Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [14]
The form actually discourages thinking by conditioning writers to be afraid of looking closely at evidence. If they look too closely, they might find something that doesn’t fit, at which point the prefabricated organizational scheme falls apart. But it is precisely the something-that-doesn’t-seem-to-fit, the thing writers call a “complication,” that triggers good ideas.
Finally, what about the perception that students need to master 5-paragraph form in order to do well on SAT exams and other forms of standardized testing? Standardized tests in writing usually don’t encourage writers to take the kinds of risks in both form and content that good writers must learn to take. But it is a myth that SAT evaluators reward 5-paragraph form. In fact, the two criteria that most often earn high scores from graders are length (yes, length) and vocabulary (Michael Winerip, “SAT Essay Test Rewards Length and Ignores Errors,” the New York Times, May 4, 2005, On Education). Readers of writing-based college entrance exams give high marks not to writing that has a tidy structure but to writing that avoids clichés and overstated claims and that employs sentence and essay structures capable of accommodating complex ideas. (See Chapter 10 for alternatives to 5-paragrah form that can accommodate complexity. See especially the Template for Using 10 on 1.)
ON WRITING TRADITIONAL ESSAYS IN THE DIGITAL AGE
You might be wondering why it is that colleges and universities continue to ask students to write traditional essays in an age when so much communication is dominated by the short and often multi-modal forms of the Internet. Does the arrival of the Internet with its blogs and web pages and YouTube clips mean that the traditional essay is rapidly becoming extinct? Why shouldn’t college students spend their time learning to write exclusively in these new forms rather than learning to do a kind of writing they might not use after college?
There are several answers to these questions. First and most importantly, learning to write the traditional essay is the only way to develop the skills and habits of mind necessary for engaging in acts of sustained, in-depth reflection. Nor does it matter if you never write essays or lab reports or academic articles after college. It is not the presentation that matters—the forms of college writing—so much as what the forms allow you to do as a thinker.
In this chapter’s short take on the writing process (See Process and Product: Some Ways of Thinking About the Writing Process), we point out that the form of a finished piece of writing does not disclose the process that would allow a writer to produce it. The necessarily concise lists of PowerPoints and of some kinds of writing on the Web don’t just spring into being in that form. The careful compression in such forms is typically the product of writing as a tool of thought.
Finally, we are advising that traditional forms and formats are only a part of what you need to learn in order to grow as a writer and thinker. The first unit of this book, for example, although its assignments can lead to traditional essays, focuses primarily on ways of using writing in order to improve your ability to observe. This kind of writing—exploratory writing, writing to help you discover ideas—can fuel various formats, including multi-modal ones.
WHAT’S DIFFERENT ABOUT WRITING ARGUMENTS IN COLLEGE?
Insofar as you will be asked to write arguments in college, they will differ in significant ways from what you hear on crossfire-style talk shows and “news” programs. In made-for-TV arguments, people set out to defeat other people’s positions and thus “win.” Arguments in college are more exploratory—aimed at locating new ways of understanding something or at finding a tentative solution to a problem. Such arguments lead with analysis rather than position-taking. The claims you arrive at in an analysis are, in fact, arguments—analytical arguments.