[jrodthree24]

I really don't understand why essays are bad. Is there any kind of research that goes into this?

I agree with you that learning should be the goal. And any busy work that doesn't help should be eliminated. But I just don't know if we know what the right structure should be and if we can say for sure that things like writing essays don't actually help students cultivate their writing and critical thinking skills.

[quacked]

Essays are wonderful. It gives me great joy to write essays today, although they're sometimes called "blog posts" or "rants" or "emails" or "memos".

I hated writing essays in school, because the assignment was always "reproduce a work of writing that adheres to the arbitrary standards of the institution for grading purposes". Great writing can't be graded, as its value is entirely subjective.

As an example, here's an assignment that I might have completed under duress, vs. one that I'd complete voluntarily for fun:

"Explain how the theme of Chaos is expressed in Slaughterhouse Five. Use at least five supporting examples from the text and cite your references MLA style. Four pages minimum."

"Convince your best friend that Slaughterhouse Five is a terrible novel. Cite the text any way you please, ideally by comparing it to a book you think is actually good."

Whatever I produced for the first prompt can be graded by ticking off boxes and looking at my grammar; whatever I produced for the second prompt would need a thorough investigation of my own writing style and a framework of grading that takes into account my own voice as an author.

(To be clear--I don't think that giving my prompt in a modern classroom would immediately inspire students. They are far too burdened by the entire system for a single change to fix their experience. I am merely discussing the difference between "pointless essays" and "essays that authors care about".)

[counters]

> Whatever I produced for the first prompt can be graded by ticking off boxes and looking at my grammar; whatever I produced for the second prompt would need a thorough investigation of my own writing style and a framework of grading that takes into account my own voice as an author.

The two prompts motivate the writer to practice two completely different skillsets; they're really not comparable.

The first one is focused more on the fundamentals of close reading and analysis. The writer needs to understand what the theme of "chaos" means, then closely read the novel or review their notes to identify literary devices or techniques that theme, and then tie it together in a "report". It requires the assignee to practice very basic skills... it's technical practice, not artistry.

The second prompt is the artistry - it's an assignment in discourse or rhetoric. The thing is, it's not possible to successfully execute the second prompt unless you've mastered the techniques from the first prompt. Beyond constructing logical or emotional arguments that may be tailored to your audience (your best friend), you still have to collect evidence from the novel. It might not be a list of literary devices, but if one of your arguments was that the book was poorly and confusingly written, you would still probably need to collect evidence of specific passages that support your claim. The whole point of the first prompt is to build the skill to do this, but with some hand-holding/constraints for practice.

I won't defend page limits, but even the reference style mandate is important because it has implications for how you actually write the essay. I deal with technical stakeholders all the time, and the amount of time that we could clear up issues if someone would just properly cite a reference can be ridiculous... perhaps those stakeholders were the teenagers who didn't bother to follow the citation guidelines for their literature class?

[ModernMech]

This is a classic pitfall faced by novice teachers. I fell for it too.

Assign the second prompt, and I guarantee you’ll get something like this as a submission:

“Bro, the novel sucks. Trust me.”

You can’t even give this a bad grade, based on the prompt. You can't say it’s not convincing, because they’ll say “you’re not my friend, this would convince my friend”

You can’t say it’s too short, because they’ll say you didn’t provide a minimum.

You can’t say it didn’t cite the novel, because you said to do whatever.

You can’t say it didn’t compare to other literature, because you said “ideally”.

Lesson 1 of being a teacher: give the students an inch and they will take a mile.

Teaching students is not unlike programming computers, in that they both take instructions very literally. If you are vague with a computer program, you know ahead of time because the program doesn’t compile.

If you are vague with an assignment you don’t know until you get it back. The more vague the assignment, the wider the variety of submissions. If you don’t tell them the font face you get a cursive one. If you don’t tell them the font size you get huge and tiny. If you don’t tell them the margins you get wide and thin.

So even if you would personally make a good faith effort at this assignment, it’s really better for everyone to be specific and follow the same format.

[gcanyon]

At the high school level it's even worse than you're describing. My daughter was taught using the Jane Schaffer method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schaffer_method

Note the section on Body paragraph structure -- that doesn't begin to cover how structured the resulting essays were. I can still remember my daughter sing-songing "T, CD CM CM, CD CM CM, CD CM CM, SC." Every essay had to follow that exact pattern. Every commentary sentence had to start with the approved list of words, and likewise the concluding sentence.

It's entirely about how easy it is for the teacher to grade, and has nothing to do with teaching students to actually write. It was awful, and I did everything I could, including contacting the Jane Shaffer people, to criticize it and push back.

[fn-mote]

> Great writing can't be graded, as its value is entirely subjective.

Well... I have a lot of problems with this, on both sides of the fence.

Provocative start: How about we give up the idea that students are producing great work?

I mean, I imagine teachers think of the exercises they give as skills development.

One of the skills to develop is technical writing.

Surely beginning students do not know how to cite textual examples to back up their arguments. Understanding the role of evidence in making an argument should be fundamental to democracy. (Understanding that we are not living in that world recently in the US.) So they need to practice.

Choosing the theme is another skill. I don't have anything to say about it, but I don't have a problem with teachers asking students to try to figure something out before they write about it.

[allturtles]

Leaving aside the fact that your two examples assess a pretty different set of skills, one has to deal with the reality that every teacher has many students. It's simply not realistic to expect them to do "a thorough investigation" of every student's style and "voice." Imagine you have 50 students across two classes, each turning in one of these essays. How long are you going to spend on each one? 5 minutes? That's 4 hours of grading time. 15 minutes? 12 hours. Now consider that most of your school day is already occupied with teaching, prepping for classes, office hours, and other responsibilities.

[insane_dreamer]

Those type of assignments are part of what "inspired" my daughter to skip out on all her high school English homework, forget the humanities, and study engineering in college. On the one hand, great, we need more women in engineering, and she's good at it (and graduated from a top college). On the other hand, the humanities are great too and it would be nice not to turn people off to them with that type of mind-numbing work that is not only subjective in content but also subject to the desires of the professor.

[HWR_14]

7th graders are highly unlikely to produce writing of such a great quality that it "cannot be graded". Maybe when Hemingway was in the seventh grade. And we can grade subjective things all the time. You can grade code based on something other than whether it runs efficiently, for instance.

Meanwhile, your prompt sounds like hell. And is far more subjective than the previous one.

> Convince your best friend that Slaughterhouse Five is a terrible novel.

So, before you even start the assignment, you let the teachers dictate the position that someone has? And you're not going to teach students to assess themes in books, so what will they judge Slaughterhouse Five on, aesthetics?

> Cite the text any way you please

Why on earth would you change that requirement. "Cite the text using method X" is a direct analog to "Coding standards dictate this naming convention". I would fire a "free thinker" who refused to adhere to the, sometimes arbitrary, standards for communication with the rest of group. Standards are good.

> ideally by comparing it to a book you think is actually good."

As a rule, I don't think convincing someone that a work of art is "terrible" should be done by comparing it to something else you "think is good".

> [No page limit]

You can trust an adult with that, but a seventh grader? Usually they need a page limit to encourage them to write more.

It seems like the following a complete essay that you would have to grade very well: "Slaughterhouse Five's lack of elves makes it terrible, because fantasy novels are just better and books like the Lord of the Rings have elves which makes it a good book [Source - My conversation with Johnny yesterday]"

Grading that well would be bad because it's horrible in every way.

[moviewise]

As a teacher of English as a second language, I find the Jane Schaffer method quite helpful in teaching structure, idea generation, and the skill of supporting statements by providing examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schaffer_method

Of course all essays shouldn't be written exactly this way, but for students just learning about writing long form, it is a brilliant stepping stone to get the basics down. Too many students—and readers—can't differentiate between a "concrete detail" or statement of fact, and "commentary material" or statement of opinion. This method helps to distinguish them.

[delusional]

When challenged on why we had to follow rules that real writers often ignored, such as those "arbitrary standards" you hate, he responded: "They can break the rules because they already know them by heart. You need to learn them." That stuck with me. I firmly believe that writing essays about boring drudgery is a necessity to develop the skill required to write essays about what's important to you.

School is not about doing great work. It's about learning the tools which you can use to do great work. School does not ask you to do novel research, and so it doesn't ask you to write novel essays.

[mc32]

I think you had a different experience. My experience with essays most typically was to choose your topic, research and write an essay. The standardized tests did usually ask you to choose from one of three topics, none of which was usually something you were enamored with, but that did force you to change from your comfort zone and adapt to situational necessity.

[mysterydip]

My favorite were "reproduce a report on these specific historical facts without plagiarizing the textbook," and before the internet was readily available. More a creative writing course than social studies.

[didibus]

Your prompt doesn't seem to actually allow for any critical thinking development or give any guidance to how you can more convincingly express your points or arguments. It also assumes you didn't enjoy the book, which I'm sure some students would have actually enjoyed, so now your prompt is even asking them to argue in bad faith, that doesn't seem to be something we want to foster honestly.

The first prompt requires the reader to critically analyze the book, by first requiring them to give it a charitable interpretation.

It is said that you cannot disagree with someone if you're unable to explain their position yourself in a clear and definitive manner. Obviously, what are you disagreeing with if you don't even understand what's the ideas behind the thing you disagree with.

That's what the first prompt would be about teaching you, to be able to understand other people's ideas and concepts, to look past your initial judgements and bias, give it a charitable interpretation, demonstrate you understood all this by summarizing the idea in a 4 page essay of your own, with supporting references to tie it back to the source, showing the source does in fact argue for these itself.

Once you can do that, you have gained the right to go on with your own disagreement and write that essay, which would be your second prompt. Though honestly, your second prompt seems to be geared more towards discussing the entertainment aspect of the book, and not the ideas and concepts it contains, so again it's not that much about critical thinking, because critically there's little to argue about a "I prefer the color red over blue."

Personally I think you were trying to get at something else, maybe your point was just, come up with assignments students enjoy and can have fun with?

I think this is always true, but some things are just boring to some students, maybe you just don't enjoy reading, writing or even critical thinking, or any of that stuff. I don't know if there's much you can do in that situation. Maybe the solution is more fluid classes, let people move at their own pace, pick their own areas of interests, even if that's directly going to a trade, skipping on literature entirely, etc.

[rustybelt]

I'll go a step further and defend "busywork". Unfortunately we don't live in a perfectly efficient society so being able to learn and execute a formulaic task that might not seem valuable is a necessary skill for most adults. Especially since individual actors may not have all the necessary information to fully assess the value of a task within a larger framework.

[lbotos]

It's an interesting question. I'd personally love to see more effort being given to "defend your point as succinctly as possible." I wrote a lot of "minimum word count essays and in the "real world" clarity trumps length every day.

Length is used as some proxy for rigor, but we know it's only a proxy.

[onos]

I like this idea. Fwiw I feel I learned / grew a lot more in one technical writing class in college than I did in all my years of English classes. Later I picked ip a book “writing with style” that was also quite helpful.

One issue for me in English was I really was not interested in the kinds of essays the English teachers were interested in having us write, eg coming up with a thesis on plot themes in Shakespeare. Just not my thing and so I couldn’t get anywhere in those classes.

[HWR_14]

I found that in elementary or secondary school page minimums were used to as a cheap proxy for effort. In college page maximums started appearing to encourage concision. Different needs for students at different points in their education.

[adelie]

My high school English teacher adamantly refused to read any essay over the length of one page, double-spaced. I learned more from that class than any other writing class I took.

[endtime]

+100

When I write today, for work, the challenge is always to write less. My VP might have time to read two pages; he's almost certainly not going to read anything longer.

[randomwalker]

I learned from one of the comments on my original post that many scholars have been saying this for a while, and that there's in fact a book that makes the same point!

Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities https://www.amazon.com/Why-They-Cant-Write-Five-Paragraph/dp...

[dsr_]

The American educational-system essay is an artificial construct designed to be easy to teach and easy to grade, without being useful for the purposes of educating the essay author or the audience or being persuasive.

Writing is generally good. Expressing yourself is good. Analysis and critique are good. The artificial essay is useless.

[z3c0]

Especially the 5-paragraph essay. Doubly so where paragraphs are rigidly-defined as "a collection of five or more sentences". I argued with a lot of teachers over that one.

All it did was teach kids how to write boring simple sentences to meet the implicit "punctuation quota". An equal amount of content compacted into a couple of complex/compound sentences would actually result in marks off.

[volkhavaar]

When I taught a class where I assigned essays I confirmed my own suspicions from when I was assigned essays: the majority of the sentences committed to paper are awful drudgery. I then flipped the requirements on their head and removed minimum page requirements and instead had extremely strict maximum page requirements (with of course the objective material requirements of the essay itself). So much improvement for everyone involved. I had to read through so much less pointless material and the students were forced to focus their ideas in a succinct way to be able to get to all of the objectives of the essay in the limited space. Everyone saved time and did better.

[pclmulqdq]

When I taught a class, I had a strict 3 page maximum on lab reports for this reason. So many people are used to turning in 10's of pages of drudgery. I just want a few that get to the heart of the issue.

[thwayunion]

Being a concert violinist is fun but playing scales isn't fun. I can't wait for the robots to learn how to play scales for me so I can focus on becoming a concert violinist.

;-)

[cannabis_sam]

Writing essays is not the problem, grading the essays and grades in general are the problem.

Feedback is obviously invaluable, but the point of grades, as used today, is solely to gatekeep who are allowed access to the next level of education. So instead of constructive feedback, it has become a set of filters entirely divorced from actual learning.

(And yes, I got good grades, I just hate that so many people I know were denied opportunities based on a shitty system, wildly not fit for purpose)

[criddell]

I think you’re going at it backwards. If you are going to ask a student to write an essay, it’s on you to be able to show that it’s the best way to help that particular student cultivate their writing and critical thinking skills.

[mgkimsal]

Perhaps I'm just... thick, but if a goal is to have someone write, say, 8 pages of thinking and ideas about a topic... I'm not sure there's 'better' ways than to have the person write 8 pages of thinking and ideas about a topic.

If the goal is wrong, perhaps just don't do it, but... "it's on you to show that it's the best way". I don't get it.

If I want to see that a student has writing skills, I would think expecting them to write is somewhat definitional?

Maybe it's on someone else to 'show' a better way to demonstrate writing skills that doesn't involve writing.

[happyopossum]

If you're going to up-end hundreds of yers of educational theory and practice, it's on you to be able to show your work. Not all progress is forward.

[vlunkr]

Does that need to be shown? Seems tautological to me. You learn to write by writing.