Who would have guessed it? Only a month or so after the perverse persistence of the five-paragraph theme became an issue at Community College of Philadelphia (Viewpoints, Fall 2003), the New York Times (December 3, 2003, A 1) made it the centerpiece of an article on George Bush’s “Leave No Child Behind” educational policy scam. Here are the first two paragraphs of the Times story headlined “Gains in Houston Schools: How Real Are They?”:
HOUSTON – As a student at Jefferson Davis High here, Rosa Arevelo seemed the “Texas miracle” in motion. After years of classroom drills, she passed the high school exam required for graduates on her first try. A program of college prep courses earned her the designation “Texas scholar.”
At the University of Houston, though, Ms. Arevelo discovered the distance between what Texas public schools called success and what she needed to know. Trained to write five-paragraph “persuasive essays” for the state exam, she was stumped by her first writing assignment. She failed the college entrance exam in math twice, even with a year of remedial algebra. At 19, she gave up and went to trade school.
The lesson of the Texas scam is clear: teaching students to write five-paragraph themes disables them, makes their success in college less, not more, likely. Yes, it is a form they can master. Yes, it is a form we can easily grade. And yes, it does students serious harm.
But we keep doing it – largely, I suspect, because we don’t know what else to do. After all, we are faced with students “who don’t know how to write in college.” And everything about their writing seems to be going wrong at once: grammar, punctuation, spelling, proofreading, unity, coherence, sense of audience, ideas worth writing about, complexity, clarity, structure, tone, etc., etc. Where does one begin? And why not assign an admittedly simple-minded structure for the to follow? At least they (and we) will feel successful at something.
But it does them harm. And we should start where medicine starts: do no harm.
The kind of harm the five-paragraph theme does perhaps becomes invisible to after all these years. Our imaginations have failed to see the mind-forged manacles (as Blake would have it) that teaching this form creates in our students. But here are two manacles to consider, two of the strongest: Rirst, since writing is the form thinking takes on the page, prescribing a particular form of thought proscribes thinking in general. And second, prescribing this form proscribes in particular thinking about what form would be appropriate for accomplishing what task with what audience. In short, the five-paragraph theme teaches students not to think and to believe this lack of thought doesn’t matter, since there is no real audience for their writing. Except for the teacher, of course, who by this form of writing is turned into a kind of clerk typist, who has a checklist that reads:
“Your essay should have the following:
√an introduction that leads to a thesis statement in the first paragraph,
√explanation and examples that support your thesis,
√consistency of thought throughout the essay,
√incorporation of ideas from the article(s) on the topic,
√a conclusion that restates the overall point of your essay.”
(The above is from a recent Community College of Philadelphia composition course exam.)
None of my ranting, of course, will convince anyone who thinks he/she really believes in the five-paragraph theme. Only those (and that may well be almost every college teacher) who deep down somewhere know that this wretched form really is harmful will be receptive.
But the question left hanging is: if not the five-paragraph theme, then what? What should we do from day to day? What should we tell our students to do?
To begin with, we need to think about student writing and faculty guidance of student writing differently. Right now we tell students how to write and, in fact, how to think. What we should be doing instead is setting up situations, conversations, into which students write. And since the conversations into which students write in courses outside English Composition are particular academic conversations, we need to set up for our students conversations that are shaped by the academic conversational “commonplaces” they will encounter as they make their ways through college.
In search of such a replacement for the five-paragraph theme, a dozen Community College of Philadelphia faculty (from English, History, Library Science, Philosophy, and Sociology) met in the Fall of 2003 and Spring of 2004 in a nine-week series of seminars. The center of our discussion turned out to be what David Bartholomae’s article “Inventing the University” calls the “commonplaces” of academic discourse. According to Bartholomae, college students every time they write are faced with the daunting task of “inventing the university”—that is, with learning to talk the talk, with learning what sorts of writing earn respect in college and what sorts do not.
Discussions of Bartholomae’s article and of syllabi from Temple University and Community College of Philadelphia (the latter from Ralph Faris, Charlene Leaver, and Evan Seymour) generated a list of commonplaces of academic conversations, commonplaces that transcend the boundaries of particular academic disciplines:
1) Academic writing is indeed always within some particular academic conversation.
2) Academic writing is multivocal rather than univocal.
3) Academic writing is perspectival.
4) Academic writing tends to metacommunicate, to talk about the talk, to stand back from the language being used and comment.on the significance of choosing this rather than that way of speaking, of framing the issue at hand this way rather than that way.
5) Academic writing is complex. Students keep asking: can you break that down? Can you make that simple? Will you say that in a few words? Behind these questions is a strong belief: All this talk in college is fundamentally illegitimate. That is, what college professors (and the writers they have us read) really do is take simple ideas and make them complicated. They do this because they think it makes them sound educated. But we students know it’s just a scam. This student ideology, which we, their long-time teachers, easily drift into, presents a real barrier to progress in college, for the commonplaces of academic discourse include the idea that because the issues the academy deals with are in fact complex, the thought (that is, the language) must also be complex. (Academic writing at its best presents complexity with clarity, not oversimplifying, not dumbing down, but with clarity that does justice to the complexity.)
6) Disagreements – the heart and soul of academic life – in academic writing are handled in such a way that the position being opposed is neither bashed nor dismissed but treated with the respect due to a point of view that has been carefully worked out by thoughtful individuals. Structurally, this tendency results in large sections of a typical academic essay being given over to careful, long, and fair accounts of the positions with which the writer is going to differ.
7) Rarely in academic writing will one encounter such constructs as “I disagree because I feel that…” That is because in academic discourse writers do nto call on the authority of their private inner feelings but rather on the authority of a more public reasoning. Thus disagreements are likely to be expressed in terms of presenting the view being opposed a ont that does not fully address a certain problem, puzzle, question, or issue.
8) Though some have argued that "everything is an argument," even lyric poems (which on this line are said to "argue" for the validity of the poet's mood, state of being, feelings, etc.), academic writers in fact do a number of other things other than make claims and support them. For instance, they may
Are all of the above in fact “argument”? Fine, but that would make “argument” a term so broad as to be of little descriptive value.
All of these ideas and more form the rich academic context into which we should be initiating our students when we frame sequences of writing assignments for them. Where to begin the sequence? In some ways it does not matter. Each of these commonplaces of academic writing implies all the others. Press any one of them hard, and the rest appear. My own choice is to start with the idea of conversation, and that kind of start opens up the question of just who is in on the conversation—students, the professor, the texts at hand, to begin with—and what the relations among those conversants implies for the writing tasks at hand.
Readers will have noticed an amusing irony here—having inveighed against telling students how to write, I am now advocating doing something that looks a lot like that. True, but pointing out to students that, for instance, many academic articles begin with an account of the conversation into which they place themselves provides students with a “template” that is not only much richer and more varied than the five-paragraph theme template but has deep roots in the academic and professional worlds beyond English Comp I. It is a template that leaves room for thought.
What is to be done? How can student writing at Community College of Philadelphia get out of the rut that it is in? On the one hand, changing classrooms one professor at a time is unlikely to be powerful enough to change the academic culture of the college. On the other, two earlier broad attempts to make such a cultural change – the General Studies reform and the “Dimensional” reform – both failed, and the current Administration does not seem one whose interests lie in such broad-vision projects. The faculty will have to do it on its own. Within a year or two perhaps the new Faculty Council on Education (first meeting during professional development week this Fall) will take up the issue of writing at Comunity College of Philadelphia.
Meanwhile, smaller efforts, some of them a little larger than actions by individual professors, will have to do. For instance, these:
1. Buy, read, and start a reading group around Gerald Graff’s new book Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (Yale, 2003). It turns out that the writing, reading, and thinking habits we thought were the province of community college students are in fact to be found in colleges and universities of all kinds. Graff has worked with teachers at Illinois State University at Chicago, community college teachers, and high school teachers on creating academic conversations into which students write.
2) Join Tom Ott’s Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Seminar this Fall, when it takes up such issues. Consider the following: a course with real subject matter is a course embedded in conversations that constitute the academic field of which that course is a part. In what conversations is your course embedded? Which of those conversations will form the context for your students’ writing? How will you set up and maintain those conversations?
3) Redesign your syllabus, putting such secondary and tertiary matters as grades, attendance, and inclement weather policies far to the rear. Up front, start the conversation that will be the center of your course. (A description of what classroom routines, customs, and practices are necessary for a college-level conversation might well be part of this up-front matter.)
4) Consider these insights from the discussion so far:
These beginnings are modest, but they’ll have to do for now.
References
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Maintained by Jay Howard,Sept 2004