by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic
The tattooed woman and the hospital administrator wrote nice essays, but let’s not go crazy. Their essays were organized and cogent, but their writing was small. This was not truly college writing, if we define that animal as writing that manifests the intellect. Their writing was polite and muted and almost Shaker-like in its simplicity and barrenness. It’s a gift to be simple, and the artist may rattle on about how difficult it is to achieve simplicity, but shouldn’t college writing flex some cognitive muscle? “Indefensible”—that’s the sort of word I expect to see in a college student’s paper. “Apex.” “Trenchant.” “Heretical.” “Casuistry” (when in doubt, I always worked “casuistry” into my college papers). “Facile.” “Unassailable.” “Axiomatic.” Chewy words. Words that slow the jaw, like jerked beef. My professors no doubt caught the whiff of the undergraduate blowhard in my writing. But we are, after all, in the realm of undergraduates. Isn’t it more appropriate for an undergraduate to wrestle with bulky concepts than to not have a notion of their very existence?
It’s a good question, but I was facing a bigger one: what to do about the students who not only couldn’t write, but who seemed to have no business in a classroom at all. How could I hope to teach them? Where would I begin? It would take me a year just to make up the deficiencies: a year of five-day-a-week meetings and six-hour classes, a year during which there was no expectation that we would actually get to doing college-level work, a year in which we would start again at the very beginning.
The enormity of the task was breathtaking.
I pictured it: “All right, everybody. Listen up. A sentence is a group of words expressing a complete thought.”
I read the essays again, drank my coffee, and went to bed. The next day my wife asked me, rather cheerfully, how my students were.
“Not so hot,” I said blandly. Of course, that didn’t quite cover it. “Actually, they’re kind of terrible. They’re bad writers.”
The matter dropped. Over the course of the next few days, I thought about their work. Disjointed sentences—sentence fragments, really—swam before my eyes as I mowed our compact patch of grass, fiddled with the downspouts, freshened and fluffed the mulch around the boxy hedges. I may have worked much more industriously than was usual; the pile of bad work in my briefcase filled me with a sort of buzzing nervous energy. I didn’t want to think about it. I started to resent the amount of time the students and their bad prose were weighing upon my mind. I watched with alarm as my per-hour teaching rate dropped.
A door had been opened to me, and I found myself surveying a landscape as drawn by M. C. Escher (that old favorite of undergraduates), in which the laws of logic and physical reality ceased to function, the sort of place where circular staircases ascended infinitely and fish transformed into birds and college looked a lot like junior high.
But I sang a happy tune to myself.
“I guess they just need to write the rust off,” I told myself gamely. I vowed to get them working at something approaching a college level. I would teach them. I would work hard. We would make a fresh start. I cried the perpetual cry of the instructor: I would succeed where others had failed.
4
Compare and Contrast
THIS WAS ALL NEW TO ME, of course, but Introduction to College Writing, or English 101, as set out in many textbooks, uses the following system, which I have come to think is a good one. Expository composition is broken down into various categories, each of which is designed to accomplish primarily a single goal. The narrative essay tells a story. The descriptive essay uses as much sensory detail and imagery as possible. The compare-contrast essay … well, I don’t think I have to tell you. Division-and-analysis essays break down a subject into component parts: an essay about whether or not it’s worth the trouble to see a ball game at Dodger Stadium, for example, might deal with the convenience of the journey, prices for tickets and parking and concessions, quality of the stadium food, and whether the total experience of the game itself adds something beyond that which could be experienced on television. A process analysis essay explains how some action is to be performed—how something is done—as opposed to a cause-and-effect paper, which explains why something happened. An argument paper takes a stand on a position.
Narrative, description, compare-contrast, division-and-analysis, process analysis, cause-and-effect, argument—these are the seven sacraments of the expository writing program. Instructors of English 101 are intimately familiar with these categories. Theoretically, these seven varieties of writing are required of the student across the curriculum. A process analysis essay, for example, prepares the student to write lab reports. Argument papers are required in nearly every discipline; one hallmark of an educated person is the ability to make persuasive arguments concerning his or her field. In addition to these seven types of essays, there is one more beast lurking in English 101: the dreaded research paper, complete with parenthetical citations and a list of works cited, all in Modern Language Association format.
To break the instruction of writing into these different forms may at first seem artificial. Every decent piece of expository prose uses elements from all the categories. We would start by dissecting Bruce Catton’s “Grant and Lee: A Study in Contrasts.” This piece is a classic example of a compare-contrast essay, but it also boasts plenty of description, lots of examples, and puts forth a series of arguments about essential differences between the Union and Confederacy. The notion of these different categories of essays struck me as artificial when I first perused the textbook, but I have come to feel that the thrust and focus the system imparts to even the most inexperienced writer can be useful. After all, one of the most troublesome aspects of writing is its breadth of possibility. The writer’s palette is the whole world; the great writer looks at all of existence, all of human history, and selects just those elements that will correctly make his point. Writing to the dictates of a category serves as an initial limiter, a helpful boundary setter.
The use of writing models makes intuitive sense to me. My own learning about writing has always started with the impulse to mimic form. When I started writing essays, for example, I had real specifics from the prose of Nora Ephron buzzing in my brain: the seemingly light and anecdotal approach, the glimpses of the author visible briefly even in the most impersonal passages; the passages of high seriousness, often at the essay’s payoff, whose meanings resonate after the wisecracks have been forgotten. I try always to keep my language lively, and much of this impulse stems from my reading—hundreds if not thousands of times—a book I received for Christmas when I was in seventh grade: The Beatles Book, edited by Edward E. Davis. It is a collection of academic essays about the band, all written around 1967, by a clutch of old-time highbrow academics and pop-culture critics, people like Richard Poirier and Richard Goldstein and Ralph J. Gleason. I remember Rolling Stone once dismissing the book as a piece of pretentious crap, but I loved it. The book is a true period piece. It reflects a sense that the Beatles really mattered; they had changed everything, including the polite art of essay writing. The book’s prose was amped up, cranked up as though straining to be heard over the din and clang of “Paperback Writer.” Even the academic stuff read like New Journalism. I think now that much of my own writing style derives from one essay I practically memorized; it was on the Beatles’ films by a woman named Leonore Fleischer. She wrote for Ramparts, I think, and went on to a long and I hope profitable career, turning out film novelizations, cowriting books with Marilyn vos Savant, and for many years editing the “Sales and Bargains” section of New York magazine. In her Beatles essay “Down the Rabbit Hole,” she had an Augie March-like way of juxtaposing high and low diction that I found thrilling, and that has stayed with me always, like those mundane sensory images from seemingly random days in one’s childhood that nonetheless remain vivid in the mind forever. She wrote of the old-timey feel of the Sgt. Pepper album:
The home ties are strong, and the compulsion to fantasy even stronger. Paradox is
the Beatles’ middle name; modernity mixes with nostalgia.
Which just sent me, at thirteen, reeling. She grabbed Britishisms (Ringo Starr had a “slightly daft look”; in his screen persona he was “doing the Rita Tushingham bit”; A Hard Day’s Night was a “lovely” film), and these merry stylistic inflections made her prose hum like a struck tuning fork. I was in love. How does one use words so cleverly and wisely? Leonore Fleischer was in my adolescent dreams a brilliant woman and a charmingly tough broad, and her little essay fed my aspirations for many years. It kept me writing.
Anyway, when I returned to class, frightened as I was by those first-night sample essays, I was determined to make the class a success. We would just proceed slowly and logically. We were to begin with the compare-contrast essay. All I had to do, I believed, was teach the method. The class and I would stroll together through the textbook. Teach the method: slowly, carefully, so that everyone gets it. The textbook must have something worthwhile to say, right? These things are written by experts. Surely if we go through the text in detail, section by section, the students will get the idea. It couldn’t hurt, right?
I read aloud to the students from the beginning of the chapter. In comparing, you point to similar features of the subjects; in contrasting, to different features.
The contours of the thing are intuitively obvious. The essay’s function is to limn the ways in which two or more entities are alike and different. Simple, right? Writing is simple. The ideas are straightforward; the goals, what we want our writing to do, are readily apparent. The theory behind any piece of writing is no more complicated than the theory behind cutting one big diamond into two smaller ones. But the doing of it … that’s another story. The mood in the room shifted. A small, growling beast of hostility stirred itself awake. In the blink of an eye, the students were discomposed. I elaborated on the text’s instruction, but every teacher knows the feeling: my words seemed to die and fall to the ground about a foot from me.
Now my throat was dry.
“Let’s look at the actual process,” I said brightly, for that was the text’s next section. “We have to have a valid reason for considering these two subjects together. Grant and Lee we can compare because they’re both Civil War generals. Obviously. But we can’t compare Robert E. Lee and Bob Dylan. There’s no basis for comparison.
“And once you’ve got your purpose, it’s important to do an outline.” I said it so quickly on the heels of my previous statement that the thought occurred to me: can one interrupt oneself ? “You’ve got to make sure that you’re comparing the same features of both subjects. If you’re comparing your first old clunker of a car to the Lexus you zoom around in now, and you talk about the old junker’s ride, gas mileage, and repairs, then you’ve got to cover the same ground with regard to the Lexus.”
I drew a chart on the board. “Now, there are two ways to structure this thing. You can talk about all the features of the first subject, then all the features of the second subject. You can spend the first part of the essay on the clunker, and then the second part on the Lexus.”
First you say how they’re the same, then how they are different. Or you say how they are different first. Or you mix it up a bit. The pedagogues, of course, have to make things complicated. Here’s Professor Shirley Dickson giving us a roundup of the different ways the essay can be organized:
In the first organizational pattern, named bipolar (Gray & Keech, 1980) or whole-whole (Raphael & Kirschner, 1985), the writer describes each topic separately, providing all of the features and details of one topic (e.g., Grasslands Native Americans) in the first set of paragraphs followed by parallel paragraphs about the second topic (e.g., Pacific Northwest Native Americans). The second compare-contrast organizational pattern, integrated (Gray & Keech, 1980) or part-part (Raphael & Kirschner, 1985), is a point-by-point comparison of two topics. For example, in a composition of the Grasslands and Pacific Northwest Native Americans, the first, second, and third paragraphs might be about the homes, transportation, and foods of each, respectively. The third organizational pattern, mixed (Raphael & Kirschner, 1985), is a combination of bipolar (whole-whole) and integrated (part-part). Some paragraphs might be only about the Grasslands or Pacific Northwest Native Americans, whereas other paragraphs might be about the similarities and differences in one feature of both, such as religion.1
I admire Raphael and Kirschner, who got there early enough to lay claim to the concept of mixed.
A blanket had descended on the classroom, a blanket of gloom trimmed with a border of indignation. Our textbook spent ten pages on the writing of compare-contrast essays; we had gone through all of it, point by laborious point, and were really none the wiser. The shit I was telling them was too easy; really, it would all be blazingly obvious to a dimwitted second grader. The students had been waiting, pens poised above their notebooks, for some great message from on high, some great secret of writing, and I had nothing, it turned out, to give them. My students were unskilled and unpracticed writers, but they weren’t stupid; they knew what the point of the comparison essay was. The devil is always in the doing.
My head swam that night as I realized how little help the textbook would offer me. The goals of writing are stark in their simplicity, the methods apparent, the theories nonexistent— none of which makes writing good instructional fodder for textbooks. The doing of it, the adhering to a logical point that’s worth making in the first place, that’s troublesome, and requires a vast landscape of practice.
Over the years, I have come to think that the two most crucial ingredients in the mysterious mix that makes a good writer may be (1) having read enough throughout a lifetime to have internalized the rhythms of the written word, and (2) refining the ability to mimic those rhythms. It is very difficult to make up for gaps in a lifetime of reading and practice over the course of a fifteen-week semester. As Mark Richardson, an assistant professor of writing and linguistics at Georgia Southern University, says, “Writing involves abilities we develop over our lifetimes. Some students are more advanced in them when they come to college than are others. Those who are less advanced will not develop to a level comparable to the more-prepared students in one year or even in two, although they may reach adequate levels of ability over time.”2
All that said, there had to be something to this textbook. It had gone through a half-dozen editions. The authors, in their acknowledgments section, thanked no fewer than forty-one college teachers from all over the country for their input. The book had all the bells and whistles, including a companion Web site, and as the preface informed me, the text featured “realistic treatment of the rhetorical methods,” “extensive thematic connections,” and “abundant editorial apparatus.”
We read and talked about the readings that accompanied the compare-contrast instruction. We diagrammed their form on the board. We read Bruce Catton closely, as tens of thousands of classes have before us (the essay was published in 1956, and is in nearly every writing textbook I have ever seen). Outside of the English 101 curriculum, though, he is something of a forgotten figure. Fifty years ago, his narrative histories were best sellers, and he was as ubiquitous in the popular culture as, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin is today. When I was a kid, his works were well represented on my family’s bookshelf. Banners at Shenandoah and A Stillness at Appomattox were among the books I found so alluring—whose titles were poetry to me—that I vowed to read them when I got old enough to understand them, along with A. J. Cronin’s The Keys of the Kingdom, Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, and an oversize graying book of photographs called Women Are Here to Stay: The Durable Sex in Its Infinite Variety Through Half a Century of American Life. Of course, once I got old enough to truly understand things, I never read a single one of them. Such an odd way for Catton’s career to play out, with one perfectly crafted essay preserved between the covers of so many textbooks.
We extracted all we could out of Bruce. We had all the side-by-side lists you could want. Lee “might have ri
dden down from the old age of chivalry, lance in hand, silken banner fluttering over his head.” Grant, in contrast, was the “modern man emerging; beyond him, ready to come on the stage, was the great age of steel and machinery, of crowded cities and a restless, burgeoning vitality.” We even talked about Catton’s occasionally old-fashioned style, with its charming inversions (“Daring and resourcefulness they had, too … ”) so appropriate for the grandeur of the subject matter.
The students wrote everything down in their notebooks.
We read the whimsical “Neat People vs. Sloppy People” by Suzanne Britt. I find Britt’s piece funny, though not as funny as the next piece, “Batting Clean-up and Striking Out” by Dave Barry. Barry’s essay wanders off in directions only he can go; his ability to deliver bits of adolescent silliness using the hoariest comic forms—all with a wide-eyed earnestness—and have it all come out actually funny may make him the most singular literary talent of our age. It goes without saying that the class had never heard of Dave Barry. They laughed, a great many of them, rather heartily. Some didn’t, perhaps because they simply didn’t find him funny or perhaps school had always been so tense for them that they had long ago shut off the receptors that react spontaneously to anything presented in a classroom. This was mere schoolwork, quite divorced from life. I envied the opportunity those who had enjoyed the Barry piece now had: to go out and scarf up everything Dave Barry had ever written. And yet I knew that this was not going to happen.
Finally, we read “The Black and White Truth About Basketball,” Jeff Greenfield’s famous analysis of black and white styles of basketball play, first published in 1975 in Esquire. And now I had a new writing ambition: to write an essay that would be published, edition after edition, in college textbooks for a minimum of twenty-five years.
