by the author Richard Wright he says..." Where we could be teaching rhetoric, we teach formulas that look like rhetoric.

But formulas are a useful teaching tool. Teachers call it scaffolding. A scaffold is a temporary structure that is used when another structure is being built or repaired. What has to come next is the dismantling of the scaffold, to be sure, but it's the old you-have-to-learn-the-rules-before-you-can-break-them argument. I sort of believe this argument. When I taught theory, I found Audre Lorde's formulation "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" extraordinarily useful for teaching the various Marxist/subaltern--postcolonial, feminist, and African American--versions of poststructuralism. But I also always pointed out that word "dismantle" to my students--Lorde's claim is a fallacy. If you want to dismantle the master's house, you must either use the master's tools, or move at a frustratingly slow and careful pace with more rudimentary tools--for example, you can remove a screw with pliers, but it is much easier and faster to remove it with a screwdriver. But Lorde, herself an academic as well as a poet, didn't want to destroy the master's house. She wanted to live in it on her own terms. She had to learn to write like them before she could claim to write like herself.

I am also a firm believer that the relentless teaching of expository writing kills the love of writing in students, much like the relentless teaching of explication kills the love of reading--a Writicide to go alongside Kelly Gallagher's Readicide, if you will. The great majority of the high school students I have taught love to do things with words--they freestyle, they rap, they text, they chat, they gossip. The key is to harness this energy and creativity to the pursuit of improving their writing. It's a bare, biologically verifiable fact that teenagers are  going to be obsessed with themselves. So we let them write about themselves endlessly. And I would rather read 150 mediocre personal essays than 150 mediocre poetry explications any day. But that's because I love teens and their problems don't bore me.

I see so many articles and Facebook comments from my friends who teach in other environments that go along the lines of this one, with the attendant hand-wringing on both sides about how high school students aren't giving high school teachers what they want, and high school teachers are not giving college freshmen what they need, so the freshmen aren't giving the comp teachers what they want. I used to feel this way, and I still go nuts, in my own way, about the your/you'res and the their/there/they'res and the "In my honest opinion I think thats" of this world. (I borrow a tool from my senior high school teacher's box, thanks to whom I learned what a comma splice was. I draw a little spiral in these sorts of mistakes. If the student doesn't learn the error, the spiral gets bigger the next time. I don't remember what my former teacher called it, but I call it Ms. Barton's vortex of despair--my despair at your not having learned this simple rule or redundancy.)

Of course it's fun to laugh when a student misspells a word and, in so doing, creates an irony that is hilarious. Doesn't everyone do this all the time? When we publish the mistakes of those students, and get a good chuckle out of them, why are we laughing? At the incongruity of the error, for sure. But isn't some of the laughter also designed to mask our own anxiety for not teaching them how to spell a key vocabulary word? Or to congratulate ourselves on our own superior knowledge?

When I first started teaching high school, with absolutely no training, I would spend hours writing and revising elaborately written essay questions--usually multiple options for a single assignment--only to receive essays that were all plot summary. The first time this happened, the disappointment was devastating, and the tedium of grading only made the devastation worse. Eventually, I figured out better ways to teach writing in order to get my students to write the way I hoped they would, which was, of course, more like me. When I taught college students at U of C, I went to their Center for Teaching and Learning and found out more about what teachers call "alignment" of assessment and teaching.

But it was only when I took some real courses in education, when I got my M.A.T. a couple of years ago, that I discovered a whole other world of literature and habits of mind that could make me into a better teacher of writing. Most of the writers of my favorite books about teaching have been around for awhile--since the late 80s, in some cases, when I was learning to write as an elementary school student.

The new Common Core State Standards still, like the old standards, emphasize and expect expository writing with clear claims and supporting evidence and so on. But the shortcuts will stay the same. And CPS's new "Performance-Based Assessments" also expect the same, as well as a graphic organizer that must be completed in order to earn full credit.

I just wish that K-12 ed and English ed would actually sit down and talk to each other about the kind of writing they want to see, and how to get there, because I think we do a lot of un-teaching when we could actually be doing re-teaching or scaffolding, also known as "spiraling." I think we laugh because we feel out of control. But maybe, with a little bit more communication, we could spiral writing instruction into control.


Maybe, but no promises, I will write future posts on how English teachers teach writing and grammar. I think my friends who are English professors or trained as English PhDs might have something to gain from knowing about things like the 6 +1 Traits of Writing....just like one of my friends told me that "I do, we do, you do" (aka gradual release of responsibility) is very useful for teaching college students.

English and Education in the Tower of Babel, Part 1: Hand-wringing about writing

I work with another teacher who always gets annoyed when this happens: a student who is writing as fast as he can, in class, stops and dramatically shakes out the cramp he has developed in his hand.

Since I now work in a land where essays are often written by hand, even out of class, and revision is known as "corrections," and malapropisms are the order of the day, I always find dramas about "how students write now" pretty amusing, and also frustrating.

So, with that spirit in mind, let's wring our hands, and then shake them out:

Many prophets are now telling us that writing is one of the most important skills for students to learn to be competitive in the 21st century global economy. Throughout the short history of American universal public education, the teaching of writing has fallen largely on the shoulders of English language arts teachers, both in K-12 and in higher education. The thing is, when it comes to best practices in the teaching of writing, many of us are flying blind, on both sides of the high school graduation milestone. This is, in part, because English educators in K-12 are mostly listening to and reading books and articles by English and Reading specialists in the Education field, while English professors and graduate students in higher ed--the ones who inevitably teach freshman composition--mostly come from the English Language and Literature field or, in increasingly rare cases, the field of English Language and Rhetoric. As I have written before, these two fields--English Language Arts/Reading, as taught in Education departments, and English Language and Literature/Rhetoric, as taught in English departments, are like twins separated at birth (though born hundreds of years apart), or soul mates--sisters from a different mother--who can't recognize each other.

As the title of this post suggests, the two fields have become so alien to each other that they use different languages. For example, in English education, citations are formatted according the style used by most sociologists--the style of the American Psychological Association (APA style). In English lang & lit, citations are formatted according to one of the styles used by most humanists--the style of the Modern Language Association (MLA style), or of the University of Chicago Press ("Chicago style").

My professor of English methods at National-Louis, Katie McKnight, pointed out to our class that English teachers in K-12 (I will, for the remainder of this post, call these people "English teachers" and the college people "English professors") have to be "bilingual" in these two citation styles, which have, at least in my personal experience, somewhat annoying and pedantic differences. When writing one's teaching philosophy for an English department--a teaching philosophy that was first drafted for an Ed class--there is a lot of minute copy editing to be done. It's a pain.

It is with some bittersweet triumph that I can note that the style taught to most high school students, even in history classes, is a quasi-MLA style, which is so hegemonic that most people don't even know that they're using it. MLA style teaches us to underline or italicize titles, to capitalize each letter of the title, to put poem and article titles in quotation marks instead of underlining or italicizing.

But enough about citation styles. All of this is to say that, when it comes to writing, English teachers and English professors are definitely not on the same page. They're not even looking at the same book.

Either this fall or last spring, there was circulated, at the school where I work, an article that informed me that the most important skill for high school graduates to learn before college is to write an expository essay of 3-5 pages. Immediately, the pressure was on to assign such essays, and as much as possible, in order to prepare students for college.

Since I started teaching in 2002, however, I discovered that it is often much easier for students to learn, and for me to assess their learning of, the skill of expressing a clear point and supporting it with evidence in a much shorter assignment, such as a single paragraph, rather than in a whole essay, which takes longer for me to grade and return to them, and much longer for them to write.

I also discovered that students are much more motivated to write about themselves than they are to write about books or other people. And, from what I've seen and heard, when students get to write about what they want, which is, often, themselves, their writing style, mechanics, and voice improve. That is, after all, partly how I learned to write, and, I think, partly how most Americans I know (who, important caveat, like to write) learned how to write.

But teaching students to write personal narrative is obviously not enough. In 9th and 10th grades, which were the grades I taught last year, we were still very much working on the most basic skill of expository or persuasive writing--showing and explaining your evidence, in a single paragraph. In English Language Arts, this is known as a "three part response" or a "PIE" paragraph (Point, Information, Explanation) or a "PEE" (Point, Evidence, Explanation) or, to the chagrin of many a college professor, a hamburger (bread, meat, bread). Even many of a language arts teacher bristles at teaching such a rote form, but I view it as an important step to get pretty good at before going on to write an essay with a more complex point and multiple paragraphs with multiple pieces of evidence to support that point--what is also known, with some notoriety, as a "five-paragraph essay" or, for history teachers, a "DBQ" (Document-Based Question [Response]). Most hilariously, it has become common in my corner of the teaching world to call the point sentence in a DBQ response a "baby thesis," which I find a little too precious, but also apt--hey, at least that means that the main argument is a mother, right?

Incidentally, I have been told on multiple occasions not to call expository/persuasive essays "five-paragraph essays" anymore, because that term bears the taint of rote learning, and word of the genre's notoriety in higher ed has gotten back to secondary ed. We don't want to mess up in preparing our students for college (and, often, we worry about messing up because we will look bad, rather than because we want our students  to succeed in college). But, guess what? Although we changed the name and the number of paragraphs, I'm here to tell you that high school teachers still teach students how to write five-paragraph essays, and that this is because, barring that the student has developed into an exquisite writer before his or her junior year in college, the five-paragraph format is what's most likely to earn a good score on the writing section of the ACT, SAT, or AP tests. Mind you: a good score, but not a great score. The English Language Arts teachers who assess these essays have learned to treat the five paragraphs with suspicion.

But, to tell you the truth? I have written a five-paragraph essay on every standardized test that ever required one, and I have always gotten a very good score. And not only that: the traditional Anglo-American expository style, institutionalized by William Strunk and E.B. White (who, like me, loved George Orwell), has turned out, for me as an academic writer, to be a pretty great one to have in my pocket. So, for what it's worth, my empirical experience as a writer, reader, and teacher of academic writing shows me that the five-paragraph prejudice is not the fault of the expository organization, per se. In fact, traditional expository organization (charged with being "masculine" by none other than Virginia Woolf) is very useful for learning to write fast under time pressure, like in grad school or law school, or on a timed test. So I still teach students how to write point-example-explanation paragraphs, and to assemble them into very straightforward, traditionally-organized essays. But I don't call them "five paragraph essays." Instead, I call them "essays with an introduction, two or three or four body paragraphs, and a conclusion."

Click here to read part 2: The Dread Five Paragraph Essay and Teaching Expository Writing

Why I Write: Baldwin, Orwell, Didion

The title of this essay is an allusion to two of my heroes who wrote essays of the same name--George Orwell and Joan Didion. (Didion also wrote an essay called "Notes of a Native Daughter"--a response to Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son."

There is this song that have been listening to on repeat throughout this fall to keep myself going. The lyric is: "Dr. King, I think often of you, and the love that you learned from Jesus." It's by Mason Jennings, and it's called "Dr. King." It's a beautiful song, and the message means a lot to me.

Many of my friends and colleagues will see this as an oversimplification of King. But it's an oversimplification that I think is worth remembering, and I try to remember it every day. There is King hagiography and King denigration, and he was a complicated and egotistical man. But King's ministry was a ministry of love.

I am not a Christian. But lately I have been thinking a lot (shout out to my mother-in-law!) about the gospel of love. Baldwin knew that King believed in love and sacrifice, which is why he respected King. But Baldwin wished that King would include more rage in his ministry. Baldwin was, himself, a lapsed Pentecostalist youth minister--he knew a lot about Christian love, Christian hate, and Christian rage. Also he knew that these three things--love, hate, and rage--could exist in one man: his father, and himself.

My friend "Jim" wrote me this note today:

I had an awfully self-helpy thought about "selling oneself" this morning -- at least, it helped myself: it occurred to me that a better formulation than selling, with its connotations of commerce, commodification, prostitution, etc., might be giving an audience or readership permission to find you complex, pleasurable, etc. Audiences are made up of all kinds of people with all sorts of defenses about the prospect of allowing you the quasi-intimacy that reading creates. A writer's job is to contextualize herself in such a way as to make that possible. I realize as I write that sounds weirdly erotic, which is not quite what I mean. Because adapting one's work to a trend, having reputation or pedigree, etc., are all ways of building trust -- and it's very hard to reach people without that. Rambling. But what do you think?

Jim, who is English, always beats himself up for Rambling. He even had a blog once upon a time that made a punny joke about this and what the British call "Rambling," which means walking long distances for fun. But anyway, his point here is a good one--which is that you need to remember your audience, and that the relationship between teacher and student, writer and audience, is a love-hate relationship.

Baldwin knew a lot about psychology, about which I will be posting later this week. But for today, I wanted to answer this question: Why do I write? Why am I writing this way right now?

Didion said: "I. I. I. [...] I write to know what I am thinking." Yes. Writing, teaching, being an academic: these are endeavors in which the human has to balance between feeling selfish (egotistical) and selfless (a martyr). Nobody likes someone who acts like a martyr when they're not literally dying for a cause. And nobody likes an narcissist, either. The humanist professions--writing, teaching, academia--attract people who wrestle with this duality. But we're kidding ourselves if we think that we write only for the sake of our audiences. The problem that Jim is talking about above is the problem of recognizing your audience. Do you write for yourself (narcissist) or for your audience (martyr)?

The answer, of course, is both/and. Martin Luther King may have been quite egotistical. There is certainly evidence to support this. But even people with narcissistic tendencies actually do most of what they do out of a sense of mission. (All ad hominem attacks on Obama aside, no one would run for President of the United States and then keep doing that job unless they actually cared about changing the world. Well, maybe one guy....who ran to please his father. But enough psychoanalysis of the presidents.)

King's mission was not one of self-aggrandizement. Movements need leaders. He knew that. He tried to balance of self-aggrandizement with self-sacrifice. And, since he was murdered at 39, and lived his entire short career of celebrity under the threat of imminent death, I should say that the balance was on the side of sacrifice for him. So it kind of annoys me when people dishonor his memory by talking about what he said in private company, which we only know about thanks to the U.S. government SPYING ON HIM. No one is all good. But he was, on balance, one of the better ones.

Orwell said that he wrote for four reasons: (1) sheer egoism; (2) aesthetic enthusiasm; (3) historical impulse; and (4) political purpose. Yes, yes, yes, and yes! Do you, dear reader, see why I love and worship these writers?

So what am I writing about now? And has it changed? My husband pointed out to me that I appear to have taken a slight turn from my previous postings. I can understand his point of view. I rarely used to talk about Foucault in my previous writing on this blog. But, at the same time, I think it is consistent with what I've always tried to do on this blog, which is to create dialogue where I could not find it in my working life.

Dialogue, cooperation, collaboration--I sound like Mr. President! But the man has a good point. We live in a  world right now that is so with-us-or-against-us that we have shut our ears to ideas. A good idea is a good idea, whether it comes from your friend or your enemy.

I don't want anyone who has read this blog before the last week to think that I have stopped writing for you. I don't entirely know who you are, but you are still my audience. Many more of my academic friends have started reading since I posted "A Defense of English." What I have noticed, and I will keep repeating it until it gets heard, is that the dialogue between English Literature departments and English Education departments is pretty impoverished, except at the few universities where these two types of specialists co-exist in one department.

To put this point another way, what I posted about Orwell was somewhat taboo for me, as an academic writer, to put out there, on a couple of levels. As a junior, junior, junior, "jobless," just-about-to-be-minted PhD, it is presumptuous of me to write about Orwell. Orwell, as an author, falls outside of my field of specialization--American and African American literature and drama. And I'm by no means an Orwell specialist; I've just read a lot of his books. I haven't read all of the criticism that's already out there about Orwell. I haven't paid attention to that conversation. So who am I to write about him? Well, I have taught a lot of Orwell to high school students--Animal Farm and 1984; Homage to Catalonia and "Shooting an Elephant" and "Politics and the English Language" and "Such, Such..." and the essay he wrote on the Spanish Civil War. So I've read him pretty carefully; and I've tried to assemble a picture of him that makes him make more sense to other people, younger people. Non-experts.

That's what teachers and critics of literature do: we try to give people a bigger picture.

On a second level, I'm way too googly-eyed about Orwell for this writing to be considered "academic." In the academy, we don't love the authors we write about. If anything, taking a position that shows that we love the author is likely to be challenged--"Why do you defend this person's thinking so much?" "I can understand why you might want to, but it's causing you to be blind to this persons flaws." In academia, we are all about pointing out people's---er, wait, arguments'--flaws.

Critics often feel sad about themselves because they feel so unwanted and unneeded by society. But society needs critics. Critics help us read better. And that's what we need to do. Orwell knew that. He saw--firsthand--all of the madness of modernity, and he wrote about it for multiple audiences. For adults and for children. For intellectuals and for ordinary people. And he wrote in a way that most people could understand, because he prized clarity above many other things (more on that in a future post).

Baldwin believed in love. I want to write like him because he believed in pouring his love and his rage into his writing, which is what I've tried to do on this blog, more than once. Most people now call Baldwin a "liberal" (in a bad way) for believing in love. But he did, and he wasn't wrong to. He was an ex-Christian and he understood the teachings of Jesus better than the people who write about him now. He understood King because he understood Jesus. He believed in love, and was sorely disappointed, because he had believed in Jesus and then watched many of his closest friends die as a direct result of American racism.

I think, in academia, it's time we had a little bit more love, and a little bit less hate from the haters. Paranoid reading is annoying and boring. There are only so many times that you can point out that an author from the past was duped. Hindsight and all that. It is presentist and unfair to judge King's gender politics by today's standards, or Harper Lee's race politics, for the same reason, or Baldwin's politics, period. Most people in this world who aren't psychotic narcissists (like Hitler and Stalin and Castro) have good intentions. In teaching, we call this giving the benefit of the doubt, or assuming positive intent. Baldwin was a liberal because he knew that being one would give him a platform. And he wanted to be heard. That's why he wrote. That's why I write.