I want to spend a couple of blogs on essay writing, to just lay a foundation for how we get our students to become good writers.
(I still owe the final blog on the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, — writing on THE BEAUTIFUL— and its all in my head and need to be written down, but since many are choosing writing curriculum and planning for the fall, a blog on essay writing seems more appropriate for the next few weeks).
College professors pull their hairs out over student essays more than they do about just about any other issue. Students from public schools, private schools, and homeschools alike, often come to college without knowing how to write a focused essay on one topic.
Why … because
1. because students do not know what to say about a particular topic
2. if they know what to say, they don’t know how to organize what they want to say so that it is persuasive, let alone coherent
3. if they know how to organize it, they often do not express themselves well enough so that their readers know and understand what was said.
Point 1 above is content or INVENTION
Point 2 above is organization or ARRANGEMENT
Point 3 above is style
Content, arrangement and style are three canons of rhetoric that are vital in essay writing, and I will deal with those in the blogs that follow this one.
ANALYSIS
Today I want to discuss a very important foundation we need to lay with our students so that they are able to think about and develop content, arrangement, and style for their own essays. The topic is analysis.
Your students need to analyze the writing of others. They need to read passages, they need to figure out what those passages say, how they are arranged, and how the writers of those passages express themselves.
This generally involves
1. reading a passage
2. paraphrasing that same passage (write it in your own words)
3. outlining that same passage to figure out how the author arranged it
4. parsing, diagramming, and doing word study on that passage to figure out what turns of phrases and what vocabulary the author used.
Those four steps are vital, absolutely VITAL to becoming a good writer. Your student should spend at least half of his allotted writing time analyzing the writing of great writers, so he recognizes how good writing is organized, what sorts of arguments are valid, and so that he gets good sentence structure and excellent vocabulary stored away in his mind.
We, at Classical Writing, always emphasize that this is best done with the classics– with the best pieces of writing that the western world has to offer. But, you do not have to delve into Shakespeare or into Benjamin Franklin in 6th grade. You can start with simple classics, simple pieces of writing, writing that your student enjoys, at whatever level he or she is at, and move your way up to more complicated pieces. The key is that your student should hopefully enjoy the writing that he or she is analyzing. Simple writing can be excellent writing. And if a student never develops a taste for Edmund Burke’s flowery and intricate style, skip Burke and pick someone else more suited for your student’s palate. Good writers, such as Laura Ingalls Wilder may write for a 3rd-5th grade audience, and that is OK, even for a 7th grader. Wilder’s stories are well organized. They have clear beginnings and ends. Each chapter has a purpose, an aim, and that aim is accomplished at the end of the chapter, AND the chapter is written with correct and well formed diction and a varied (though not complex) vocabulary. A student can learn much about telling a story from an author like Wilder, and in the process of outlining the chapter, a student can learn how to organize a story about an event.
Some of my college students are sadly very poor writers. Part of the problem in their writing is that they were asked to write essays, to express their opinions, at a very early age—usually at a time when they had very little to say (other than aping their parent’s opinions) and they had no sense of how to organize what little they tried to say.
Why paraphrase?
It sounds boring, perhaps, and it sounds inane and simple. I read the passage, I know what it said, I understand it. WHY do I have to write a paraphrase, or a one paragraph summary of it??
Well… it is one thing to say that you KNOW what it says… or rather that you THINK you know what it says. DO you really know what it says? The proof is in your paraphrase. Have your students paraphrase and then compare with each other’s paraphrases. What did Susie include? Why did Bob not include the same thing? WHAT truly is the essence of this passage? What could be left out? How do we know what the essence is? Is it subjective, like I have this preference and you have that preference and it really makes no difference whether we don’t include the same thing in our summaries?
In my college classes I get a frightening number of students who actually do not know how to extract the essence of a passage. We read paragraphs aloud in class. Students in different groups work together to try to extract the essences of the paragraphs, and many do not have the filtering skills to recognize which details are important and which ones are not. Paraphrases and summaries are incredibly important exercises to hone the skills of learning to see what is important in a piece of writing.
I will make a similar case for outlining. You can read a passage and ‘get it’, but can you write a piece that is just as good yourself? One of the keys to writing is organizing your thoughts. Few students make use of outlines because they have few enough thoughts and they do not really know whether it matters which thought is presented first, which one second, and which one last. So they write from whatever is in their heads, and often it is a jumbled mess of disjointed arguments that do not come together to form a coherent whole at the end of the essay.
Why outline?
Outlining the writings of others is essential to learning to organize one’s own writing. When presented with a short essay on a topic, like one of Seneca’s moralizing pieces on Anger, on Philosophy, or on Old Age, students should outline it paragraph by paragraph, to figure out what his thesis statement is, what his supporting arguments are, and how he concludes. This gives students a clue how to organize their own essays. The more of that sort of outline students learn to do, the more likely that students will learn to outline their own thoughts prior to writing an essay.
Why Diagram?
Diagramming is usually a harder sell, but it is equally essential. Diagramming operates at the sentence level. It sheds light on the anatomy of the individual sentence, and it helps the student construct sentences that are well -crafted and make sense both grammatically and semantically. In Classical Writing, we start sentence diagramming and outlining in 3rd-4th grade with simple sentences. Diagramming ensures that every sentence has a verb and a subject as well as a predicate. It identifies the structure of the sentence as a whole as well as the structure of the individual modifiers. Students who are used to diagramming scores of sentences from an early age, are better at crafting their own sentences, both so their sentences are grammatically correct, but also so the sentences are clear, varied, and interesting to read.
Please do not omit teaching paraphrasing, outlining, diagramming. Those are indispensable tools to proper writing instruction. Those analysis hours are incredibly well spent.
If those skills are not part of your own (you, the teacher’s) battery of skills, do it WITH your students. YOU paraphrase and compare your version with your students, YOU outline a passage and compare with your students, YOU diagram along with them.