I want to ramble a bit on the importance of writing honestly, and using the essay writing process to discover ideas, not just report them. There are a lot of avenues (really, a lot) by which we could approach this topic, but I’ll start here with the fact that students often seem to get locked into absolute arguments when writing essays, and are subsequently unwilling to change them. Getting locked into absolutes is, I think, a smaller problem that we can use to talk our way into a discussion of the importance of writing honestly. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do for now.
Anyway, let’s start. Students, it seems, often get themselves locked into arguing for very absolute positions without much nuance. Take the following prompt question for an assignment (which I couldn’t figure out how to indent properly in WordPress):
In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which character is the more honorable one, Brutus or Marc Antony?
This was an essay prompt I gave my tenth graders, once upon a time. As you might expect, their answers were mostly “Brutus!” or “No, Antony!” They set their answers at the start and stuck with them. None that I can recall gave the equally reasonable and probably truer answer of “Well, it’s complicated.”
As it turns out, there’s a lot to be said on either side of the question. Brutus may seem the obvious choice at first; although he participates in killing his friend, Caesar, he seems to do so for reasons he genuinely believes are good, and he’s the one that comes out and explains to the public why it was a necessary act. Perhaps he was misguided in his honor, but Antony himself closes out the play by praising Brutus’ good faith. Next to him, Antony seems a shrewd political manipulator, taking advantage of Brutus’ trust in him to stir the people of Rome to riot, moving behind the scenes all the while to establish what will eventually become the second triumvirate of Rome.
But, then, are Antony’s motives honorable, even if his means are not? After all, he punishes the conspiracy for their murder of Caesar. Sure, he breaks a few eggs along the way, but he gets the omelet made. Instead of a cynical politician, perhaps he is a man who sees what needs to be done for the justice of Rome and, working in a world of plots and assassinations, realizes he must get his hands dirty for the sake of what’s right? Meanwhile, Brutus’ intentions may be good, but he assassinates his best friend. And yet he’s honorable? Really?
And so on and so forth. Even with just a few minutes of work, the answer to the original question—which character is more honorable—is starting to look more like that third option: it’s complicated. But I can only get there by asking the question, not by assuming I already have the answer.
You can see this same sort of absolute arguing when you ask students to compare two books (or poems, or plays, or miscellaneous works of literature). Usually, you get one of two kinds of answers:
1) The difference argument: “Book A is like this, and Book B is like that.”
2) The similarity argument: “Books A and B are both like this.”
In almost every case, this kind of absolute arguing will be wrong. (Or incomplete. Maybe that’s a better word.) For the difference argument, Book A probably is mostly like this, but it probably has a little bit of that going on, too—and vice versa for Book B, which probably has more of that than Book A does, but has its own share of this, all the same. For the similarity argument, it’s almost certainly not a one-to-one comparison. Probably, a more accurate statement would be something like “Despite their differences with regards to that, Books A and B still share a strong connection in terms of this.”
In other words, as my undergraduate Shakespeare professor pointed out to me, it’s okay to argue in terms of degree. You do not have to claim that a thing is completely this way and not at all another way. It’s okay to say the thing is more one way than another.
As I said at the start, I think this issue with adhering to absolutes is actually a part or symptom of a deeper problem: the feeling that when you, as a student, choose your initial stance in an argument, you should be completely right—or at least you should strive to appear completely right. There is no room (students often seem to think) to admit fault with one’s argument at any point in the writing process; to do so would be to admit to a failure of that process. As a result, students often write themselves deeper and deeper into positions they know full well to be flawed or contrived, trying desperately all the while to sweep each new realization under the rug. The writing process becomes miserable, basically a cover-up job. The final product reflects ideas the student does not believe but feels compelled to show belief in—indeed, feels compelled to stand on a structure he knows is shaky and maintain that it is firm.
What if, instead, you wrote what you actually believed? What if, instead of trying to sweep everything under the rug, you actually considered new ideas when you came to them and, if it seemed necessary, incorporated them into your argument? What if you even let yourself change what you were arguing if you realized your initial thesis was mistaken?
For those of you who worry this would take too much time, that it would require you to rewrite everything have already written, I offer two thoughts to consider.
The first is that changing your thesis halfway through writing usually (although not always) takes less rewriting than you might expect. Mostly, it requires reframing the raw information you present in your paragraphs to suit the new thesis, which can be accomplished largely by writing a new topic sentence for each paragraph that you want to reframe. At each paragraph, your new topic sentence tells your reader how the information in that paragraph supports the new thesis, or why it is important to consider that paragraph’s information while discussing your new thesis.
Probably—again, not always—the raw information in the paragraphs will be able to serve as evidence for your new thesis just as well as and perhaps even better than it served as evidence for your old thesis. After all, that raw information is the series of thoughts and ideas that led you to realize your new thesis, and isn’t that what evidence is? Information that leads you to a certain conclusion? All you need to do is go back and clean up the path of thought, to go back and clarify how that information leads to the logical conclusion that is your new thesis.
You may find that you need to add or remove certain ideas as you go—this would be rewriting. While you’re cleaning up the path, perhaps you find a spot where it goes off in the wrong direction for a while (so take out the detours) or perhaps a spot where the logic of the path seems to be missing a step (so write in the explanation that bridges the gap). This is what it means to discover new ideas while you write. Everything you’ve already written is not wasted; most of it will be the logic and thoughts that have led you to where you are now. What you take out is just all the side paths you needed to venture down a little ways to see that they were going in directions that were either wrong or irrelevant to the purposes of your new thesis. In other words, it probably won’t take you as long as you might think to switch gears and support your new thesis, because you’ve probably already done most of the work.
The second thought I would offer (to people who worry that revising their theses will take too long) is a question. Which do you think you could do more quickly and with more energy: painfully construct a sham argument while struggling to push down all your new realizations, or explain an argument you believe and already mostly know?
Obviously, I am expecting that most students will answer that the latter option would be easier, but I may well be wrong. If you think the former would be easier—and you know yourself and your situation better than I do—then I sincerely wish you the best of luck. Write like the wind, and may you find solace sleeping in late on the one day of the week when you don’t have class at some ungodly hour in the early morning.
If your answer is the latter option, if you indeed think it would be easier to explain an argument that you believe and already mostly know, then I would point out that this is exactly what I mean when I suggest that you write honestly (which I mentioned in the previous post, “The point of this blog”). This kind of writing requires putting aside the desire to be right and taking up the job of finding out what’s right. It really is a shift in mindset. Don’t start your essays expecting to know exactly how things will play out. You won’t know at the start, and in any event the whole point is to find out things that you didn’t know when you began. If you’re doing essay writing right, in other words, you will discover things later on in the process of writing that you didn’t think of when you began.
You should write honestly, therefore, for two reasons. The first is that it allows you to accomplish the real purpose of essay writing, which is to discover new ideas and not merely to report on ideas already known.
The second reason is if you use an essay for the purpose it was designed to accomplish, it will (surprise, surprise) make your life as a student a lot easier. Trying to use the essay writing process to report on ideas you already know is like trying to use a hockey stick to play lacrosse. A hockey stick is built for playing hockey, and if you use it for that purpose, you’ll have a lot more luck and a lot less frustration. Towards the end of my previous post, “The point of this blog,” I referenced a plaque at the University of Virginia that instructs students to “Seek the light of truth,” and I suggested that maybe seeking the light of truth wasn’t just a possible thing to do, but actually your job as a student. I would point out now that the essay has been given to you as a tool to accomplish this job of seeking the light of truth. It was not built for proving things you already think, and it will probably not serve you well in that endeavor.
To illustrate what I’ve been talking about, that last paragraph (the one just above this one) is certainly not something that I expected to write when I began drafting this blog post a few hours ago. Actually, this post started out by talking about debate and courtroom argumentation. As you can see, none of that made the final cut—it didn’t seem relevant in the final analysis—but writing through those ideas moved me towards the ones I’ve published in this post. There were certainly more edits, too; I nearly even proofread this post before publishing it. On a larger scale, though, I was worried that the whole thing about getting locked into absolutes wasn’t going to make sense and that I might need to cut it. It ended up staying, just reframed by the introduction paragraph, which I wrote only just before writing this paragraph. My hope in writing that introduction was to help prepare you, as the reader, for the path of thought that my writing ended up taking. And after everything else was said and done, I wrote this paragraph, just to really demonstrate that it’s okay to change things while writing, to show you (again, thinking mainly of first-year students, here) that you will actually have an easier time with college writing if you let yourself be honest and argue the things you come to believe over the course of the writing process.
Maybe my efforts have even paid off.