For at least twenty years, the 500-word theme has been the laughing stock of our profession. In journal after journal, in conference after conference, and deep in our hearts, college English teachers everywhere have admitted that no good comes from teaching this form —and likely much harm. But still the beat goes on. The same journals that rightly ridicule the 500-word theme— with its thesis statement, topic sentences; introductory, developmental, and concluding paragraphs; and all the dreary rest — at the same time print ad after ad promoting textbooks in which the 500-word theme reigns, textbooks often written by the same college writing teachers whose journal articles ridicule the teaching of that form. How can this be? How have we gone on year after year teaching what we know to be false?
I hear some voices in response: “Oh, but I do believe in the 500-word theme! How dare you say I don’t?!” To this I have no good answer. Except perhaps this: Look to your heart. Do you really believe that a form found nowhere outside English 101 should be the mainstay of that course, a course that claims to prepare students for writing in college and in the wider world?
Other voices in response are more troubling. These are the voices that say, “Yes, I know the 500-word theme is in itself foolish, but I use it only as a tool, as a device for teaching students some basic principles of organization.” This is the more troubling view of the 500-word theme because it is more widespread and, most importantly, because it keeps those who hold it from facing a major truth: the 500-word theme prevents students from thinking.
Even worse, the 500-word theme gives students (and eventually their teachers) the illusion that they are thinking when in fact all they are doing is filling in the blanks. Thus, for instance, students being taught the 500-word theme are not allowed to ask this question: “Given what I want to do with this piece of writing, is a thesis statement appropriate?” Don’t ask such questions; just fill in the blanks—a topic and a claim about the topic. And don’t ask if arguing a point is always appropriate; just come up with three reasons why your claim is true. Etc., etc. We English teachers are often wont to complain about departments that depend entirely on multiple choice exams, when, behind our own backs, we have constructed a way of writing and thinking about writing that is at base only a variation on the multiple choice exam.
I can hear still other voices objecting: “Oh, I get it: you think students should not follow a standard organizational form; you think they should express themselves!” Indeed, over the years, for many conversations in and around the English Department, only two alternatives have been said to be available to teachers of writing: prescribed forms, especially the 500-word theme, and formless, tell-it-from-heart expressivism. A third possibility (explored briefly later in this essay), having students think rhetorically about the particular academic situation into which they are writing, is rarely considered seriously.
A True Story—With Names Withheld
The true worth of the 500-word theme can be found in an incident that occurred within our own walls. It happened recently, and no, I was not one of the participants.
A Composition teacher at the end of the semester submitted his class’s final essays to a rather large group of faculty readers. The teacher was nervous about this because he had not taught the 500-word theme during the semester but had instead done other things, most importantly getting students to think carefully about what they were reading, especially when they were reading their own writing. He was right to be nervous, for all of his students’ final essays were failed by the faculty readers. With that distinctly unhelpful information in hand, the teacher considered each student’s entire portfolio and arrived at final grades for the course accordingly.
But the teacher was determined that this mass “failure” would not occur again. And so, a few days before the next semester’s final essay, he spent one hour teaching his students the 500-word theme and told them that their grade on that essay would be determined by faculty who were particularly interested in their ability to deploy that form. You can see the result coming: all the students passed. What a lesson is here! We now know the exact worth of the 500-word theme: one hour’s teaching.
Actually, the incident is worse than it appears, for in fact not all the students did pass. The one essay flunked by faculty was written by a student who from the beginning of the semester had been the most thoughtful writer in the teacher’s class. In her final essay, this student made the mistake of adding to the 500-word theme: after dutifully providing three topic sentences and supporting developmental paragraphs “proving” that her thesis statement was true, the student went on to add a paragraph or two that exploredwhy, in fact, the conclusion she had come to might be challenged. In other words, despite the power of the anti-thought 500-word theme regime, this student was able to put real thought on the page. This is the student the faculty flunked.
But by doing so, of course, it is the faculty who flunked. We all flunk when we impose this regime on our students. Thus the scandal of the 500-word theme continues.
What Is To Be Done?
I do not know if we are capable of changing our ways in this matter. Deep down we know we should. But there is a lot getting in the way of our doing so. Most importantly, we face this difficult challenge: “OK, the 500-word theme sucks. It stops students from thinking. It fails as a model for writing everywhere outside English 101. But if not that, what am I supposed to do?”
Perhaps we should start by admitting that the 500-word theme is indeed something we do because we don’t know what else to do. And there are some good reasons we don’t know. To begin with, we are trying to teach writing in isolation from an academic discipline. No one else in the world tries that. Everyone else teaches writing within some particular academic or professional setting. Only we try to teach writing as writing. No wonder we fall back on a “universal” model, even when we know that the model’s claim to universality is bogus.
A second reason why coming up with alternatives is difficult is our sense that, because as a Department we are really not in agreement about what we should be doing as writing teachers, we push ourselves toward measurable standards. But since those “standards” have been invented within the context of disagreement, they can be nothing but superficial and bogus standards— hence the scandal of the flunking faculty described earlier.
Together these two add up to a certain kind of failure of imagination: we have not been able to imagine constructing a context for writing that is not based on following a series of sterile models—not only the 500-word theme, of course, but also rhetorical modes such as the descriptive essay, the comparison-and-contrast essay, the argumentative essay. And since the teaching of writing is largely isolated in individual three-credit sections (sometimes six-credit “links”) focused on just writing; and since the failures of curricular reform of the past two decades at CCP have meant that writing does not occur in almost every course students encounter, we Composition teachers are left hanging out there in the wind.
Where Do You Think You Are—Harvard?
The most delicate and difficult side of this matter is certainly the place where it touches on questions of race, class, and gender. It’s the old problem: when we dumb down the curriculum (even as we say of course we’re not dumbing down the curriculum), are we “meeting the special needs of unprepared students,” or are we simply giving up on groups of students we believe just don’t have the right stuff? Perhaps a brief thought experiment can shed some light on these questions. Imagine that our classrooms were filled not with the students we now have but instead with, say, suburban white students who had not done well in school not because they were not smart enough but because of social and cultural problems mysterious to us. Would we treat such students to a stale repetition of the regimes that failed to engage them in high school, as we wielders of the 500-word theme now do for the students we now in fact have? Unlikely. With these imagined suburban students we would much more likely honor their intelligence and their alienation from high school routines by seeing if we could truly engage their minds with challenging, adult-level college material and practices. When we fail to do this for the students we actually have, we open ourselves to the charge that indeed racial, class, and gender stereotypes have seeped into our beliefs and practices. No, this is not Harvard. No student or teacher who has been here for five minutes thinks that it is. But it’s not a third-rate junior high school either, and the challenge we face is how to present college to students actually present in our classes.
But perhaps the biggest barrier to real change in this area (and a lot of other curricular areas) is the old CCP refrain: “Oh yes! I already do that in my classroom.” Not to put too fine a point on it: No, you don’t. And if you did, you would suffer the same fate as the teacher who in one semester didn’t spend an hour teaching his students the 500-word theme. In short, we will have to admit we don’t know what we are doing before we can start to do something that makes sense.
Drop the 500-word theme? What would my students’ essays look like? How would I grade them? That, of course is another side of the scandal: that we have taken the most retrograde feature of academe, the letter grade, and put it in the driver’s seat, telling us how and what we should teach.
If we think, on the other hand, that constructing in our writing classrooms something like an academic discipline —literature? the study of rhetoric? discourse analysis?—and have students write into that disciplinary situation in ways that make rhetorical sense, then perhaps we could begin to move away from the fakery of the 500-word theme and towards students’ actually putting thought on the page. Thought on the page: before we miseducated ourselves and our students, that’s what writing was.
Perhaps we should talk about that.
© Copyright 2003. Contact author for permission
Maintained by Jay Howard,Sept 2003