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The Essay
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How to develop, research, structure, and write research essay and reports
Death
to the Reading Class
By Marshall Poe
Fortnightly Review, September 2011
As noted in the Wikipedia article on the essay, Aldous Huxley, in his Collected Essays, discusses three types of essays:
The first and third types are, to my mind, more difficult to write. For your majors and your likely jobs, you're going to get more use out of the second, the objective and factual type of thinking and writing.
For purposes of this course, the term "essay" refers to
this objective and factual type of thinking and writing.
rhetorical part: assertion, support, explanation
analogy: pull out your gun, load, aim and shoot
An assertion
is like a gun. Anyone can pull one out and start waving it around. By
itself, an assertion is an opinion, all talk, lots of fervent belief,
but nothing else. To make it more persuasive, all you can do it raise
your voice, wag the gun more wildly.
The support is the bullets. It's what you load your gun with. A loaded gun is a lot more threatening. It can, potentially, do a lot more damage than the gun by itself.
However, to effectively communicate, you need to pull the trigger. No matter how good your gun and your bullets, you're never going to hit your target unless you pull the trigger. Your target is your reader, and that's a singular "reader", on purpose. You cannot shoot everyone with a gun. It's pretty much one at a time.
Same with an essay. Don't try to write to "everyone". Write to one specific person, one reader. You need to explain what you want your reader to get out of the evidence. Then it's not just your opinion against someone else's. It's your substantiated, explained opinion, which is more persuasive and carries more weight than the opinions of those wagging their guns at each other.
The body section or paragraph is like a
mini-essay in itself. Where the whole essay has a thesis statement, the
individual sections or paragraphs have topic statements. Then at the
end of the course, after you have written a lot of paragraphs, you will
add a level of complexity by combining some of them into an essay. It
will have many paragraphs, many topic sentences, and lots of examples,
and you will pull the trigger over and over again by continually
explaining what those examples show.
An enormous amount of the communication that is done in
any organization is oral. The modes that we have you practice in
writing class, slowly, on paper, the compare/contrast and cause/effect
sort of thing, will be your best tools in these oral situations. You
need to be able to decode what others are saying, and you need to be
able to do it quickly. You need to be able to think on your feet,
whether in an informal one-on-one with the boss or in a meeting with
all the other department heads competing for a share of the same
inadequate resources that the organization has available.
Most of this kind of communication is goal-oriented. You are trying to
get someone to do something a certain way or to see something a certain
way, generally to the advantage of you or your department. Marketing
wants Production to speed it up. Accounting wants Marketing to spend
less on advertising. R&D wants Production to try something new. HR
wants everyone to learn new things, even if you don't want to. Above
all, you want your boss to see you a certain way when it comes time for
raises and promotions.
Or you're the poor guy in the image on the right pleading with HR not
to fire your best worker. The rest of the department is watching how
well you can persuade power.
While this kind of communication is very important, there's another
kind that is also very important. The oral communication is more for
persuasion, when you're communicating like a lawyer.
The
other kind of communication is when you act like a scientist, not a
lawyer. This kind of communication is almost always written. The
writing can range from an informal email to a glossy, color-printed,
bound volume. Organizations are downing in data. A report sucks out
some of that information and organizes it to help someone solve a
problem or make a decision. The best reports are attractive and
accessible. They are also authorized.
Most of the jobs you've had so far in your life were hourly. You put in
your scheduled time. Less time, less money. The jobs you want with your
college education are going to be more professional. In practical
terms, that means you get to control a certain amount of your time. As
long as you're on time and under budget, you can determine much of what
you do hour by hour.
Much of this kind of communication is routine. It is periodically
recording data that is constantly being generated, like quarterly sales
reports or daily production logs, as in the screenshot on the right.
Much of it is done with forms and formulaic writing. It is read like a
map is read -- you quickly get what you need and ignore the rest.
However, much of this kind of communication is not routine. The
organization has a problem to solve, for example, how do we increase
sales 10% next quarter? Or it has a decision to make, for example,
which market to we open first, Brazil or China? The decision goes down:
incease sales; open new markets. The information goes up: your report.
The decision goes down: here's the budget for your sales plan; we'll
market in Brazil first.
The information going up is always authorized. Very rarely, and at
great political peril, are you going to write a report all by yourself
at your own initiative. First of all, you probably are going to write
it on a team. And second, when you are at work or you are representing
your organization in public, including online, you lose many of your
civil rights -- freedom of speech and association chief among them. So
there will always be some person or committee authorizing a report. You
will perhaps write a part and sometimes all of the first draft of this
report. If the authorizing agent, usually your boss, accepts it, then
it is no longer yours in any real sense. The information in your report
will get incorporated into the process of solving the problem or making
the decision. Or not.
The point here is that your opinion of all this as a report writer does
not matter. At all. When you work for an organization, they are renting
your brain, your communication skills, your problem-solving and
decision-making skills. If you make something or write something or
produce something at work, it is not yours. It belongs to the
organization. When you leave, you don't take all the writing you did
with you. It stays there for a long, long time.
When you are doing this "scientific" kind of
communication, you are selecting and analyzing data. Your analysis will
have a conclusion and, if appropriate, a recommendation. But you can't
change the data. And logic is logic. Whether anyone will like it or not
like it doesn't matter one bit to the data.
For ENG 110, you are going to write essays that are more like what a
lawyer would write, and you are going to base it on the kind of
information that the scientists provide.
Three kinds of knowledge:
a priori knowledge - obtained
without needing to observe the world
empirical knowledge - obtained
after experience, observing the world or interacting
with it in some
way.
inferential knowledge -
reasoning from empirical or from other inferential knowledge. Such
knowledge may or may not be verifiable by observation or testing.
A lot of the writing that you do professionally will be reports. On the one end, the information for the report is so standard and is generated to frequently that you will use a form. Fill in the blanks with words and numbers, verifiable facts, things that you, the writer, observed or counted.
Moving along that dimension, a report would still
contain only verifiable facts, but instead of just filling in the
blanks of a form, you will write complete sentences. For these kind of
reports, the organization that employs you will often provide a strict
format or template for the report to follow.
Continuing along that dimension, a report can have the
facts (research) assembled by the writer in service of a main idea,
what we call a thesis if it's in an essay. For example, you might
explain
why your plan for next year is a use of the company's resources that
fits a corporate objective.
Or you might explain to the granting agency why your proposal should be
funded. The writer is more in the role of a scientist, looking
dispassionately and objectively at the data and thinking clearly about
it. It tends to be written in a flat, impersonal voice and attempts
only to inform. If there's any persuasion or argumentation, it's all
logical.
Here's a news article -- a
report
-- about the preservation
conference in Buffalo in October 2011. It tells what happened. It makes
declarative statements about things that the reporter saw and heard.
The emphasis is helping the reader see and hear it, too. He doesn't
tell you anything you couldn't have seen and heard had you been there.
The Wikipedia article doesn't have anything that is not referenced. It
purposefully excludes inferential thinking.
Preservationism
gets eerie
by Mark Sommer, News Staff Reporter
Buffalo News, October 20, 2011
Here's another report: Wikipedia's Refugees:
An essay does all that, and in addition it has a personality and a voice and assumes that the reader is willing to listen to a line of thought, a sequence of connected ideas. It does more than just organize the facts. The essay helps the reader think about the facts and it does it in an engaging manner. In organizations, this kind of writing is often the domain of the marketing or resources development department. However, this kind of thinking is behind a huge amount of oral communication in organizations, one-on-one and in meetings. It may not ever get formalized in writing. Given the politics of organizations, it may be better for everyone that such communication is not in writing.
But the communication is based on clear thinking, the persuading based on facts about reality (as opposed to wishful thinking or jumping to conclusions and other common rhetorical deceptions). That is the kind of communicating that is exhibited by leaders and leads to promotions and raises.
In this course, we are encouraging that kind of rational thinking and persuasive communication in formal essays.
Here's a news commentary -- an
essay--
about the preservation conference in Buffalo in October 2011. It
makes
a case for what the conference means to Buffalo. In the example below,
Donn Esmonde uses
cause-and-effect reasoning. He makes an inference. The emphasis is
helping the reader think about what was heard and seen. He may give you
a way to think about it that you wouldn't have thought otherwise. Nick
Kristof's essay for the NY Times takes a strong position: repulsive and
wrong.
Conference
is start of something big
by Donn Esmonde
Buffalo News, October 23, 2011
On Top of Famine, Unspeakable Violence
by Nicholas D. Kristof
NY Times, September 24, 2011
additive
One kind of sculptor adds lumps of clay and then pushes, pulls, and smooths them. Less experienced writers are additive, looking for more words or pages to fill an assignment. They don't want to write anything they won't use. They think before they write.
subtractive
Another kind of sculptor chips at a block
of stone, taking away what doesn't belong. More experienced writers are
subtractive, always looking for what to delete and compress. They throw
away lots of perfectly good sentences. They write in order to learn
what they think.
As you grow as a writer, you will progress from additive to subtractive, from looking for more words to write to looking for more words to delete.
In many organizations, people speak of "crafting" a document or "putting together" a document rather than "writing" it. These terms emphasize the cutting and shaping and de-emphasize the composition.
The key factor is that block of stone. It's your research. If you are looking to something to fill pages, then you haven't done enough research. If you do enough research, that is, if you collect enough information, data, experts' statements, and illustrations, then you'll have more than enough to write, and you'll be on your way to looking for things to delete.
Don't think of research as a couple of facts and quotes you pin onto your essay like ornaments on a Christmas tree. Think of the research as the block of marble that gets chipped and drilled into shape. Your sources aren't some nuisance to prove you did your homework. Your sources make up most of your essay. Your contribution is to organize them (put them in order; topic sentences; transitions) and to make inferences from them, to explain what they mean.
Your research is what gives substance and weight to your claims (thesis statement and topic sentences). You aren't going to be paid for what you have to say. You're going to be paid for selecting and shaping what others have said and written and then for making inferences, for explaining it to your audience according to their needs.
Several of you have brought up this idea: your opinions.
The word has several meanings, two of which are relevant here. One meaning is unsubstantiated claim. The idea here is that everyone has opinions, everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, and one opinion is as good as another. These opinions are usually an expression of feeling and emotion, whether explicit ("People on welfare are lazy bums, so Congress should abolish welfare." "My boyhood favorites Boston Red Sox are the best team in baseball.") or implicit ("Welfare saps human motivation." "Players who have admitted to using steroids should never be in the Hall of Fame.").
Even though you have the right to your opinion, it is
not true that all opinions are equal. About four hundred years ago in
what we now call Western society, thoughtful, curious people developed
a way to tell which opinions were true and which were not. Until then
people were generally ruled by the authority of a human, usually one
with power, or the authority of humans collectively, that is,
tradition. So the big thing that happened four hundred years ago was a
way of telling what was true independent
of authority, human or divine.
The movement to do that is call the Enlightenment in the sense of a light going on.
Before that, might made right. If the king or priest or rich man said something, it was right because they said it. After that, might still ruled, of course. But there was an alternative. Sometimes, reason made right.
That gets us to the other meaning of opinion: substantiated claim. "After thoroughly researching and carefully analyzing the unequal distribution of resources in our society, it is my position that Senator XYZ's proposal to raise the income threshold for food stamps will motivate the marginally employed members of our society." When supported by a lot of research and careful explanation, this claim has so much authority that it's more than an opinion. It's a position. In an essay, it could function as the thesis statement.
Part of what going to college is all about is learning how people and organizations make better decisions by grounding claims in evidence and reasoning. While it may be true in the bar on Saturday night that all opinions are equally good (wanna go outside and fight about it?), it is not true in the office on Monday morning.
At work, all opinions are not equal. When you go to work, you are entitled to your opinion, it's your right to have it. But you will soon learn to keep it to yourself if you can't support it with good evidence and sound reasoning.
In short, you are entitled to your own opinion. But you
are not entitled to your own evidence. Nor are you entitled to your own
reasoning process. The criteria for evidence are well established.
Logical reasoning is tried and true.
So yes, your opinions are important and worth listening to, but only after you have earned the right to be taken seriously by researching the evidence and analyzing the situation with logical reasoning. Then your opinion becomes your position and it is worth much more. It might even change the minds of someone who has only an unsubstantiated opinion.
The best or most persuasive argument will explain evidence that passes all six of the tests of evidence. [link] This process turns opinions into facts.
How can you tell ...
whether your
opinions are any good. Why should anyone pay attention to you?
whether
someone's opinion is worth paying attention to. For example,
politicians and advertisers.
whether
"facts" are true or false?
When you have an important decision to make, how do you think it
through?
What does it take to convince you?
What Is An Argument?
One kind of argument, we hear every day. Often spoken rather than written, it is seldom rational or logical. It leads to frustration and shouting or worse.
"That's Just Your Opinion."
The other kind of argument occurs when people want to change each other’s minds or actions. We often try to persuade others to buy an idea or to behave in a certain way. Salespeople, politicians, customers, teachers, and bosses try to sell us ideas or influence our behavior.
"Believe Me"
Whether spoken or written, wise or unwise, true or false, that kind of argument is a group of statements. Many of those statements blow smoke, sprinkle fairy dust, and spread ignorance. They may entertain or distract and are often quite effective at that.
To think clearly, we must separate those statements
from statements that matter. Statements that matter function three
ways, as assertion, as evidence, and as explanation. [link]
Yes, it will, if you have only one style. Then, like a singer who can sing only one song in only one key, you can't contribute much to other songs in other keys. So I wouldn't say the basic unit of discourse will cramp your style as much as it will add another style to the one you already have. This one will fit your thinking into a structure that will be familiar to your readers.
"Even the birds are chained to the skyways."
I can't find the pop song that's from, but I was reminded of it watching the downhill skiers at the Olympics on TV one evening last winter.
When I stand at the top of a slope, I have to work with the terrain and the vegetation and other skiers, but I basically make my own way downhill. That's how many people want to write essays, sort of meandering along, enjoying the trip and not so concerned about the destination.
Unfortunately, you won't get paid for that at work. Writing for work is more like the task facing the competitive Olympians at the top of a downhill course. There are gates they must go through. They are often red, so there's no mistaking them.
If you're a fan, you know that those gates don't restrict the skier's style, they free it. In the same way, the structural model, the problem-solving model, that I am showing you for this course can free you to write well, not hamper you.
modified: January 2012
by Douglas Anderson
http://toLearn.net/eng110/essay/index.html