500 WORDS
CRR Week 7: Reading Like a Writer
Description:
Now that you’ve selected your final research topics that you will build upon for the last 4 weeks of this course, we are going to take a deep dive into research and source evaluation. To this point, you’ve had experience evaluating other author’s arguments, sources, logic, and claim types and now it’s your turn to try your hand at crafting a multidimensional and hybrid argument of your own.
The choices we make surrounding what kinds of source material help us form our arguments are rhetorical choices. Selecting high quality source material and practicing ethical and sound research is not only important in the context of academia but can tremendously increase your writerly ethos when done well. Using research strategies and techniques outlined by our authors alongside practicing important source annotation techniques will be the first and most vital step in crafting your final hybrid argument and extended research pa.per.
Chapter Readings:
· Writing Arguments: A Rhetoric with Readings 11e. Chapter 6: Responding to Objectives and Alternative Views p. 83-98
Additional Readings:
· Reid, Shelley. “Ten Ways to think about Writing.”Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 2, pp. 71-86
· Bunn, Mike. “How to Read like a Writer.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 2, pp. 3-23.
· Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts.” Language Awareness: Readings for College Writers. Ed. by Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005: 93-96.
· Elbow, Peter. “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgement.” College English, Feb 1993, vol. 55, no. 2, pp. 187-206.
Module Objectives:
1. Identifying claim key claim types in another student’s draft
2. Distinguish intended audience for peer hybrid arguments
3. Provide suggestions on strengthening appeals through peer response
4. Identify the difference between higher and lower order concerns
5. Demonstrate higher order peer response using another student’s writing.
6. Demonstrate MLA formatting and lower order editing concerns using another classmates’ draft
Instructions:
You will need to post initial responses and peer responses in a timely manner, responding to instructor discussion threads/prompts or posting uniquely generated content.
Initial Post:
Instructor Prompt #1:
Shelley Reid and Mike Bunn offer a revisioned way to think about audience, purpose, and rhetorical intent. The concept of “thinking like a reader” is not a new one is nascent to this course’s objective to think dialectically and to hone rhetorical awareness. I want you to imagine you are attending a private lecture with Shelley Reid and Mike Bunn. Hypothetically reflect on what aspects of writing both scholars would agree upon and what aspects of writing might they deviate? What would this joint presentation be titled? What questions might you ask them individually or together if you were a student experiencing this lecture?
Instructor Prompt #2:
Anne Lamott’s seminal work, “Shitty First Drafts” is among my favorite to have students read during peer review and revision week. Similarly, famous expressivist writer and compositionist, Peter Elbow’s seminal work, “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgement” is a staple for teachers of writing to read during revision week. The audience for each text is different but Lamott and Elbow share similar conceptions surrounding the writing process and how students should approach the radical act of revision. In your response, I want you to first describe your experiences with revision and peer review and then I want you to invite Lamott and Elbow into your discussion. How do these different texts inform your understanding of the writing process? What aspects resonate with you?
1
Shitty First Drafts
Anne Lamott from Bird by Bird
Born in San Francisco in 1954, Anne Lamott is a graduate of Goucher College
in Baltimore and is the author of six novels, including Rosie (1983), Crooked Little
Heart (1997), All New People (2000), and Blue Shoes (2002). She has also been the
food reviewer for California magazine, a book reviewer for Mademoiselle, and a
regular contributor to Salon’s “Mothers Who Think.” Her nonfiction books include
Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (1993), in which she
describes her adventures as a single parent, and Tender Mercies: Some Thoughts on
Faith (1999), in which she charts her journey toward faith in God.
In the following selection, taken from Lamott’s popular book about writing,
Bird by Bird (1994), she argues for the need to let go and write those “shitty first
drafts” that lead to clarity and sometimes brilliance in our second and third drafts.
1 Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of
shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good
second drafts and terrific third drafts. People tend to look at successful writers who
are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially and think
that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling
great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they
have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their
necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages
as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some
very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal
of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and
confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but
we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that
God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest
friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image
when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)
2 Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it. Nor do
they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff
warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the
snow. One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to
himself nicely, “It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do — you can
either type, or kill yourself.” We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those
writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and
sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time. Now,
Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every
morning — sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away,
humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad
things to rain down on a person like this.
3 For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the
only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.
4 The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp
all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it
later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions
come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well, so
what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to
get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all
down on paper because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that
you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be
something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just
love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be
writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go — but there was no
way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.
5 I used to write food reviews for California magazine before it folded. (My writing
food reviews had nothing to do with the magazine folding, although every single
review did cause a couple of canceled subscriptions. Some readers took umbrage at
my comparing mounds of vegetable puree with various ex-presidents’ brains.) These
reviews always took two days to write. First I’d go to a restaurant several times with
a few opinionated, articulate friends in tow. I’d sit there writing down everything
anyone said that was at all interesting or funny. Then on the following Monday I’d
sit down at my desk with my notes and try to write the review. Even after I’d been
doing this for years, panic would set in. I’d try to write a lead, but instead I’d write a
couple of dreadful sentences, XX them out, try again, XX everything out, and then
feel despair and worry settle on my chest like an x-ray apron. It’s over, I’d think
calmly. I’m not going to be able to get the magic to work this time. I’m ruined. I’m
through. I’m toast. Maybe, I’d think, I can get my old job back as a clerk-typist. But
probably not. I’d get up and study my teeth in the mirror for a while. Then I’d stop,
remember to breathe, make a few phone calls, hit the kitchen and chow down.
Eventually I’d go back and sit down at my desk, and sigh for the next ten minutes.
Finally I would pick up my one-inch picture frame, stare into it as if for the answer,
and every time the answer would come: all I had to do was to write a really shitty
first draft of, say, the opening paragraph. And no one was going to see it.
6 So I’d start writing without reining myself in. It was almost just typing, just
making my fingers move. And the writing would be terrible. I’d write a lead
paragraph that was a whole page, even though the entire review could only be three
pages long, and then I’d start writing up descriptions of the food, one dish at a time,
bird by bird, and the critics would be sitting on my shoulders, commenting like
cartoon characters. They’d be pretending to snore, or rolling their eyes at my
overwrought descriptions, no matter how hard I tried to tone those descriptions
down, no matter how conscious I was of what a friend said to me gently in my early
days of restaurant reviewing. “Annie,” she said, “it is just a piece of chicken. It is just
a bit of cake.”
7 But because by then I had been writing for so long, I would eventually let myself
trust the process — sort of, more or less. I’d write a first draft that was maybe twice
as long as it should be, with a self-indulgent and boring beginning, stupefying
descriptions of the meal, lots of quotes from my black-humored friends that made
them sound more like the Manson girls than food lovers, and no ending to speak of.
2
The whole thing would be so long and incoherent and hideous that for the rest of the
day I’d obsess about getting creamed by a car before I could write a decent second
draft. I’d worry that people would read what I’d written and believe that the accident
had really been a suicide, that I had panicked because my talent was waning and my
mind was shot.
8 The next day, I’d sit down, go through it all with a colored pen, take out
everything I possibly could, find a new lead somewhere on the second page, figure
out a kicky place to end it, and then write a second draft. It always turned out fine,
sometimes even funny and weird and helpful. I’d go over it one more time and mail
it in.
9 Then, a month later, when it was time for another review, the whole process
would start again, complete with the fears that people would find my first draft
before I could rewrite it.
10 Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start
somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper. A friend of
mine says that the first draft is the down draft — you just get it down. The second
draft is the up draft — you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more
accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to
see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.
1. Lamott says that the perceptions most people have of how writers work is
different from the reality of the work itself. She refers to this in paragraph 1 as
“the fantasy of the uninitiated.” What does she mean?
2. In paragraph 7 Lamott refers to a time when, through experience, she
“eventually let [herself] trust the process – sort of, more or less.” She is
referring to the writing process, of course, but why “more or less”? Do you
think that her wariness is personal, or is she speaking for all writers in this
regard? Explain.
3. From what Lamott has to say, is writing a first draft more about the product or
the process? Do you agree in regard to your own first drafts? Explain.
Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts.” Language Awareness: Readings for College
Writers. Ed. by Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark. 9th ed.
Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005: 93-96.
Ten Ways To Think About Writing:
Metaphoric Musings for College
Writing Student
by
E. Shelley Reid
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3
Ten Ways To Think About Writing:
Metaphoric Musings for College
Writing Students
E. Shelley Reid
1. A Thousand Rules and Three Principles
Writing is hard.*
I’m a writer and a writing professor, the daughter and granddaugh-
ter of writers and writing professors, and I still sit down at my key-
board every week and think, writing is hard.
I also think, though, that writing is made harder than it has to be
when we try to follow too many rules for writing. Which rules have
you heard? Here are some I was taught:
Always have a thesis. I before E except after C. No one-sen-
tence paragraphs. Use concrete nouns. A semi-colon joins two
complete sentences. A conclusion restates the thesis and the
topic sentences. Don’t use “I,” check your spelling, make three
main points, and don’t repeat yourself. Don’t use contrac-
tions. Cite at least three sources, capitalize proper nouns, and
don’t use “you.” Don’t start a sentence with “And” or “But,”
don’t end a sentence with a preposition, give two examples in
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E. Shelley Reid4
every paragraph, and use transition words. Don’t use transi-
tion words too much.
When we write to the rules, writing seems more like a chore than
a living process that connects people and moves the world forward. I
find it particularly hard to cope with all those “Don’ts.” It’s no wonder
we get writer’s block, hands poised above the keyboard, worried about
all the ways we could go wrong, suddenly wondering if we have new
messages or whether there’s another soda in the fridge.
We can start to unblock the live, negotiated process of writing for
real people by cutting the thousand rules down to three broader prin-
ciples:
1. Write about what you know about, are curious about, are pas-
sionate about (or what you can find a way to be curious about
or interested in).
2. Show, don’t just tell.
3. Adapt to the audience and purpose you’re writing for.
When we write this way, we write rhetorically: that is, we pay attention
to the needs of the author and the needs of the reader rather than the
needs of the teacher—or the rules in the textbook.
Everything that matters from the preceding list of rules can be con-
nected to one of those three rhetorical principles, and the principles
address lots of aspects of writing that aren’t on the list but that are
central to why humans struggle to express themselves through written
language. Write about what you know about so that you can show not
just tell in order to adapt to your audience’s needs and accomplish your
goals. (Unless you do a good job showing what you mean, your audi-
ence will not understand your message. You will not meet their expec-
tations or accomplish your goals.) Make clear points early so that your
audience can spot your expertise or passion right from the start. Write
multi-sentence paragraphs in which you show key ideas in enough de-
tail that your audience doesn’t have to guess what you mean. Use a
semi-colon correctly in order to show how your carefully thought out
ideas relate to one another—and to win your reader’s confidence.
Writing will still be hard because these are some of the hardest
principles in college; they may be some of the hardest principles in
the galaxy. But if you write from those three principles, and use some
of the strategies listed below, your writing will finally have a fighting
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 5
chance of being real, not just rules. And that’s when writing gets inter-
esting and rewarding enough that we do it even though it’s hard.
2. Show & Telepaths
What does that “show, don’t just tell” idea really mean? Let’s try some
time travel to get a better idea. Can you remember being in kindergar-
ten on show-and-tell day? Imagine that a student gets up in front of
you and your fellow five-year-olds, empty-handed, and says, “I have a
baseball signed by Hank Aaron that’s in perfect condition, but I can’t
bring it to school.” You’re only five years old, but you know that she’s
got two problems, right? Not only can you not see the ball to know
exactly what “perfect condition” looks like, to eyeball the signature
and smell the leather and count the stitches, but you have no reason
to believe this kid even if she describes it perfectly. If you tell without
showing, your reader might not only be confused but might entirely
disbelieve you. So you’re two strikes down.
Another way to explain show vs. tell is with a story. There is a very,
very short science fiction story in a collection of very short science fic-
tion stories entitled “Science Fiction for Telepaths.”
This is the entire story, just six words: “Aw, you know what I mean”
(Blake 235).
“Wah-ha-ha!” go the telepaths, “what a great story! I really liked
the part about the Martian with three heads trying to use the gamma
blaster to get the chartreuse kitchen sink to fly out the window and
land on the six-armed Venusian thief! Good one!” Since the telepaths
can read the storyteller’s mind, they don’t need any other written de-
tails: they know the whole story instantly.
This story is a little like when you say to your best friend from just
about forever, you know what I mean, and sometimes she even does,
because she can almost read your mind. Sometimes, though, even your
best buddy from way back gives you that look. You know that look:
the one that says he thinks you’ve finally cracked. He can’t read your
mind, and you’ve lost him.
If you can confuse your best friend in the whole world, even when
he’s standing right there in front of you, think how easy it could be to
confuse some stranger who’s reading your writing days or months or
years from now. If we could read each other’s minds, writing wouldn’t
be hard at all, because we would always know what everyone meant,
E. Shelley Reid6
and we’d never doubt each other. If you figure out how to read minds
this semester, I hope you’ll tell us how it works! In the meantime,
though, you have to show what you mean.
3. The Little Green Ball and
Some People: Doing Details Right
Now we know: I can read my own mind, and you can read your own
mind, and this self-mind-reading is even easier to do than breathing
in and out on a lovely April morning. When I write something like “I
have a little green ball” on the whiteboard, I read my mind as I read
the board, so I understand it—and I’m positive, therefore, that you
understand it. Meanwhile, you read my sentence and your own mind
together and the meaning is so perfectly clear to you that it’s nearly
impossible to imagine that you’re not understanding exactly what I
intended.
I have a little green ball. Even a five-year-old could read this sen-
tence and know what I mean, right?
Try something. Bring both hands up in front of your face, and use
each one to show one possible size of this “little” ball. (You can try
this with friends: have everyone close their eyes and show the size of a
“little” ball with their hands, then open their eyes, and look around.)
Hmm. Already there’s some possible disagreement, even though it
seemed so clear what “little” meant.
Maybe “green” is easier: you know what “green” is, right? Of course.
But now, can you think of two different versions of “green”? three ver-
sions? five? In the twenty-five minds in a classroom, say, we might have
at least twenty kinds of little, and maybe a hundred kinds of green,
and we haven’t even discussed what kind of “ball” we might be talking
about. Those of you who are math whizzes can see the permutations
that come from all those variables. If I sent you to Mega Toyland with
the basic instructions, “Buy me a little green ball,” the chances are slim
that you would come home with the ball I had in mind.
If I don’t care about the exact ball—I just need something ball-like
and not too huge and somewhat greenish—then it doesn’t matter. I
can leave it up to you to decide. (Occasionally, it’s effective to avoid
details: if I were writing a pop song about my broken heart, I’d be de-
liberately vague so that you’d think the song was about your heart, and
then you’d decide to download or even buy my song.) But the more
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 7
I care that you know exactly what I’m thinking, the more the details
matter to me, then the more information I need to give you.
What information would you need to write down so that someone
would buy the exact little green ball that you’re thinking of while he or
she is shopping at Mega Toyland?
If you’re going to show me, or each other, what you’re thinking,
using only language, it will take several sentences, perhaps a whole
paragraph—filled with facts and statistics, comparisons, sensory de-
scription, expert testimony, examples, personal experiences—to be
sure that what’s in your mind is what’s in my mind. After my students
and I finish examining my ball and choosing rich language to show it,
the whiteboard often reads something like this: “I have a little green
ball about an inch in diameter, small enough to hide in your hand.
It’s light neon green like highlighter ink and made of smooth shiny
rubber with a slightly rough line running around its equator as if two
halves were joined together. When I drop it on the tile floor, it bounces
back nearly as high as my hand; when I throw it down the hallway, it
careens unpredictably off the walls and floor.” Now the ball in your
mind matches the ball in my hand much more closely.
Showing is harder than just telling, and takes longer, and is depen-
dent on your remembering that nobody reads your mind like you do.
Can you think of other “little green ball” words or phrases that you
might need to show more clearly? How do you describe a good movie
or a bad meal? How would you describe your mother, your hometown,
your car? Try it on a blank page or in an open document: write one
“you know what I mean” sentence, then write every detail and example
you can think of to make sure that a reader does know what you mean.
Then you can choose the most vivid three or four, the ones that best
show your readers what you want them to understand.
There’s another kind of description that requires mind reading. If I
write on the board that “some people need to learn to mind their own
business sometimes,” would you agree with me? (By now, you should
be gaining some skepticism about being able to read my mind.) In my
head, I’m filling in “some people” and “their business” and “some-
times” with very specific, one-time-only examples. It’s like I have a
YouTube clip playing in my head, or a whole season’s worth of a reality
TV show, and you don’t have access to it yet. (I might as well be say-
ing “I have cookies!” but not offering to share any of them with you.)
E. Shelley Reid8
If I give you a snapshot from that film, if I use language to pro-
vide a one-time-only example, I show you: “My ninety-year-old grand-
mother needs to stop calling up my younger cousin Celia like she did
last night and telling her to persuade me to move back home to Lara-
mie so my mom won’t get lonely and take up extreme snowboarding
just to go meet some nice people.” Does that help you see how the one-
time-only example you were thinking of, when you read my boring
sentence along with your own mind, is different from what I wanted
you to think? As writers, we need to watch out for the some-people
example and the plural example: “Sometimes things bother me” or
“Frederick Douglass had lots of tricks for learning things he needed to
know.” If an idea is important, give an exact one-time snapshot with
as much detail as possible.
In a writing class, you also have to learn to be greedy as a reader, to
ask for the good stuff from someone else’s head if they don’t give it to
you, to demand that they share their cookies: you have to be brave and
say, “I can’t see what you mean.” This is one of the roles teachers take
up as we read your writing. (One time during my first year teaching,
one of my students snorted in exasperation upon receiving his essay
back from me. “So, like, what do you do,” he asked, “just go through
the essay and write ‘Why? How so? Why? How so? Why? How so?’
randomly all over the margins and then slap that ‘B–’ on there?” I
grinned and said, “Yep, that’s about it.”)
It’s also your job as a peer reader to read skeptically and let your
fellow writer know when he or she is assuming the presence of a mind
reader—because none of us knows for sure if we’re doing that when
we write, not until we encounter a reader’s “Hunh?” or “Wha-a-a-?”
You can learn a lot about writing from books and essays like this one,
but in order to learn how not to depend on reading your own mind,
you need feedback from a real, live reader to help you gauge how your
audience will respond.
4. Lost Money and Thank-you Notes:
What’s in an Audience?
Writing teachers are always going on and on about audience, as if
you didn’t already know all about this concept. You can do a simple
thought-experiment to prove to them, and to yourself, that you already
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 9
fully understand that when the audience changes, your message has to
change, sometimes drastically.
Imagine that you’ve done something embarrassingly stupid or im-
pulsive that means you no longer have any money to spend this se-
mester. (I won’t ask you what it is, or which credit card or 888 phone
number or website it involves, or who was egging you on.) You really
need the money, but you can’t get it back now. If I just said, “Write a
message to try to get some money from someone,” you might struggle
a bit, and then come up with some vague points about your situation.
But if I say, “Ask your best friend for the money,” you should sud-
denly have a very clear idea of what you can say. Take a minute and
consider: what do you tell this friend? Some of my students have sug-
gested, “Remember how you owe me from that time I helped you last
February?” or “I’ll pay you back, with interest” or “I’ll do your laun-
dry for a month.” Most of my students say they’ll tell their friends the
truth about what happened: would you? What else might you say to
your own friend, particularly if he were giving you that skeptical look?
Suppose then that your friend is nearly as broke as you are, and
you have to ask one of your parents or another family adult. Now what
do you say to help loosen the parental purse strings? Do you tell the
truth about what happens? (Does it matter which parent it is?) Do you
say, “Hey, you owe me”? Some of my students have suggested choos-
ing messages that foreground their impending starvation, their intense
drive for a quality education, or their ability to learn a good lesson.
Would your parent want you to offer to pay back the money? What
else might you say?
Notice how easy it is for you to switch gears: nothing has changed
but the audience, and yet you’ve quickly created a whole new message,
changing both the content and the language you were using.
One more try: when your parent says there’s just no extra cash to
give you, you may end up at the local bank trying to take out a loan.
What will you tell the bank? Should the loan officer hear how you
lost your money, or how you promise you’ll be more responsible in
the future? Should you try looking hungry and wan? Probably not: by
discussing collateral (your five-year-old Toyota) and repayment terms
(supported by your fry-jockey job at McSkippy’s), you’re adjusting
your message once again.
Sometimes writing teachers talk about a “primary” and “second-
ary” audience, as if that were really a complicated topic, but you know
E. Shelley Reid10
all about this idea, too. Take just a minute and think about writing
a thank-you note. If it’s a thank-you note to your grandmother, then
your primary audience is your grandmother, so you write to her. But
if your grandmother is like mine, she may show your note to someone
else, and all those people become secondary audiences. Who might see,
or hear about, your note to your grandmother? Neighbors, other rela-
tives, her yoga group or church friends? If you know your note will be
stuck up on the fridge, then you can’t use it as a place to add snarky
remarks about your younger brother: you write for a primary audience,
but you also need to think for a minute to be sure your message is ad-
justed for the needs of your secondary audiences. (If you haven’t writ-
ten a thank-you note recently, try to remember the last time someone
forwarded your email or text message to someone else, without asking
you first.)
In a writing classroom, everyone knows that, in reality, your pri-
mary audience is the teacher—just as during rehearsal or team practice
the primary audience is the director or coach who decides whether
you’ll be first clarinet or take your place in the starting line-up. Your
classmates (or teammates) may be part of a secondary audience who
also need considering. It can be tempting to take the middle-of-the-
road route and forget about any other audiences. But in all these cases,
you won’t be practicing forever. It helps to imagine another primary
audience—sometimes called a “target audience”—outside the class-
room, in order to gain experience tailoring your performance to a
“real” audience. It also helps to imagine a very specific primary audi-
ence (a person or small group or publication), so that instead of staring
at the screen thinking vague “some people” thoughts, you can quickly
come up with just the right words and information to match that audi-
ence’s needs, and it helps to consider some exact secondary audiences
so that you can include ideas that will appeal to those readers as well.
(Who do you suppose are the specific primary and secondary audi-
ences for this essay? How does the writing adapt to those audiences?)
5. Pink Houses & Choruses:
Keeping Your Reader With You
Once you’ve identified a target audience, and put down all the detail
you can think of to help show your ideas to those readers, you need
to focus on not losing them somewhere along the way. Earlier in your
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 11
writing career as you worked on writing cohesive essays, you may have
watched writing teachers go totally ballistic over thesis statements and
topic sentences—even though some teachers insisted that they weren’t
requiring any kind of set formula. How can this be? What’s up with
all this up-front information?
The concept is actually pretty simple, if we step out of the writing
arena for a minute. Say you’re driving down the interstate at sixty-five
miles an hour with three friends from out of town, and you suddenly
say to them, “Hey, there’s that amazing Pink House!” What happens?
Probably there’s a lot of whiplash-inducing head swiveling, and some-
one’s elbow ends up in someone else’s ribs, and maybe one of your
friends gets a glimpse, but probably nobody really gets a chance to see
it (and somebody might not believe you if she didn’t see it for herself!).
What if you had said instead, “Hey, coming up on the right here in
about two miles, there’s an amazing huge neon Pink House: watch for
it”? They’d be ready, they’d know where to look and what to look for,
and they’d see what you wanted them to see.
Writers need to advise their readers in a similar way. That advice
doesn’t always need to be in a thesis statement or a topic sentence, but
it does need to happen regularly so that readers don’t miss something
crucial.
“But,” you say, “I’m not supposed to repeat things in my essay; it
gets boring!” That’s true, up to a point, but there are exceptions. Have
you ever noticed how the very same company will run the exact same
advertisement for light beer five or six times during one football game?
It’s not as if the message they are trying to get across is that complex:
Drink this beer and you will be noticed by this beautiful woman, or get
to own this awesome sports car, or meet these wonderful friends who will
never ever let you down. The ad costs the company hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars each time, but there it is again. Beer: sports car. Beer:
sports car. Contemporary Americans have a very high tolerance for
repeated messages; we even come to depend on them, like football fans
relishing the instant replay. Beer: sports car.
If you’d rather think like an artist than an advertising executive,
consider popular music. Pick a pop song, any song—“Jingle Bells,” for
instance, or whatever song everybody’s listening to this month—and
the next time you listen, count the number of times the chorus, or
even the title phrase, comes up. Do we get bored by the repetition? Not
usually. In fact, the chorus is crucial for audience awareness because
E. Shelley Reid12
it’s often the first (or even the only) part of the song the listener learns
and can sing along with. Repeating the chorus helps bring the audi-
ence along with you from verse to verse: the audience thinks, “Aha, I
know this!”
Now, what you’re trying to say in your essay is much more complex
than beer: sports car or I will always love you. If you only say it once
or twice—there, in the last paragraph, where you finally figured out
the most important point, or maybe once at the start and once at the
end—we might miss it, or only get a piece of it. Here you’ve spent
hundreds of minutes working on this idea, and we zoom past it at
sixty-five m.p.h. and miss it entirely! You have to bring it back to our
attention throughout the essay. Of course, you don’t want to repeat
just anything. You certainly don’t want to repeat the same examples or
vague “some people” theories, stuffing baloney into the middle of the
paper to fill it out. But the core idea—beer: sports car—needs to ap-
pear early and often, using the same key words, even, as an anchor for
all the complex ideas and examples you’re connecting to it, as a place
for the audience to recognize the main idea and find a way to “sing
along.”
So as you’re revising, add your chorus back into some key middle
parts of your essay—the beginnings and endings of paragraphs, like
commercial breaks, can be places that readers expect repetition—until
you start to really feel uncomfortable about your repetition . . . and
then add it one more time, and it might be enough, but it shouldn’t be
too much. (Since you read the essay dozens of times and you read your
own mind, you’ll get antsy about repetition long before your readers
will in their one trip through your essay.) If you get a good balance,
your reader—the same person who keeps laughing at the beer ad or
mumbling the chorus to the pop song without knowing the rest of the
lyrics—won’t even notice that you’re repeating. When I work with my
students, I say: “I promise to tell you—no harm, no penalty—if you’re
ever too clear about your main point.” I find that very few people make
it that far, but they like having the encouragement to try. You and your
peer readers can make the same agreement.
6. Fruit Jell-O: Balancing Arguments & Examples
“Great,” you say, “so I’m supposed to have all these examples and to
have all these Pink House reminders, but it’s hard to keep it all straight.”
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 13
That’s a very smart observation—because one of the main challenges
writers face, when we can’t read someone’s mind or get them to read
ours, is learning how to balance the writing that states our theories and
arguments with the writing that provides our evidence and examples. It
turns out that it’s easier to do just one of these things at a time when
writing, but having theories and arguments without evidence and ex-
amples is a recipe for confusion and misunderstanding.
I find that it helps sometimes to think about fruit Jell-O™, the kind
my mom used to take to family get-togethers: lime Jell-O with manda-
rin orange slices in it, or berry Jell-O with cherries in it. Fruit Jell-O is
a pretty good balance of foods to take to an informal family gathering:
it meets the needs of the audience.
You wouldn’t want to take plain gelatin to show off to your fam-
ily, after all. Think of the last time you ate plain old Jell-O, with no
additional food (or beverage) added to it. Weren’t you in a hospital, or
a school cafeteria, or some other unhappy place? Hospitals serve plain
gelatin because it looks and behaves like food, but it has so few ingre-
dients that it won’t irritate your mouth or upset your digestion. That
same blandness means that not a lot of family members will choose it
over the tortilla chips or the macaroons.
Writing just your opinions, theories, and arguments is a lot like
serving plain Jell-O: it seems like you’re doing something productive,
but there’s not much substance to it. Politicians often write plain Jell-O
speeches with no details or examples, because that kind of talk moti-
vates people but won’t irritate voters with tiny details about time or
money. Talent-show contestants sometimes choose to sing plain Jell-O
songs for the same reason.
On the other hand, if you took a bowl of cherries with you, your
family might perk up a bit, but cherries are kind of hard to serve. They
roll out of the bowl and off of those flimsy paper plates and end up
sliding into the cheese dip or being squished into the new carpet by
your two-year-old cousin. People finger all the cherries but take just
a few (using tongs on cherries just seems too formal!), and it’s hard to
know how to handle the pits, or to eat gooey already-pitted cherries
with your hands.
Writing just your examples, reasons, and details is a lot like bring-
ing cherries to the party: it’s interesting and lively, but readers don’t
know what to make of it all. Some of your reasons or stories will roll
out of readers’ heads if they aren’t firmly attached to an argument;
E. Shelley Reid14
some readers will meander through all your details and just randomly
remember one or two of them rather than building a whole picture.
Good writers blend argument and evidence as they write, so that
readers get both elements together all the way through. Good revisers
go back and adjust the recipe, seeking a workable combination. Some-
times as you’re revising it can feel odd to be just adding cherries: it can
seem like you’re packing in too many extra details when there’s already
a perfectly good piece of fruit there. Other times it seems weird to
be just adding Jell-O, because all those “chorus” sentences sound the
same and have the same flavor, and you don’t want to repeat yourself
unnecessarily. It’s hard to get the balance right, and you’ll want to have
your readers help you see where to adjust the ingredients. But if you
remember that the fruit/evidence is the tastiest part (so you want the
most vibrant examples), and the point of Jell-O/argumentation is to
provide consistency to hold everything together (you want statements
that sound alike), you may start to gain additional confidence in bal-
ancing your writing.
7. Wash-and-wear Paragraphs
If you’re going to have Jell-O and cherries, a chorus and one-time-only
examples, in every paragraph, that’s going to take some managing—
and you’ll want to manage rhetorically rather than going by some rules
you once heard about exactly how long a paragraph should be. What
paragraph-length rules have you been taught? Should a paragraph be
five to eight sentences? always more than two sentences? never longer
than a page? Some of my students have learned rules that specify that
all paragraphs have twelve sentences and each sentence has a specific
job. That sounds complicated—and you know that a rule like that
can’t be universally true. What if you’re writing for a newspaper? for
a psychology journal? for a website? Paragraph length doesn’t follow
clear rules, but once again depends upon a rhetorical negotiation be-
tween the writer’s needs and the reader’s needs.
Switch gears for a minute and try out another metaphor: what do
you know about how big a load of laundry should be? Right: it de-
pends. What’s wrong with a very small or a very large load? Paragraphs
face the same kinds of boundaries: too small, and they can waste a
reader’s energy, always starting and stopping; too large, and they over-
load a reader and nothing gets clean. But there are no definite rules
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 15
in laundry or in paragraphs. Is there ever reason to do one tiny laun-
dry load, even if it might waste money or energy? Sure: maybe you’ve
got an important event to attend Friday night and you just need to
wash your best black shirt quickly, or maybe you have a small washing
machine. Is there ever reason to do one slightly oversized load? Abso-
lutely: perhaps you’re low on quarters or there’s only one machine open
in the dormitory laundry room, and you need to get all those t-shirts
clean. The same is true for paragraphs: sometimes, you have just one
important thing to say, or your readers have a short attention span, so
you want a short paragraph—even a one-sentence paragraph. On the
other hand, sometimes you have a complex explanation that you want
your reader to work through all at once, so you stretch your paragraph
a little longer than usual, and hope your reader stays with you.
You want to write paragraphs that your target audience can handle
without straining their brains or leaving suds all over the floor. I bet
you’re pretty good at sorting laundry into the basic loads: darks, colors,
whites, like the three body paragraphs of a five-paragraph essay. But
what if you’re writing an eight-page paper using three basic points?
What if you have an enormous pile of whites?
You sometimes have to split up even the loads that look alike.
Would you split an all-whites pile into all the long-drying socks vs.
all the quick-drying shirts? the dirty stuff vs. the really gross, stinky
stuff? the underwear you need tomorrow vs. the towels you could wash
later? You can find lots of ways to split a too-long paragraph based on
how you want your reader to think about the issue: pros and cons,
first steps and next steps, familiar information and more surprising
information.
Writers need to remember that paragraphs help readers focus and
manage their analytical energies. It’s good to have some variance in
size and shape but not to overtax your readers with too much variation;
it’s useful to write each paragraph with a clear beginning and ending
to direct readers’ attention; and it’s helpful if paragraphs come with a
blend of information and analysis to help readers “see what you mean”
about your subpoints and see how they relate to the overall point of
your essay. It’s not true that paragraphs are “one size fits all,” and it’s
not true that “anything goes”: you need to adjust your paragraphs to
connect your ideas to your readers’ brains.
E. Shelley Reid16
8. Hey Hey Hey and the Textbook
Conspiracy: Annotating Your Reading
I know, you thought this was an essay about writing. But part of being
a writer, and being a helpful companion to other writers, is being a
careful reader, a reader who writes.
Besides, I want to be sure you get what you pay for: that kind of
critical thinking helps all of us be better writers. Did you know that
you pay for most textbooks in two ways, and most students never do
the simplest thing to recoup their investment?
How do you pay? First, except for texts like the one you’re reading
right now, you’ve paid some exorbitant price for your books, even if
you bought them used. Why would you do that, instead of checking
them out of the library or sneaking a look from a friend? Right: you
can read them whenever and wherever you get around to it. (No, I
don’t want to know where you read your class book!) But you may be
overlooking one more benefit, which I’ll get to in a minute.
Second, you pay for the book—even a free one like this one—with
your time. You pore over page after page, the minutes ticking by, in-
stead of building houses for orphans in Botswana or coming up with
a cure for insomnia or even giving that double-crossing elf what he
deserves in World of Warcraft. Did you ever finish all that poring (with
a “p,” not a “b,” really) and realize you had tuned out and didn’t re-
member a thing? Now you’ve paid dearly, and you may have to pay yet
another time when you re-read it.
The simplest thing you can do to get your money’s worth and your
time’s worth from your books and other reading material is this: you
can write on them.
Whatever you pay for the book (minus whatever you might sell it
back for), the only two benefits you get are convenient reading access,
and the chance to write in the book. If you don’t write in your book, or
type notes into the document, you’re being cheated, as if you’d paid for
a Combo Meal but ate only the fries. (Do you think maybe you won’t
be able to re-sell your book if you write in it? Check with your friends:
I bet someone’s bought a used book that’s been scribbled all over. So
clearly someone will buy your book back even if you write in it. Don’t
let the textbook industry scare you out of getting what you pay for.)
Some of you may think you are writing on your text, but I wonder
if that’s true. Smearing it with hot pink highlighter pen doesn’t count
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 17
as writing. Why not? That takes another story and another metaphor.
There’s a classic Far Side cartoon from back in the twentieth century
that reveals what dogs are really saying when they bark all day long.
According to cartoonist Gary Larson, when we finally translate their
secret language, we find that they say, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” (144). You
can just see a dog thinking that way, everything new and surprising,
but not much complexity of analysis. Hey!
When you read something and gloss it with your highlighter pen,
that’s what you’re saying: Hey! Hey! Hey! You can come back six weeks
later to write an essay or study for an exam, and you have an entire
book filled with Hey! It’s a good start, but as a smart writing student,
you’re ready to go further to get your money’s worth.
Without having to expend much more energy, you can begin to
add a wholly intelligent commentary, putting your own advanced
brain down on the page, using an actual writing utensil such as a pen
or pencil (or a comment function for an electronic document). For
starters, let’s just vary Hey:
Ha.
Heh.
Hee.
Hooboy!
Hmm.
Hmph.
Huh?
Whoa!
Each of those responses records some higher-brain judgment: if you
go back later, you’ll know whether you were saying “Hey, this is cool!”
or “Hey, this is fishy.” You can also use other abbreviations you know:
LOL, OMG, WTH(eck), or J. You can underline short phrases with
a solid or a squiggly underline, depending on your reaction. And of
course, you can always go back to “Why? How so? Show me!” If you
get really bold, you can ask questions (“will this take too much time?”),
write quick summaries (“annotate so there’s no hey”) or note connec-
tions (“sounds like the mind-reading thing”). It doesn’t take very long,
and it keeps your brain involved as you read. What other short annota-
tions could you write or type on this page right now?
E. Shelley Reid18
Every time you write on the page and talk back to the text, you get
your money’s worth, because you make the text truly your own, and
you get your time’s worth, because you’re staying awake and you’re
more likely to remember and learn what you read. If you don’t remem-
ber, you still have an intelligent record of what you should’ve remem-
bered, not just a pile of Hey! Bonus: being a writer when you’re a reader
helps you become a better reader and a better writer.
9. Short-Time Writing: Use Your Higher Brain
So far, we’ve been thinking about writing when you have plenty of
time to consider your audience, play with your paragraphs, and re-
calibrate your Jell-O/cherry balance. But you won’t always have that
much time: sometimes you’ll get a late start or have an early deadline.
In college, you might encounter essay questions on an exam. Learning
how to be a good timed-exam writer can help you in lots of short-time
writing situations.
What’s hard about writing an essay exam? The stress, the pressure,
the clock ticking, the things you don’t know. It’s like trying to think
with a jet airplane taking off overhead, or a pride of hungry lions rac-
ing your way. But wait: the coolest thing about the essay exam is that,
in contrast to a multiple choice exam that shows what you don’t know,
the essay exam allows you to focus on what you do know. The problem
is that only your higher brain can show off that knowledge, and for
most people in a stressful situation like an essay exam, the higher brain
starts to lose out to the lower brain, the fight-or-flight brain, the brain
that sees breathing in and breathing out as one of its most complicated
tasks, and so the writing goes awry.
Essay exams—or those last-minute, started-at-1:22-a.m. essays
that you may be tempted or forced to write this semester (but not
for your writing teacher, of course!)—generally go wrong by failing
to meet one of the three principles described at the beginning of this
essay. Sometimes students fail to study well so that they can write from
knowledge. (Unfortunately, I don’t know if I can help you with your
midnight cram sessions.) More often, though, some very smart, well-
prepared students fail to adapt to their audience’s needs, or fail to pro-
vide specific support. All that late-night study-session agony goes for
nothing if your lower brain takes over while you’re writing. Your lower
brain can barely remember “I before E,” and it knows nothing about
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 19
complicated rhetorical strategies like ours: you have to make sure your
higher brain sets the pace and marks the trail.
So the teacher hands out the questions, and the first thing you
do is . . . panic? No. Start writing? Heavens, no. Never start an essay
exam—or a truly last-minute essay—by starting to write the essay,
even if (like me) you generally prefer to “just start writing” rather than
doing a lot of restrictive planning. Freewriting is an excellent writing
exercise, but only when you know you have plenty of time to revise.
Instead, ignore all those keyboards clacking, all those pens scribbling:
they are the signs of lower brains at work, racing off screeching wild-
ly about lions without remembering the way writing happens. You’re
smarter than that. You’re going to use your higher brain right at the
start, before it gets distracted. Speed, right now, is your enemy, a trick
of the lower brain.
The first thing you want to do is . . . read the gosh darn question.
Really, really read it. Annotate the assignment sheet or exam prompt,
or write the key question out on a separate piece of paper, so you
know you’re actually reading it, and not just pretending to. (If you’re
in a workplace setting, write down a list of the top things you know
your audience—or your boss—wants to see.) In every essay exam
I’ve ever given, somebody has not answered the question. When I
say this in a class, everyone frowns or laughs at me just the way you
are now, thinking, “What kind of idiot wouldn’t read the question?
Certainly not me!” But someone always thinks she’s read the whole
question, and understood it, when she hasn’t. Don’t be that writer.
Circle the verbs: analyze, argue, describe, contrast. Underline the key
terms: two causes, most important theme, main steps, post–Civil War.
Read it again, and read it a third time: this is your only official
clue about what your audience—the teacher—wants. On a piece of
scratch paper, write out an answer to the question, in so many words:
if it asks, “What are two competing explanations for language ac-
quisition?” write down, “Two competing explanations for language
acquisition are ___ and ___ .” In an examination setting, this may
even become your opening line, since readers of essay exams rarely
reward frilly introductions or cute metaphors.
But don’t start to write the whole answer yet, even though your
lower brain is begging you, even though the sweat is breaking out on
your brow and your muscles are tensing up with adrenaline because
you know the lions and probably some rampaging T-Rexes are just
E. Shelley Reid20
around the corner. In real time, it has only taken you two minutes to
read and annotate the question. Some students are still pulling out
their pens, while across campus at least one student is just waking up
in a panic because his alarm didn’t go off. Meanwhile, far from being
hopelessly behind, you’re ahead of everyone who’s writing already, be-
cause you’re still working with your higher brain.
You have one more task, though. You know that showing takes lon-
ger, and is more complicated, than telling. Given the choice, your lower
brain will tell, tell, and tell again, blathering on about Jell-O generali-
ties that don’t let readers see all the best thinking going on in your
mind. Before your higher brain starts to abandon you, make it give
you the cherries: write yourself a list of very specific examples that you
can use in this essay, as many as you can think of. Do not just “think
them over.” That’s a lower brain shortcut, a flight move, and it’s a trick,
because your lower brain will forget them as soon as the lions get a bit
closer. Write them down. If you don’t know all the possible transmis-
sion vectors for tuberculosis that were discussed, write down excellent
examples of the ones you do know. If you can, number them in an
order that makes sense, so that you leave a good breadcrumb trail for
your lower brain to follow. Don’t call it an “outline” if you don’t want
to; that can feel intimidating. Just call it a “trail guide.”
Now you can start writing: take a deep, calming breath and begin
with your in so many words sentence, then follow the trail your higher
brain has planned. About every two or three sentences, you should
start out with “For example, . . .” or “Another example of this is . . . ,”
to be sure that you’re not forgetting your higher brain’s advice or slid-
ing into a vague “some people” sentence. About every three or four
sentences, you should start out with “Therefore, . . .” or “In other
words, . . .” and come back to a version of that very first, question-
answering sentence you wrote on your paper. Bring the chorus back in;
stay in tune and on the trail. Don’t try for too much variation or beau-
ty. Knowing that your higher brain has already solved the problem, all
you have to do is set it down on paper, to show what you know. Writing
is hard, especially under time pressure, but when you use higher brain
strategies and don’t get trapped in the rules or caught up in random
flight, when you take control and anticipate your reader’s needs, you
can make writing work for you in very powerful ways even without a
lot of time.
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 21
10. Rules vs. Rhetoric, or, The Five
Paragraph Essay vs. “Try Something!”
We started out by thinking of all the rules—all those “Don’ts”—that
writers can face. Each of the metaphors here replaces a rule with an
idea that helps you consider how real people communicate with each
other through writing, and how writers make judgments and choices
in order to have the most powerful effect on their readers. That is,
we’ve been thinking rhetorically, about the audience and purpose and
context of a writing situation.
Interestingly, many of those rules are just short-cut versions of re-
ally good rhetorical principles. If you were a middle-school teacher
faced with a room full of thirty squirrelly teenagers who all wanted
to know What’s Due On Friday? and who didn’t have patience for one
more part of their chaotic lives to be in the “it just depends” category,
you might be tempted to make some rules, too. You might even come
up with The Five Paragraph Essay.
That is, instead of saying, “Most readers in the U.S. prefer to know
exactly what they’re getting before they invest too much time,” which
is a thoughtful rhetorical analysis that can help writers make good
choices, you might say, “Your thesis must come in the first paragraph.”
Instead of saying, “In Western cultures, many readers are comfortable
with threes: three bears, three strikes, three wishes, even the Christian
Trinity,” you might make a rule and say, “You must write an essay
with a beginning, an end, and three middle paragraphs.” Instead of
saying, “Your readers need to know how your examples connect to one
another, and how each set of examples is related to your overall point,”
you might say, “Every paragraph needs to start with a transition and a
topic sentence and finish with a concluding sentence.” And instead of
saying, “Writers in the U.S. face one of the most heterogeneous groups
of readers in the world, so we need to be as careful as possible to make
our meaning clear rather than assuming that all readers know what
we’re talking about,” you might just say, “Each paragraph needs to in-
clude two concrete-detail sentences and two commentary sentences.”
You would intend to be helping your students by saying these
things, and for many young writers, having clear rules is more useful
than being told, “It depends.” But eventually the rules start to be more
limiting than helpful, like a great pair of shoes that are now a size too
small. Good writers need some space to grow.
E. Shelley Reid22
As a writer in college now, and as a writer in the larger world full of
real readers—whether they’re reading your Facebook page, your letter
to the editor, or your business plan—you need to free yourself from
the rules and learn to make rhetorical decisions. From now on, when
you hear someone tell you a rule for writing, try to figure out the rhe-
torical challenge that lies behind it, and consider the balancing acts
you may need to undertake. What do you want to say, and what will
help the readers in your primary audience “see what you mean” and
follow your main points?
There aren’t any easy answers: writing is still hard. But the good
news is that you can use a few helpful “rules” as starting points when
they seem appropriate, and set aside the rest. You can draw on some
key principles or metaphors to help you imagine the needs of your
readers, and when you come to an open space where there doesn’t seem
to be a perfect rule or strategy to use, you can try something. In the end,
that’s what writers are always doing as we write: trying this, trying
that, trying something else, hoping that we’ll make a breakthrough so
that our readers will say “Aha, I see what you mean!”—and they really,
truly will see it. You know James Bond 007 would try something; Jane
Eyre would try something; those Olympic medalists and rock stars and
pioneering cardiac surgeons and Silicon Valley whiz kids are always
trying something. In the same way, being a good writer is always more
about trying something than about following the rules, about adapting
to a new situation rather than replicating last year’s essay. So take a
deep breath, push all those nay-saying rule-makers into the far corners
of your brain, focus on your current audience and purpose, and write!
Discussion
1. Which section of this essay do you remember most clearly?
Write down what you remember about it, and explain how you
might use an idea in that section to help with a writing task
that you’re doing this week. Why do you think this section
stuck with you?
2. Without looking back at the essay, what would you say is the
chorus of the essay, the “beer: sports car” message that keeps
getting restated? Write it down: it may be a sentence, a phrase,
and/or a few key words. Now go back to a section of the essay
and underline or highlight sentences or phrases where Reid re-
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 23
peats this chorus or key words. Does she repeat them as much
as you thought she did?
3. What other rules for writing have you been told to follow, ei-
ther at school or outside of school in your workplace, com-
munity group, or online setting? List a couple of rules that
weren’t described in this essay, and note down whether you
think they’re most connected to the principle of writing from
knowledge, showing enough detail, or adapting to readers’
needs. Also, if there’s another principle for writing that helps
you a lot, something you always try to do, add a note about it
so you can share it with your classroom peers.
4. Where in this essay does Reid practice what she preaches? Go
back through the essay and label a few places where she seems
to be doing what she says writers should do (“here she gives a
Pink House heads-up sentence at the start of a section”), and
note a few places where she doesn’t. Even though Reid admits
that writing is hard and depends on a specific context, her es-
say may make some of the strategies sound easier or more uni-
versal than they are. Which one of her suggestions seems like
it would be the hardest for you to do, or seems like it would
be the least effective in the kind of writing you do most often?
Explain why this suggestion is trickier than it looks, and how
you might cope with that challenge as a writer.
Works Cited
Blake, E. Michael. “Science Fiction for Telepaths.” 100 Great Science Fiction
Short Short Stories. Ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin Greenberg, and Joseph D.
Olander. New York: Avon, 1978. 235. Print.
Larson, Gary. The Far Side Gallery 5. Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel,
1995. Print.
Universityof Massachusetts Amherst
English Department Faculty Publication Series English
1994
Ranking , Evaluating , Liking: Sorting Out Three
Forms of Judgment.
Peter Elbow
University of Massachusetts – Amherst, elbow@english.umass.edu
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1
Peter Elbow
Ranking, Evaluating and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment
From: College English 55.2 (1993): 187-206. Reprinted in Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of
Writing and Teaching Writing. NY: Oxford University Press, 2000. This version lacks some formatting and copy editing
in the published versions.
This essay is my attempt to sort out the different acts we call assessment–the different
ways in which we express or frame our judgments of value. I have been working on this tangle
not just because it is interesting and important in itself but because assessment tends so much
to drive and control teaching. Much of what we do in the classroom is determined by the
assessment structures we work under.
Assessment is a large and technical area and I’m not a professional. But my main premise
or subtext in this essay is that we nonprofessionals can and should work on it because
professionals have not reached definitive conclusions about the problem of how to assess
writing (or anything else, I’d say). Also, decisions about assessment are often made by people
even less professional than we, namely legislators. Pat Belanoff and I realized that the field of
assessment is open when we saw the harmful effects of a writing proficiency exam at Stony
Brook and worked out a collaborative portfolio assessment system in its place (Belanoff and
Elbow; Elbow and Belanoff). Professionals keep changing their minds about large scale testing
and assessment. And as for classroom grading, psychometricians provide little support or
defense of it.
The Problems with Ranking and the Benefits of Evaluating
By ranking I mean the act of summing up one’s judgment of a performance or person into
a single, holistic number or score. We rank every time we give a grade or holistic score.
Ranking implies a single scale or continuum or dimension along which all performances are
hung.
By evaluating I mean the act of expressing one’s judgment of a performance or person by
pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of different features or dimensions. We evaluate
every time we write a comment on a paper or have an conversation about its value. Evaluation
implies the recognition of different criteria or dimensions–and by implication different contexts
and audiences for the same performance. Evaluation requires going beyond a first response
that may be nothing but a kind of ranking (“I like it” or “This is better than that”), and instead
looking carefully enough at the performance or person to make distinctions between parts or
features or criteria.
It’s obvious, thus, that I am troubled by ranking. But I will resist any temptation to argue
that we can get rid of all ranking–or even should. Instead I will try to show how we can have
less ranking and more evaluation in its place.
2
I see three distinct problems with ranking: it is inaccurate or unreliable; it gives no
substantive feedback; and it is harmful to the atmosphere for teaching and learning.
(1) First the unreliability. To rank reliably means to give a fair number, to find the single
quantitative score that readers will agree on. But readers don’t agree.
This is not news–this unavailability of agreement. We have long seen it on many fronts.
For example, research in evaluation has shown many times that if we give a paper to a set of
readers, those readers tend to give it the full range of grades (Diederich). I’ve recently come
across new research to this effect–new to me because it was published in 1912. The
investigators carefully showed how high school English teachers gave different grades to the
same paper. In response to criticism that this was a local problem in English, they went on the
next year to discover an even greater variation among grades given by high school geometry
teachers and history teachers to papers in their subjects. (See the summary of Daniel Starch
and Edward Elliott’s 1913 School Review articles in Kirschenbaum, Simon and Napier 258-59.)
We know the same thing from literary criticism and theory. If the best critics can’t agree
about what a text means, how can we be surprised that they disagree even more about the
quality or value of texts. And we know that nothing in literary or philosophical theory gives us
any agreed-upon rules for settling such disputes.
Students have shown us the same inconsistency with their own controlled experiments of
handing the same paper to different teachers and getting different grades. This helps explain
why we hate it so when students ask us their favorite question, “What do you want for an A?”:
it rubs our noses in the unreliability of our grades.
Of course champions of holistic scoring argue that they get can get agreement among
readers–and they often do (White). But they get that agreement by “training” the readers
before and during the scoring sessions. What “training” means is getting those scorers to stop
reading the way they normally read–getting them to stop using the conflicting criteria and
standards they normally use outside the scoring sessions. (In an impressive and powerful book,
Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues that whenever we have widespread inter-reader reliability, we
have reason to suspect that difference has been suppressed and homogeneity imposed–almost
always at the expense of certain groups.) In short, the reliability in holistic scoring is not a
measure of how texts are valued by real readers in natural settings, but only of how they are
valued in artificial settings with imposed agreements.
Defenders of holistic scoring might reply (as one anonymous reviewer did), that holistic
scores are not perfect or absolutely objective readings but just “judgments that most readers
will agree are the appropriate ones given the purpose of the assessment and the system of
communication.” But I have been in and even conducted enough holistic scoring sessions to
know that even that degree of agreement doesn’t occur unless “purpose” and
“appropriateness” are defined to mean acceptance of the single set of standards imposed on
that session. We know too much about the differences among readers and the highly variable
nature of the reading process. Supposing we get readings only from academics, or only from
people in English, or only from respected critics, or only from respected writing programs, or
only from feminists, or only from sound readers of my tribe (white, male, middle class, full
3
professors between the ages of fifty and sixty). We still don’t get agreement. We can
sometimes get agreement among readers from some subset, a particular community that has
developed a strong set of common values, perhaps one English department or one writing
program. But what is the value of such a rare agreement? It tells us nothing about how
readers from other English departments or writing programs will judge–much less how readers
from other domains will judge.
(From the opposite ideological direction, some skeptics might object to my skeptical train
of thought: “So what else is new?” they might reply. “Of course my grades are biased,
‘interested’ or ‘situated’–always partial to my interests or the values of my community or
culture. There’s no other possibility.” But how can people consent to give grades if they feel
that way? A single teacher’s grade for a student is liable to have substantial consequences–for
example on eligibility for a scholarship or a job or entrance into professional school. In grading,
surely we must not take anything less than genuine fairness as our goal.)
It won’t be long before we see these issues argued in a court of law, when a student who
has been disqualified from playing on a team or rejected from a professional school sues,
charging that the basis for his plight–teacher grades–is not reliable. I wonder if lawyers will be
able to make our grades stick.
(2) Ranking or grading is woefully uncommunicative. Grades and holistic scores are
nothing but points on a continuum from “yea” to “boo”–with no information or clues about the
criteria behind these noises. They are 100 percent evaluation and 0 percent description or
information. They quantify the degree of approval or disapproval in readers but tell nothing at
all about what the readers actually approve or disapprove of. They say nothing that couldn’t be
said with gold stars or black marks or smiley-faces. Of course our first reactions are often
nothing but global holistic feelings of approval or disapproval, but we need a system for
communicating our judgments that nudges us to move beyond these holistic feelings and to
articulate the basis of our feeling–a process that often leads us to change our feeling. (Holistic
scoring sessions sometimes use rubrics that explain the criteria–though these are rarely passed
along to students–and even in these situations, the rubrics fail to fit many papers.) As C. S.
Lewis says, “People are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of
things than to describe them” (7).
(3) Ranking leads students to get so hung up on these oversimple quantitative verdicts
that they care more about scores than about learning–more about the grade we put on the
paper than about the comment we have written on it. Have you noticed how grading often
forces us to write comments to justify our grades?–and how these are often not the comment
we would make if we were just trying to help the student write better? (“Just try writing
several favorable comments on a paper and then giving it a grade of D” [Diederich 21].)
Grades and holistic scores give too much encouragement to those students who score
high–making them too apt to think they are already fine–and too little encouragement to those
students who do badly. Unsuccessful students often come to doubt their intelligence. But
oddly enough, many “A” students also end up doubting their true ability and feeling like frauds-
-because they have sold out on their own judgment and simply given teachers whatever yields
an A. They have too often been rewarded for what they don’t really believe in. (Notice that
4
there’s more cheating by students who get high grades than by those who get low ones. There
would be less incentive to cheat if there were no ranking.)
We might be tempted to put up with the inaccuracy or unfairness of grades if they gave
good diagnostic feedback or helped the learning climate; or we might put up with the damage
they do to the learning climate if they gave a fair or reliable measure of how skilled or
knowledgeable students are. But since they fail dismally on both counts, we are faced with the
striking question of why grading has persisted so long.
There must be many reasons. It is obviously easier and quicker to express a global feeling
with a single number than to figure out what the strengths and weaknesses are and what one’s
criteria are. (Though I’m heartened to discover, as I pursue this issue, how troubled teachers
are by grading and how difficult they find it.) But perhaps more important, we see around us a
deep hunger to rank–to create pecking orders: to see who we can look down on and who we
must look up to, or in the military metaphor, who we can kick and who we must salute.
Psychologists tell us that this taste for pecking orders or ranking is associated with the
authoritarian personality. We see this hunger graphically in the case of IQ scores. It is plain
that IQ scoring does not represent a commitment to looking carefully at peoples’ intelligence;
when we do that, we see different and frequently uncorrelated kinds or dimensions of
intelligence (Gardner). The persistent use of IQ scores represents the hunger to have a number
so that everyone can have a rank. (“Ten!” mutter the guys when they see a pretty woman.)
Because ranking or grading has caused so much discomfort to so many students and
teachers, I think we see a lot of confusion about the process. It is hard to think clearly about
something that has given so many of us such anxiety and distress. The most notable confusion I
notice is the tendency to think that if we renounce ranking or grading, we are renouncing the
very possibility of judgment and discrimination–that we are embracing the idea that there is no
way to distinguish or talk about the difference between what works well and what works badly.
So the most important point, then, is that I am not arguing against judgment or
evaluation. I’m just arguing against that crude, oversimple way of representing judgment–
distorting it, really–into a single number, which means ranking people and performances along
a single continuum.
In fact I am arguing for evaluation. Evaluation means looking hard and thoughtfully at a piece
of writing in order to make distinctions as to the quality of different features or dimensions.
For example, the process of evaluation permits us to make the following kinds of statements
about a piece of writing:
-The thinking and ideas seemed interesting and creative.
-The overall structure or sequence seemed confusing.
-The writing was perfectly clear at the level of individual sentences and even paragraphs.
-There is an odd, angry tone of voice that seems unrelated or inappropriate to what the writer
was saying.
-Yet this same voice is strong and memorable and makes one listen if irritated.
5
-There are a fair number of mistakes in grammar or spelling: more than “a sprinkling” but less
than “riddled with.”
To rank, on the other hand, is to be forced to translate those discriminations into a single
number. What grade or holistic score do these judgments add up to? It’s likely, by the way,
that more readers would agree with those separate, “analytic” statements than would agree on
a holistic score.
I’ve conducted many assessment sessions where we were not trying to impose a set of
standards but rather to find out how experienced teachers read and evaluate, and I’ve had
many opportunities to see that good readers give grades or scores right down through the
range of possibilities. Of course good readers sometimes agree–especially on papers that are
strikingly good or bad or conventional, but I think I see difference more frequently than
agreement when readers really speak up.
The process of evaluation, because it invites us to articulate our criteria and to make
distinctions among parts or features or dimensions of a performance, thereby invites us further
to acknowledge the main fact about evaluation: that different readers have different priorities,
values, and standards.
The conclusion I am drawing, then, in this first train of thought is that we should do less
ranking and more evaluation. Instead of using grades or holistic scores–single number verdicts
that try to sum up complex performances along only one scale–we should give some kind of
written or spoken evaluation that discriminates among criteria and dimensions of the writing–
and if possible that takes account of the complex context for writing: who the writer is, what
the writer’s audience and goals are, who we are as reader and how we read, and how we might
differ in our reading from other readers the writer might be addressing.
But how can we put this principle into practice? The pressure for ranking seems
implacable. Evaluation takes more time, effort, and money. It seems as though we couldn’t get
along without scores on writing exams. Most teachers are obliged to give grades at the end of
each course. And many students–given that they have become conditioned or even addicted
to ranking over the years and must continue to inhabit a ranking in most of their courses–will
object if we don’t put grades on papers. Some students, in the absence of that crude gold star
or black mark, may not try hard enough (though how hard is “enough”–and is it really our job
to stimulate motivation artificially with grades–and is grading the best source of motivation?).
It is important to note that there are certain schools and colleges that do not use single-
number grades or scores, and they function successfully. I taught for nine years at Evergreen
State College, which uses only written evaluations. This system works fine, even down to
getting students accepted into high quality graduate and professional schools.
Nevertheless we have an intractable dilemma: that grading is unfair and
counterproductive but that students and institutions tend to want grades. In the face of this
dilemma there is a need for creativity and pragmatism. Here are some ways in which I and
others use less ranking and more evaluation in teaching–and they suggest some adjustments in
how we score larger scale assessments. What follows is an assortment of experimental
compromises–sometimes crude, seldom ideal or utopian–but they help.
6
(a) Portfolios. Just because conventional institutions oblige us to turn in a single
quantitative course grade at the end of every marking period, it doesn’t follow that we need to
grade individual papers. Course grades are more trustworthy and less damaging because they
are based on so many performances over so many weeks. By avoiding frequent ranking or
grading, we make it somewhat less likely for students to become addicted to oversimple
numerical rankings–to think that evaluation always translates into a simple number–in short,
to mistake ranking for evaluation. (I’m not trying to defend conventional course grades since
they are still uncommunicative and they still feed the hunger for ranking.) Portfolios permit me
to refrain from grading individual papers and limit myself to writerly evaluative comments–and
help students see this as a positive rather than a negative thing, a chance to be graded on a
body of their best work that can be judged more fairly. Portfolios have many other advantages
as well. They are particularly valuable as occasions for asking students to write extensive and
thoughtful explorations of their own strengths and weaknesses.
A midsemester portfolio is usually an informal affair, but it is a good occasion for giving
anxious students a ballpark estimate of how well they are doing in the course so far. I find it
helpful to tell students that I’m perfectly willing to tell them my best estimate of their course
grade–but only if they come to me in conference and only during the second half of the
semester. This serves somewhat to quiet their anxiety while they go through seven weeks of
drying out from grades. By midsemester, most of them have come to enjoy not getting those
numbers and thus being able to think better about more writerly comments from me and their
classmates.
Portfolios are now used extensively and productively in larger assessments, and there is
constant experimentation with new applications (Belanoff and Dickson; Portfolio Assessment
Newsletter; Portfolio News).
(b) Another useful option is to make a strategic retreat from a wholly negative position.
That is, I sometimes do a bit of ranking even on individual papers, using two “bottom-line”
grades: H and U for “Honors” and “Unsatisfactory.” I tell students that these translate to about
A or A- and D or F. This practice may seem theoretically inconsistent with all the arguments I’ve
just made, but (at the moment, anyway) I justify it for the following reasons.
First, I sympathize with a part of the students’ anxiety about not getting grades: their fear
that they might be failing and not know about it–or doing an excellent job and not get any
recognition. Second, I’m not giving many grades; only a small proportion of papers get these
‘H’s or ‘U’s. The system creates a “non-bottom-line” or “non-quantified” atmosphere. Third,
these holistic judgments about best and worst do not seem as arbitrary and questionable as
most grades. There is usually a bit more agreement among readers about the best and worst
papers. What seems most dubious is the process of trying to rank that whole middle-range of
papers–papers that have a mixture of better and worse qualities so that the numerical grade
depends enormously on a reader’s priorities or mood or temperament. My willingness to give
these few grades goes a long way toward helping my students forgo most bottom-line grading.
I’m not trying to pretend that these minimal “grades” are truly reliable. But they
represent a very small amount of ranking. Yes, someone could insist that I’m really ranking
every single paper (and indeed if it seemed politically necessary, I could put an OK or S [for
7
satisfactory] on all those middle range papers and brag, “Yes, I grade everything.”) But the fact
is that I am doing much less sorting since I don’t have to sort them into five or even twelve
piles. Thus there is a huge reduction in the total amount of unreliability I produce.
(It might seem that if I use only these few minimal grades I have no good way for figuring
out a final grade for the course–since that requires a more fine-grained set of ranks. But I don’t
find that to be the case. For I also give these same minimal grades to the many other important
parts of my course such as attendance, meeting deadlines, peer responding, and journal
writing. If I want a mathematically computed grade on a scale of six or A through E, I can easily
compute it when I have such a large number of grades to work from–even though they are only
along an odd three point scale.)
This same practice of crude or minimal ranking is big help on larger assessments outside
classrooms, and needs to be applied to the process of assessment in general. There are two
important principles to emphasize. On the one hand we must be prudent or accommodating
enough to admit that despite all the arguments against ranking, there are situations when we
need that bottom-line verdict along one scale: which student has not done satisfactory work
and should be denied credit for the course? which student gets the scholarship? which
candidate to hire or fire? We often operate with scarce resources. But on the other hand we
must be bold enough to insist that we do far more ranking than is really needed. We can get
along not only with fewer occasions for assessment but also with fewer gradations in scoring. If
we decide what the real bottom-line is on a given occasion–perhaps just “failing” or perhaps
“honors” too–then the reading of papers or portfolios is enormously quick and cheap. It leaves
time and money for evaluation–perhaps for analytic scoring or some comment.
At Stony Brook we worked out a portfolio system where multiple readers had only to
make a binary decision: acceptable or not. Then individual teachers could decide the actual
course grade and give comments for their own students–so long as those students passed in
the eyes of an independent rater (Elbow and Belanoff; Belanoff and Elbow). The best way to
begin to wean our society from its addiction to ranking may be to permit a tiny bit of it (which
also means less unreliability)–rather than trying to go “cold turkey.”
(c) Sometimes I use an analytic grid for evaluating and commenting on student papers. Here’s
an example:
Strong OK Weak
CONTENT, INSIGHTS, THINKING, GRAPPLING WITH TOPIC
GENUINE REVISION, SUBSTANTIVE CHANGES, NOT JUST EDITING
ORGANIZATION, STRUCTURE, GUIDING THE READER
LANGUAGE: SYNTAX, SENTENCES, WORDING, VOICE
MECHANICS: SPELLING, GRAMMAR, PUNCTUATION, ROOFREADING
OVERALL [Note: this is not a sum of the other scores.]
8
I often vary the criteria in my grid (e.g. “connecting with readers” or “investment”) depending
on the assignment or the point in the semester.
Grids are a way I can satisfy the students’ hunger for ranking but still not give in to
conventional grades on individual papers. Sometimes I provide nothing but a grid (especially on
final drafts), and this is a very quick way to provide a response. Or on midprocess drafts I
sometimes use a grid in addition to a comment: a more readerly comment that often doesn’t
so much tell them what’s wrong or right or how to improve things but rather tries to give them
an account of what is happening to me as I read their words. I think this kind of comment is
really the most useful thing of all for students, but it frustrates some students for a while. The
grid can help these students feel less anxious and thus pay better attention to my comment.
I find grids extremely helpful at the end of the semester for telling students their
strengths and weaknesses in the course–or what they’ve done well and not so well. Besides
categories like the ones above, I use categories like these: “skill in giving feedback to others,”
“ability to meet deadlines,” “effort,” and “improvement.” This practice makes my final grade
much more communicative.
(d) I also help make up for the absence of ranking–gold stars and black marks–by having
students share their writing with each other a great deal both orally and through frequent
publication in class magazines. Also, where possible, I try to get students to give or send writing
to audiences outside the class. At the University of Massachusetts, freshmen pay a ten dollar
lab fee for the writing course, and every teacher publishes four or five class magazines of final
drafts a semester. The effects are striking. Sharing, peer feedback, and publication give the
best reward and motivation for writing, namely, getting your words out to many readers.
(e) I sometimes use a kind of modified contract grading. That is, at the start of the course
I pass out a long list of all the things that I most want students to do–the concrete activities
that I think most lead to learning–and I promise students that if they do them all they are
guaranteed a certain final grade. Currently, I say it’s a B–it could be lower or higher. My list
includes these items: not missing more than a week’s worth of classes; not having more than
one late major assignment; substantive revising on all major revisions; good copy editing on all
major revisions; good effort on peer feedback work; keeping up the journal; and substantial
effort and investment on each draft.
I like the way this system changes the “bottom-line” for a course: the intersection where
my authority crosses their self-interest. I can tell them, “You have to work very hard in this
course, but you can stop worrying about grades.” The crux is no longer that commodity I’ve
always hated and never trusted: a numerical ranking of the quality of their writing along a
single continuum. Instead the crux becomes what I care about most: the concrete behaviors
that I most want students to engage in because they produce the more learning and help me
teach better. Admittedly, effort and investment are not concrete observable behaviors, but
they are no harder to judge than overall quality of writing. And since I care about effort and
investment, I don’t mind the few arguments I get into about them; they seem fruitful. (“Let’s
try and figure out why it looked to me as though you didn’t put any effort in here.”) In contrast,
I hate discussions about grades on a paper and find such arguments fruitless. Besides, I’m not
9
making fine distinctions about effort and investment–just letting a bell go off when they fall
palpably low.
It’s crucial to note that I am not fighting evaluation with this system. I am just fighting
ranking or grading. I still write evaluative comments and often use an evaluative grid to tell my
students what I see as strengths and weaknesses in their papers. My goal is not to get rid of
evaluation but in fact to emphasize it, enhance it. I’m trying to get students to listen better to
my evaluations–by uncoupling them from a grade. In effect, I’m doing this because I’m so fed
up with students following or obeying my evaluations too blindly–making whatever changes my
comments suggest but doing it for the sake of a grade; not really taking the time to make up
their own minds about whether they think my judgments or suggestions really make sense to
them. The worst part of grades is that they make students obey us without carefully thinking
about the merits of what we say. I love the situation this system so often puts students in: I
make a criticism or suggestion about their paper, but it doesn’t matter to their grade whether
they go along with me or not (so long as they genuinely revise in some fashion). They have to
think; to decide.
Admittedly this system is crude and impure. Some of the really skilled students who are
used to getting A’s and desperate to get one in this course remain unhelpfully hung up about
getting those ‘H’s on their papers. But a good number of these students discover that they
can’t get them, and they soon settle down to accepting a B and having less anxiety and more of
a learning voyage.
The Limitations of Evaluation and the Benefits of Evaluation-free Zones
Everything I’ve said so far has been in praise of evaluation as a substitute for ranking. But
I need to turn a corner here and speak about the limits or problems of evaluation. Evaluating
may be better than ranking, but it still carries some of the same problems. That is, even though
I’ve praised evaluation for inviting us to acknowledge that readers and contexts are different,
nevertheless the very word evaluation tends to imply fairness or reliability or getting beyond
personal or subjective preferences. Also, of course, evaluation takes a lot more time and work.
To rank you just have to put down a number; holistic scoring of exams is cheaper than analytic
scoring.
Most important of all, evaluation harms the climate for learning and teaching–or rather
too much evaluation has this effect. That is, if we evaluate everything students write, they tend
to remain tangled up in the assumption that their whole job in school is to give teachers “what
they want.” Constant evaluation makes students worry more about psyching out the teacher
than about what they are really learning. Students fall into to a kind of defensive or on-guard
stance toward the teacher: a desire to hide what they don’t understand and try to impress.
This stance gets in the way of learning. (Think of the patient trying to hide symptoms from the
doctor.) Most of all, constant evaluation by someone in authority makes students reluctant to
take the risks that are needed for good learning–to try out hunches and trust their own
judgment. Face it: if our goal is to get students to exercise their own judgment, that means
10
exercising an immature and undeveloped judgment and making choices that are obviously
wrong to us.
We see around us a widespread hunger to be evaluated that is often just as strong as the
hunger to rank. Countless conditions make many of us walk around in the world wanting to ask
others (especially those in authority), “How am I doing, did I do OK?” I don’t think the hunger
to be evaluated is as harmful as the hunger to rank, but it can get in the way of learning. For I
find that the greatest and most powerful breakthroughs in learning occur when I can get myself
and others to put aside this nagging, self-doubting question (“How am I doing? How am I
doing?”)–and instead to take some chances, trust our instincts or hungers. When everything is
evaluated, everything counts. Often the most powerful arena for deep learning is a kind of
“time out” zone from the pressures of normal evaluated reality: make-believe, play, dreams–in
effect, the Shakespearian forest.
In my attempts to get away from too much evaluation (not from all evaluation, just from
too much of it), I have drifted into a set of teaching practices which now feel to me like the best
part of my teaching. I realize now what I’ve been unconsciously doing for a number of years:
creating “evaluation-free zones.”
(a) The paradigm evaluation-free zone is the ten minute, nonstop freewrite. When I get
students to freewrite, I am using my authority to create unusual conditions in order to
contradict or interrupt our pervasive habit of always evaluating our writing. What is essential
here are the two central features of freewriting: that it be private (thus I don’t collect it or have
students share it with anyone else); and that it be nonstop (thus there isn’t time for planning,
and control is usually diminished). Students quickly catch on and enter into the spirit. At the
end of the course, they often tell me that freewriting is the most useful thing I’ve taught them
(see Belanoff, Elbow, and Fontaine).
(b) A larger evaluation-free zone is the single unevaluated assignment–what people
sometimes call the “quickwrite” or sketch. This is a piece of writing that I ask students to do–
either in class or for homework–without any or much revising. It is meant to be low stakes
writing. There is a bit of pressure, nevertheless, since I usually ask them to share it with others
and I usually collect it and read it. But I don’t write any comments at all–except perhaps to put
straight lines along some passages I like or to write a phrase of appreciation at the end. And I
ask students to refrain from giving evaluative feedback to each other–and instead just to say
“thank you” or mention a couple of phrases or ideas that stick in mind. (However, this writing-
without-feedback can be a good occasion for students to discuss the topic they have written
about–and thus serve as an excellent kick-off for discussions of what I am teaching.)
(c) These experiments have led me to my next and largest evaluation-free zone–what I
sometimes call a “jump start” for my whole course. For the last few semesters I’ve been
devoting the first three weeks entirely to the two evaluation-free activities I’ve just described:
freewriting (and also more leisurely private writing in a journal) and quickwrites or sketches.
Since the stakes are low and I’m not asking for much revising, I ask for much more writing
homework per week than usual. And every day we write in class: various exercises or games.
The emphasis is on getting rolling, getting fluent, taking risks. And every day all students read
11
out loud something they’ve written–sometimes a short passage even to the whole class. So
despite the absence of feedback, it is a very audience-filled and sociable three weeks.
At first I only dared do this for two weeks, but when I discovered how fast the writing
improves, how good it is for building community, and what a pleasure this period is for me, I
went to three weeks. I’m curious to try an experiment with teaching a whole course this way. I
wonder, that is, whether all that evaluation we work so hard to give really does any more good
than the constant writing and sharing (Zak).
I need to pause here to address an obvious rejoinder: “But withholding evaluation is not
normal!” Indeed, it is not normal–certainly not normal in school. We normally tend to
emphasize evaluations–even bottom-line ranking kinds of evaluations. But I resist the
argument that if it’s not normal we shouldn’t do it.
The best argument for evaluation-free zones is from experience. If you try them, I
suspect you’ll discover that they are satisfying and bring out good writing. Students have a
better time writing these unevaluated pieces; they enjoy hearing and appreciating these pieces
when they don’t have to evaluate. And I have a much better time when I engage in this
astonishing activity: reading student work when I don’t have to evaluate and respond. And yet
the writing improves. I see students investing and risking more, writing more fluently, and
using livelier, more interesting voices. This writing gives me and them a higher standard of
clarity and voice for when we move on to more careful and revised writing tasks–tasks that
involve more intellectual pushing and that sometimes make their writing go tangled or sodden.
The Benefits and Feasibility of Liking
Liking and disliking seem like unpromising topics in an exploration of assessment. They
seem to represent the worst kind of subjectivity, the merest accident of personal taste. But I’ve
recently come to think that the phenomenon of liking is perhaps the most important evaluative
response for writers and teachers to think about. In effect, I’m turning another corner in my
argument. In the first section I argued against ranking–with evaluating being the solution.
Next I argued not against evaluating–but for no-evaluation zones in addition to evaluating.
Now I will argue neither against evaluating nor against non-evaluation zones, but for something
very different in addition, or perhaps underneath, as a foundation: liking.
Let me start with the germ story. I was in a workshop and we were going around the
circle with everyone telling a piece of good news about their writing in the last six months. It
got to Wendy Bishop, a good poet (who has also written two good books about the teaching of
writing), and she said, “In the last six months, I’ve learned to like everything I write.” Our jaws
dropped; we were startled–in a way scandalized. But I’ve been chewing on her words ever
since, and they have led me into a retelling of the story of how people learn to write better.
The old story goes like this: We write something. We read it over and we say, “This is
terrible. I hate it. I’ve got to work on it and improve it.” And we do, and it gets better, and this
happens again and again, and before long we have become a wonderful writer. But that’s not
12
really what happens. Yes, we vow to work on it–but we don’t. And next time we have the
impulse to write, we’re just a bit less likely to start.
What really happens when people learn to write better is more like this: We write
something. We read it over and we say, “This terrible . . . . But I like it. Damn it, I’m going to get
it good enough so that others will like it too.” And this time we don’t just put it in a drawer, we
actually work hard on it. And we try it out on other people too–not just to get feedback and
advice but, perhaps more important, to find someone else who will like it.
Notice the two stories here–two hypotheses. (a) “First you improve the faults and then
you like it.” (b) “First you like it and then you improve faults.” The second story may sound odd
when stated so baldly, but really it’s common sense. Only if we like something will we get
involved enough to work and struggle with it. Only if we like what we write will we write again
and again by choice–which is the only way we get better.
This hypothesis sheds light on the process of how people get to be published writers.
Conventional wisdom assumes a Darwinian model: poor writers are unread; then they get
better; as a result, they get a wider audience; finally they turn into Norman Mailer. But now I’d
say the process is more complicated. People who get better and get published really tend to be
driven by how much they care about their writing. Yes, they have a small audience at first–
after all, they’re not very good. But they try reader after reader until finally they can find
people who like and appreciate their writing. I certainly did this. If someone doesn’t like her
writing enough to be pushy and hungry about finding a few people who also like it, she
probably won’t get better.
It may sound so far as though all the effort and drive comes from the lonely driven writer-
-and sometimes it does (Norman Mailer is no joke). But, often enough, readers play the
crucially active role in this story of how writers get better. That is, the way writers learn to like
their writing is by the grace of having a reader or two who likes it–even though it’s not good.
Having at least a few appreciative readers is probably indispensable to getting better.
When I apply this story to our situation as teachers I come up with this interesting
hypothesis: good writing teachers like student writing (and like students). I think I see this
born out–and it is really nothing but common sense. Teachers who hate student writing and
hate students are grouchy all the time. How could we stand our work and do a decent job if we
hated their writing. Good teachers see what is only potentially good, they get a kick out of
mere possibility–and they encourage it. When I manage to do this, I teach well.
Thus, I’ve begun to notice a turning point in my courses–two or three weeks into the
semester: “Am I going to like these folks or is this going to be a battle, a struggle?” When I like
them everything seems to go better–and it seems to me they learn more by the end. When I
don’t and we stay tangled up in struggle, we all suffer–and they seem to learn less.
So what am I saying? That we should like bad writing? How can we see all the
weaknesses and criticize student writing if we just like it? But here’s the interesting point: if I
like someone’s writing it’s easier to criticize it.
13
I first noticed this when I was trying to gather essays for the book on freewriting that Pat
Belanoff and Sheryl Fontaine and I edited. I would read an essay someone had written, I would
want it for the book, but I had some serious criticism. I’d get excited and write, “I really like
this, and I hope we can use it in our book, but you’ve got to get rid of this and change that, and I
got really mad at this other thing.” I usually find it hard to criticize, but I began to notice that I
was a much more critical and pushy reader when I liked something. It’s even fun to criticize in
those conditions.
It’s the same with student writing. If I like a piece, I don’t have to pussyfoot around with
my criticism. It’s when I don’t like their writing that I find myself tiptoeing: trying to soften my
criticism, trying to find something nice to say–and usually sounding fake, often unclear. I see
the same thing with my own writing. If I like it, I can criticize it better. I have faith that there’ll
still be something good left, even if I train my full critical guns on it.
In short–and to highlight how this section relates to the other two sections of this essay–
liking is not same as ranking or evaluating. Naturally, people get them mixed up: when they
like something, they assume it’s good; when they hate it, they assume it’s bad. But it’s helpful
to uncouple the two domains and realize that it makes perfectly good sense to say, “This is
terrible, but I like it.” Or, “This is good, but I hate it.” In short, I am not arguing here against
criticizing or evaluating. I’m merely arguing for liking.
Let me sum up my clump of hypotheses so far:
-It’s not improvement that leads to liking, but rather liking that leads to improvement.
-It’s the mark of good writers to like their writing.
-Liking is not same as evaluating. We can often criticize something better when we like it.
-We learn to like our writing when we have a respected reader who likes it.
-Therefore, it’s the mark of good teachers to like students and their writing.
If this set of hypotheses is true, what practical consequences follow from it? How can we
be better at liking? It feels as though we have no choice–as though liking and not-liking just
happen to us. I don’t really understand this business. I’d love to hear discussion about the
mystery of liking–the phenomenology of liking. I sense it’s some kind of putting oneself out–or
holding oneself open–but I can’t see it clearly. I have a hunch, however, that we’re not so
helpless about liking as we tend to feel.
For in fact I can suggest some practical concrete activities that I have found fairly reliable
at increasing the chances of liking student writing:
(a) I ask for lots of private writing and merely shared writing, that is, writing that I don’t
read at all, and writing that I read but don’t comment on. This makes me more cheerful
because it’s so much easier. Students get better without me. Having to evaluate writing–
especially bad writing–makes me more likely to hate it. This throws light on grading: it’s hard
to like something if we know we have to give it a D.
(b) I have students share lots of writing with each other–and after a while respond to
each other. It’s easier to like their writing when I don’t feel myself as the only reader and judge.
14
And so it helps to build community in general: it takes pressure off me. Thus I try to use peer
groups not only for feedback, but for other activities too, such as collaborative writing,
brainstorming, putting class magazines together, and working out other decisions.
(c) I increase the chances of my liking their writing when I get better at finding what is
good–or potentially good–and learn to praise it. This is a skill. It requires a good eye, a good
nose. We tend–especially in the academic world–to assume that a good eye or fine
discrimination means criticizing. Academics are sometimes proud of their tendency to be
bothered by what is bad. Thus I find I am sometimes looked down on as dumb and
undiscriminating: “He likes bad writing. He must have no taste, no discrimination.” But I’ve
finally become angry rather than defensive. It’s an act of discrimination to see what’s good in
bad writing. Maybe, in fact, this is the secret of the mystery of liking: to be able to see
potential goodness underneath badness.
Put it this way. We tend to stereotype liking as a “soft” and sentimental activity. Mr.
Rogers is our model. Fine. There’s nothing wrong with softness and sentiment–and I love Mr.
Rogers. But liking can also be hard-assed. Let me suggest an alternative to Mr. Rogers: B. F.
Skinner. Skinner taught pigeons to play ping-pong. How did he do it? Not by moaning, “Pigeon
standards are falling. The pigeons they send us these days are no good. When I was a pigeon . .
. .” He did it by a careful, disciplined method that involved close analytic observation. He put
pigeons on a ping-pong table with a ball, and every time a pigeon turned his head 30 degrees
toward the ball, he gave a reward (see my “Danger of Softness”).
_What would this approach require in the teaching of writing? It’s very simple . . . but not
easy. Imagine that we want to teach students an ability they badly lack, for example how to
organize their writing or how to make their sentences clearer. Skinner’s insight is that we get
nowhere in this task by just telling them how much they lack this skill: “It’s disorganized.
Organize it!” “It’s unclear. Make it clear!” Notice how much more practical and helpful it is to
move from this kind of advice: “Do something different from what you’re doing here” to this
kind: “Do more of what you’re doing there.”
No, what we must learn to do is to read closely and carefully enough to show the student
little bits of proto-organization or sort of clarity in what they’ve already written. We don’t have
to pretend the writing is wonderful. We could even say, “This is a terrible paper and the worst
part about it is the lack of organization. But I will teach you how to organize. Look here at this
little organizational move you made in this sentence. Read it outloud and try to feel how it
pulls together this stuff here and distinguishes it from that stuff there. Try to remember what it
felt like writing that sentence–creating that piece of organization. Do it some more.”
When academics criticize behaviorism as crude it often means that they aren’t willing to
do the close careful reading of student writing that is required. They’d rather give a cursory
reading and turn up their nose and give a low grade and complain about falling standards. No
one has undermined behaviorism’s main principle of learning: that reward produces learning
more effectively than punishment.
(d) I improve my chances of liking student writing when I take steps to get to know them
a bit as people. I do this partly through the assignments I give. That is, I always ask them to
15
write a letter or two to me and to each other (for example about their history with writing). I
base at least a couple of assignments on their own experiences, memories, or histories. And I
make sure some of the assignments are free choice pieces–which also helps me know them.
In addition, I make sure to have at least three conferences with each _student each
semester–the first one very early. I often call off some class es in order to keep conferences
from being too onerous (insisting nevertheless that students meet with their partner or small
group when class is called off). Some teachers have mini-conferences with students during
class–while students are engaged in writing or peer group meetings. I’ve found that when I
deal only with my classes as a whole–as a large group–I sometimes experience them as a herd
or lump–as stereotyped “adolescents”; I fail to experience them as individuals. For me,
personally, this is disastrous since it often leads me to experience them as that scary tribe that I
felt rejected by when I was an eighteen-year-old–and thus, at times, as “the enemy.” But when
I sit down with them face to face, they are not so stereotyped or alien or threatening–they are
just eighteen-year-olds.
Getting a glimpse of them as individual people is particularly helpful in cases where their
writing is not just bad, but somehow offensive–perhaps violent or cruelly racist or homophobic
or sexist–or frighteningly vacuous. When I know them just a bit I can often see behind their
awful attitude to the person and the life situation that spawned it, and not hate their writing so
much. When I know students I can see that they are smart behind that dumb behavior; they
are doing the best they can behind that bad behavior. Conditions are keeping them from acting
decently; something is holding them back.
(e) It’s odd, but the more I let myself show the easier it is to like them and their writing. I
need to share some of my own writing–show some of my own feelings. I need to write the
letter to them that they write to me–about my past experiences and what I want and don’t
want to happen.
(f) It helps to work on my own writing–and work on learning to like it. Teachers who are
most critical and sour about student writing are often having trouble with their own writing.
They are bitter or unforgiving or hurting toward their own work. (I think I’ve noticed that failed
PhDs are often the most severe and difficult with students.) When we are stuck or sour in our
own writing, what helps us most is to find spaces free from evaluation such as those provided
by freewriting and journal writing. Also, activities like reading out loud and finding a supportive
reader or two. I would insist, then, that if only for the sake of our teaching, we need to learn to
be charitable and to like our own writing.
A final word. I fear that this sermon about liking might seem an invitation to guilt. There
is enough pressure on us as teachers that we don’t need someone coming along and calling us
inadequate if we don’t like our students and their writing. That is, even though I think I am
right to make this foray into the realm of feeling, I also acknowledge that it is dangerous–and
paradoxical. It strikes me that we also need to have permission to hate the dirty bastards and
their stupid writing.
After all, the conditions under which they go to school bring out some awful behavior on
their part, and the conditions under which we teach sometimes make it difficult for us to like
16
them and their writing. Writing wasn’t meant to be read in stacks of twenty-five, fifty, or
seventy-five. And we are handicapped as teachers when students are in our classes against
their will. (Thus high school teachers have the worst problem here, since their students tend to
be the most sour and resentful about school.)
Indeed, one of the best aids to liking students and their writing is to be somewhat
charitable toward ourselves about the opposite feelings that we inevitably have. I used to think
it was terrible for teachers to tell those sarcastic stories and hostile jokes about their students:
“teacher room talk.” But now I’ve come to think that people who spend their lives teaching
need an arena to let off this unhappy steam. And certainly it’s better to vent this sarcasm and
hostility with our buddies than on the students themselves. The question, then, becomes this:
do we help this behavior function as a venting so that we can move past it and not be trapped
in our inevitable resentment of students? Or do we tell these stories and jokes as a way of
staying stuck in the hurt, hostile, or bitter feelings–year after year–as so many sad teachers do?
In short I’m not trying to invite guilt, I’m trying to invite hope. I’m trying to suggest that if
we do a sophisticated analysis of the difference between liking and evaluating, we will see that
it’s possible (if not always easy) to like students and their writing–without having to give up our
intelligence, sophistication, or judgment.
* * *
Let me sum up the points I’m trying to make about ranking, evaluating, and liking:
-Let’s do as little ranking and grading as we can. They are never fair and they undermine
learning and teaching.
-Let’s use evaluation instead–a more careful, more discriminating, fairer mode of
assessment.
-But because evaluating is harder than ranking, and because too much evaluating also
undermines learning, let’s establish small but important evaluation-free zones.
-And underneath it all–suffusing the whole evaluative enterprise–let’s learn to be better
likers: liking our own and our students’ writing, and realizing that liking need not get in
the way of clear-eyed evaluation.
WORKS CITED
Diederich, Paul. Measuring Growth in English. Urbana: NCTE, 1974.
Belanoff, Pat and Peter Elbow. “Using Portfolios to Increase Collaboration and Community in a
Writing Program.” WPA: Journal of Writing Program Administration 9.3 (Spring 1986):
27-40. (Also in Portfolios: Process and Product. Ed. Pat Belanoff and Marcia Dickson.
Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann. 1991.)
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Belanoff, Pat, Peter Elbow and Sheryl Fontaine eds. Nothing Begins with N: New Investigations
of Freewriting. Southern Illinois UP, 1991.
Bishop, Wendy. Something Old, Something New: College Writing Teachers and Classroom
Change. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990.
—. Released into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing. Urbana: NCTE, 1990.
Elbow, Peter. “The Danger of Softness.” What is English. New York: MLA, 1990: 197-210.
Elbow, Peter and Pat Belanoff. “State University of New York: Portfolio-Based Evaluation
Program.” New Methods in College Writing Programs: Theory into Practice. Eds. Paul
Connolly and Teresa Vilardi. New York: MLA, 1986: 95-105. (Also in Portfolios: Process
and Product. Ed. Pat Belanoff and Marcia Dickson. Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook
Heinemann. 1991.)
Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic,
1983.
Kirschenbaum, Howard, Simon Sidney, and Rodney Napier. Wad-Ja-Get? The Grading Game in
American Education. New York: Hart Publishing, 1971.
Lewis, C. S. Studies in Words. London: Cambridge UP, 2nd ed, 1967.
Portfolio Assessment Newsletter. Five Centerpointe Drive, Suite 100, Lake Oswego, Oregon
97035.
Portfolio News. c/o San Dieguito Union High School District, 710 Encinitas Boulevard, Encinitas,
CA 92024.
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.
White, Edward M. Teaching and Assessing Writing. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1985.
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ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst
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Ranking, Evaluating, Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment.
Peter Elbow
Recommended Citation
How to Read Like a Writer
by
Mike Bunn
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71
How to Read Like a Writer
Mike Bunn
In 1997, I was a recent college graduate living in London for six months
and working at the Palace Theatre owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber.*
The Palace was a beautiful red brick, four-story theatre in the heart of
London’s famous West End, and eight times a week it housed a three-
hour performance of the musical Les Miserables. Because of antiquated
fire-safety laws, every theatre in the city was required to have a certain
number of staff members inside watching the performance in case of
an emergency.
My job (in addition to wearing a red tuxedo jacket) was to sit inside
the dark theater with the patrons and make sure nothing went wrong.
It didn’t seem to matter to my supervisor that I had no training in se-
curity and no idea where we kept the fire extinguishers. I was pretty
sure that if there was any trouble I’d be running down the back stairs,
leaving the patrons to fend for themselves. I had no intention of dying
in a bright red tuxedo.
There was a Red Coat stationed on each of the theater’s four floors,
and we all passed the time by sitting quietly in the back, reading books
with tiny flashlights. It’s not easy trying to read in the dim light of
a theatre—flashlight or no flashlight—and it’s even tougher with
shrieks and shouts and gunshots coming from the stage. I had to focus
intently on each and every word, often rereading a single sentence sev-
eral times. Sometimes I got distracted and had to re-read entire para-
* This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License and is subject to the
Writing Spaces’ Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105,
USA. To view the Writing Spaces’ Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces.
org/terms-of-use.
Mike Bunn72
graphs. As I struggled to read in this environment, I began to realize
that the way I was reading—one word at a time—was exactly the
same way that the author had written the text. I realized writing is a
word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence process. The intense concentra-
tion required to read in the theater helped me recognize some of the
interesting ways that authors string words into phrases into paragraphs
into entire books.
I came to realize that all writing consists of a series of choices.
I was an English major in college, but I don’t think I ever thought
much about reading. I read all the time. I read for my classes and
on the computer and sometimes for fun, but I never really thought
about the important connections between reading and writing, and
how reading in a particular way could also make me a better writer.
What Does It Mean to Read Like a Writer?
When you Read Like a Writer (RLW) you work to identify some of
the choices the author made so that you can better understand how
such choices might arise in your own writing. The idea is to carefully
examine the things you read, looking at the writerly techniques in the
text in order to decide if you might want to adopt similar (or the same)
techniques in your writing.
You are reading to learn about writing.
Instead of reading for content or to better understand the ideas in
the writing (which you will automatically do to some degree anyway),
you are trying to understand how the piece of writing was put together
by the author and what you can learn about writing by reading a par-
ticular text. As you read in this way, you think about how the choices
the author made and the techniques that he/she used are influencing
your own responses as a reader. What is it about the way this text is
written that makes you feel and respond the way you do?
The goal as you read like a writer is to locate what you believe are
the most important writerly choices represented in the text—choices
as large as the overall structure or as small as a single word used only
once—to consider the effect of those choices on potential readers (in-
cluding yourself ). Then you can go one step further and imagine what
different choices the author might have made instead, and what effect
those different choices would have on readers.
How to Read Like a Writer 73
Say you’re reading an essay in class that begins with a short quote
from President Barack Obama about the war in Iraq. As a writer, what
do you think of this technique? Do you think it is effective to begin the
essay with a quote? What if the essay began with a quote from someone
else? What if it was a much longer quote from President Obama, or a
quote from the President about something other than the war?
And here is where we get to the most important part: Would you
want to try this technique in your own
writing?
Would you want to start your own essay with a quote? Do you
think it would be effective to begin your essay with a quote from Presi-
dent Obama? What about a quote from someone else?
You could make yourself a list. What are the advantages and dis-
advantages of starting with a quote? What about the advantages and
disadvantages of starting with a quote from the President? How would
other readers respond to this technique? Would certain readers (say
Democrats or liberals) appreciate an essay that started with a quote
from President Obama better than other readers (say Republicans or
conservatives)? What would be the advantages and disadvantages of
starting with a quote from a less divisive person? What about starting
with a quote from someone more divisive?
The goal is to carefully consider the choices the author made and
the techniques that he or she used, and then decide whether you want
to make those same choices or use those same techniques in your own
writing. Author and professor Wendy Bishop explains how her reading
process changed when she began to read like a writer:
It wasn’t until I claimed the sentence as my area of desire,
interest, and expertise—until I wanted to be a writer writing
better—that I had to look underneath my initial readings .
. . I started asking, how—how did the writer get me to feel,
how did the writer say something so that it remains in my
memory when many other things too easily fall out, how did
the writer communicate his/her intentions about genre, about
irony? (119–20)
Bishop moved from simply reporting her personal reactions to the
things she read to attempting to uncover how the author led her (and
other readers) to have those reactions. This effort to uncover how au-
thors build texts is what makes Reading Like a Writer so useful for
student writers.
Mike Bunn74
How Is RLW Different from “Normal” Reading?
Most of the time we read for information. We read a recipe to learn
how to bake lasagna. We read the sports page to see if our school won
the game, Facebook to see who has commented on our status update,
a history book to learn about the Vietnam War, and the syllabus to see
when the next writing assignment is due. Reading Like a Writer asks
for something very different.
In 1940, a famous poet and critic named Allen Tate discussed two
different ways of reading:
There are many ways to read, but generally speaking there are
two ways. They correspond to the two ways in which we may
be interested in a piece of architecture. If the building has Co-
rinthian columns, we can trace the origin and development of
Corinthian columns; we are interested as historians. But if we
are interested as architects, we may or may not know about
the history of the Corinthian style; we must, however, know
all about the construction of the building, down to the last
nail or peg in the beams. We have got to know this if we are
going to put up buildings ourselves. (506)
While I don’t know anything about Corinthian columns (and doubt
that I will ever want to know anything about Corinthian columns),
Allen Tate’s metaphor of reading as if you were an architect is a great
way to think about RLW. When you read like a writer, you are trying
to figure out how the text you are reading was constructed so that you
learn how to “build” one for yourself. Author David Jauss makes a
similar comparison when he writes that “reading won’t help you much
unless you learn to read like a writer. You must look at a book the way
a carpenter looks at a house someone else built, examining the details
in order to see how it was made” (64).
Perhaps I should change the name and call this Reading Like an
Architect, or Reading Like a Carpenter. In a way those names make
perfect sense. You are reading to see how something was constructed
so that you can construct something similar yourself.
How to Read Like a Writer 75
Why Learn to Read Like a Writer?
For most college students RLW is a new way to read, and it can be dif-
ficult to learn at first. Making things even more difficult is that your
college writing instructor may expect you to read this way for class but
never actually teach you how to do it. He or she may not even tell you
that you’re supposed to read this way. This is because most writing
instructors are so focused on teaching writing that they forget to show
students how they want them to read.
That’s what this essay is for.
In addition to the fact that your college writing instructor may
expect you to read like a writer, this kind of reading is also one of the
very best ways to learn how to write well. Reading like a writer can
help you understand how the process of writing is a series of making
choices, and in doing so, can help you recognize important decisions
you might face and techniques you might want to use when working
on your own writing. Reading this way becomes an opportunity to
think and learn about writing.
Charles Moran, a professor of English at the University of Massa-
chusetts, urges us to read like writers because:
When we read like writers we understand and participate in
the writing. We see the choices the writer has made, and we
see how the writer has coped with the consequences of those
choices . . . We “see” what the writer is doing because we read
as writers; we see because we have written ourselves and know
the territory, know the feel of it, know some of the moves our-
selves. (61)
You are already an author, and that means you have a built-in advan-
tage when reading like a writer. All of your previous writing experi-
ences—inside the classroom and out—can contribute to your success
with RLW. Because you “have written” things yourself, just as Moran
suggests, you are better able to “see” the choices that the author is
making in the texts that you read. This in turn helps you to think
about whether you want to make some of those same choices in your
own writing, and what the consequences might be for your readers if
you do.
Mike Bunn76
What Are Some Questions to Ask
Before You Start Reading?
As I sat down to work on this essay, I contacted a few of my former stu-
dents to ask what advice they would give to college students regarding
how to read effectively in the writing classroom and also to get their
thoughts on RLW. Throughout the rest of the essay I’d like to share
some of their insights and suggestions; after all, who is better qualified
to help you learn what you need to know about reading in college writ-
ing courses than students who recently took those courses themselves?
One of the things that several students mentioned to do first, be-
fore you even start reading, is to consider the context surrounding both
the assignment and the text you’re reading. As one former student,
Alison, states: “The reading I did in college asked me to go above and
beyond, not only in breadth of subject matter, but in depth, with re-
gards to informed analysis and background information on context.”
Alison was asked to think about some of the factors that went into the
creation of the text, as well as some of the factors influencing her own
experience of reading—taken together these constitute the context of
reading. Another former student, Jamie, suggests that students “learn
about the historical context of the writings” they will read for class.
Writing professor Richard Straub puts it this way: “You’re not going to
just read a text. You’re going to read a text within a certain context, a
set of circumstances . . . It’s one kind of writing or another, designed
for one audience and purpose or another” (138).
Among the contextual factors you’ll want to consider before you
even start reading are:
• Do you know the author’s purpose for this piece of writing?
• Do you know who the intended audience is for this piece of
writing?
It may be that you need to start reading before you can answer these
first two questions, but it’s worth trying to answer them before you
start. For example, if you know at the outset that the author is try-
ing to reach a very specific group of readers, then his or her writerly
techniques may seem more or less effective than if he/she was trying
to reach a more general audience. Similarly—returning to our earlier
example of beginning an essay with a quote from President Obama
How to Read Like a Writer 77
about the war in Iraq—if you know that the author’s purpose is to
address some of the dangers and drawbacks of warfare, this may be
a very effective opening. If the purpose is to encourage Americans to
wear sunscreen while at the beach this opening makes no sense at all.
One former student, Lola, explained that most of her reading assign-
ments in college writing classes were designed “to provoke analysis and
criticisms into the style, structure, and purpose of the writing itself.”
In What Genre Is This Written?
Another important thing to consider before reading is the genre of the
text. Genre means a few different things in college English classes, but
it’s most often used to indicate the type of writing: a poem, a newspa-
per article, an essay, a short story, a novel, a legal brief, an instruction
manual, etc. Because the conventions for each genre can be very differ-
ent (who ever heard of a 900-page newspaper article?), techniques that
are effective for one genre may not work well in another. Many readers
expect poems and pop songs to rhyme, for example, but might react
negatively to a legal brief or instruction manual that did so.
Another former student, Mike, comments on how important the
genre of the text can be for reading:
I think a lot of the way I read, of course, depends on the type
of text I’m reading. If I’m reading philosophy, I always look
for signaling words (however, therefore, furthermore, despite)
indicating the direction of the argument . . . when I read fic-
tion or creative nonfiction, I look for how the author inserts
dialogue or character sketches within narration or environ-
mental observation. After reading To the Lighthouse [sic] last
semester, I have noticed how much more attentive I’ve become
to the types of narration (omniscient, impersonal, psychologi-
cal, realistic, etc.), and how these different approaches are uti-
lized to achieve an author’s overall effect.
Although Mike specifically mentions what he looked for while reading
a published novel, one of the great things about RLW is that it can be
used equally well with either published or student-produced writing.
Is This a Published or a Student-Produced Piece of Writing?
As you read both kinds of texts you can locate the choices the author
made and imagine the different decisions that he/she might have made.
Mike Bunn78
While it might seem a little weird at first to imagine how published
texts could be written differently—after all, they were good enough
to be published—remember that all writing can be improved. Scholar
Nancy Walker believes that it’s important for students to read pub-
lished work using RLW because “the work ceases to be a mere artifact,
a stone tablet, and becomes instead a living utterance with immediacy
and texture. It could have been better or worse than it is had the author
made different choices” (36). As Walker suggests, it’s worth thinking
about how the published text would be different—maybe even bet-
ter—if the author had made different choices in the writing because
you may be faced with similar choices in your own work.
Is This the Kind of Writing You Will Be
Assigned to Write Yourself?
Knowing ahead of time what kind of writing assignments you will be
asked to complete can really help you to read like a writer. It’s prob-
ably impossible (and definitely too time consuming) to identify all of
the choices the author made and all techniques an author used, so it’s
important to prioritize while reading. Knowing what you’ll be writing
yourself can help you prioritize. It may be the case that your instruc-
tor has assigned the text you’re reading to serve as model for the kind
of writing you’ll be doing later. Jessie, a former student, writes, “In
college writing classes, we knew we were reading for a purpose—to
influence or inspire our own work. The reading that I have done in
college writing courses has always been really specific to a certain type
of writing, and it allows me to focus and experiment on that specific
style in depth and without distraction.”
If the text you’re reading is a model of a particular style of writ-
ing—for example, highly-emotional or humorous—RLW is particu-
larly helpful because you can look at a piece you’re reading and think
about whether you want to adopt a similar style in your own writing.
You might realize that the author is trying to arouse sympathy in read-
ers and examine what techniques he/she uses to do this; then you can
decide whether these techniques might work well in your own writing.
You might notice that the author keeps including jokes or funny sto-
ries and think about whether you want to include them in your writ-
ing—what would the impact be on your potential readers?
How to Read Like a Writer 79
What Are Questions to Ask As You Are Reading?
It is helpful to continue to ask yourself questions as you read like a
writer. As you’re first learning to read in this new way, you may want
to have a set of questions written or typed out in front of you that you
can refer to while reading. Eventually—after plenty of practice—you
will start to ask certain questions and locate certain things in the text
almost automatically. Remember, for most students this is a new way
of reading, and you’ll have to train yourself to do it well. Also keep in
mind that you’re reading to understand how the text was written—
how the house was built—more than you’re trying to determine the
meaning of the things you read or assess whether the texts are good
or bad.
First, return to two of the same questions I suggested that you
consider before reading:
• What is the author’s purpose for this piece of writing?
• Who is the intended audience?
Think about these two questions again as you read. It may be that
you couldn’t really answer them before, or that your ideas will change
while reading. Knowing why the piece was written and who it’s for can
help explain why the author might have made certain choices or used
particular techniques in the writing, and you can assess those choices
and techniques based in part on how effective they are in fulfilling
that purpose and/or reaching the intended audience.
Beyond these initial two questions, there is an almost endless list
of questions you might ask regarding writing choices and techniques.
Here are some of the questions that one former student, Clare, asks
herself:
When reading I tend to be asking myself a million questions.
If I were writing this, where would I go with the story? If the
author goes in a different direction (as they so often do) from
what I am thinking, I will ask myself, why did they do this?
What are they telling me?
Clare tries to figure out why the author might have made a move in
the writing that she hadn’t anticipated, but even more importantly,
she asks herself what she would do if she were the author. Reading the
Mike Bunn80
text becomes an opportunity for Clare to think about her own role as
an author.
Here are some additional examples of the kinds of questions you
might ask yourself as you read:
• How effective is the language the author uses? Is it too formal?
Too informal? Perfectly appropriate?
Depending on the subject matter and the intended audience, it may
make sense to be more or less formal in terms of language. As you
begin reading, you can ask yourself whether the word choice and tone/
language of the writing seem appropriate.
• What kinds of evidence does the author use to support his/her
claims? Does he/she use statistics? Quotes from famous people?
Personal anecdotes or personal stories? Does he/she cite books
or articles?
• How appropriate or effective is this evidence? Would a dif-
ferent type of evidence, or some combination of evidence, be
more effective?
To some extent the kinds of questions you ask should be deter-
mined by the genre of writing you are reading. For example, it’s prob-
ably worth examining the evidence that the author uses to support his/
her claims if you’re reading an opinion column, but less important if
you’re reading a short story. An opinion column is often intended to
convince readers of something, so the kinds of evidence used are often
very important. A short story may be intended to convince readers of
something, sometimes, but probably not in the same way. A short story
rarely includes claims or evidence in the way that we usually think
about them.
• Are there places in the writing that you find confusing? What
about the writing in those places makes it unclear or confusing?
It’s pretty normal to get confused in places while reading, especially
while reading for class, so it can be helpful to look closely at the writ-
ing to try and get a sense of exactly what tripped you up. This way you
can learn to avoid those same problems in your own writing.
How to Read Like a Writer 81
• How does the author move from one idea to another in the
writing? Are the transitions between the ideas effective? How
else might he/she have transitioned between ideas instead?
Notice that in these questions I am encouraging you to question
whether aspects of the writing are appropriate and effective in addition
to deciding whether you liked or disliked them. You want to imagine
how other readers might respond to the writing and the techniques
you’ve identified. Deciding whether you liked or disliked something
is only about you; considering whether a technique is appropriate or
effective lets you contemplate what the author might have been trying
to do and to decide whether a majority of readers would find the move
successful. This is important because it’s the same thing you should
be thinking about while you are writing: how will readers respond to
this technique I am using, to this sentence, to this word? As you read,
ask yourself what the author is doing at each step of the way, and then
consider whether the same choice or technique might work in your
own writing.
What Should You Be Writing As You Are Reading?
The most common suggestion made by former students—mentioned
by every single one of them—was to mark up the text, make com-
ments in the margins, and write yourself notes and summaries both
during and after reading. Often the notes students took while reading
became ideas or material for the students to use in their own papers.
It’s important to read with a pen or highlighter in your hand so that
you can mark—right on the text—all those spots where you identify
an interesting choice the author has made or a writerly technique you
might want to use. One thing that I like to do is to highlight and
underline the passage in the text itself, and then try to answer the fol-
lowing three questions on my notepad:
• What is the technique the author is using here?
• Is this technique effective?
• What would be the advantages and disadvantages if I tried this
same technique in my writing?
Mike Bunn82
By utilizing this same process of highlighting and note taking, you’ll
end up with a useful list of specific techniques to have at your disposal
when it comes time to begin your own writing.
What Does RLW Look Like in Action?
Let’s go back to the opening paragraph of this essay and spend some
time reading like writers as a way to get more comfortable with the
process:
In 1997, I was a recent college graduate living in London for six
months and working at the Palace Theatre owned by Andrew
Lloyd Webber. The Palace was a beautiful red brick, four-story
theatre in the heart of London’s famous West End, and eight times
a week it housed a three-hour performance of the musical Les
Miserables. Because of antiquated fire-safety laws, every theatre
in the city was required to have a certain number of staff members
inside watching the performance in case of an emergency.
Let’s begin with those questions I encouraged you to try to answer
before you start reading. (I realize we’re cheating a little bit in this case
since you’ve already read most of this essay, but this is just practice.
When doing this on your own, you should attempt to answer these
questions before reading, and then return to them as you read to fur-
ther develop your answers.)
• Do you know the author’s purpose for this piece of writing? I
hope the purpose is clear by now; if it isn’t, I’m doing a pretty
lousy job of explaining how and why you might read like a
writer.
• Do you know who the intended audience is? Again, I hope that
you know this one by now.
• What about the genre? Is this an essay? An article? What would
you call it?
• You know that it’s published and not student writing. How
does this influence your expectations for what you will read?
• Are you going to be asked to write something like this yourself?
Probably not in your college writing class, but you can still use
RLW to learn about writerly techniques that you might want
to use in whatever you do end up writing.
How to Read Like a Writer 83
Now ask yourself questions as you read.
In 1997, I was a recent college graduate living in London for six
months and working at the Palace Theatre owned by Andrew
Lloyd Webber. The Palace was a beautiful red brick, four-sto-
ry theatre in the heart of London’s famous West End, and eight
times a week it housed a three-hour performance of the musi-
cal Les Miserables. Because of antiquated fire-safety laws, every
theatre in the city was required to have a certain number of staff
members inside watching the performance in case of an emer-
gency.
Since this paragraph is the very first one, it makes sense to think about
how it introduces readers to the essay. What technique(s) does the au-
thor use to begin the text? This is a personal story about his time work-
ing in London. What else do you notice as you read over this passage?
Is the passage vague or specific about where he worked? You know that
the author worked in a famous part of London in a beautiful theater
owned by a well-known composer. Are these details important? How
different would this opening be if instead I had written:
In 1997, I was living in London and working at a theatre that
showed Les Miserables.
This is certainly shorter, and some of you may prefer this version. It’s
quick. To the point. But what (if anything) is lost by eliminating so
much of the detail? I chose to include each of the details that the re-
vised sentence omits, so it’s worth considering why. Why did I men-
tion where the theater was located? Why did I explain that I was living
in London right after finishing college? Does it matter that it was after
college? What effect might I have hoped the inclusion of these details
would have on readers? Is this reference to college an attempt to con-
nect with my audience of college students? Am I trying to establish my
credibility as an author by announcing that I went to college? Why
might I want the readers to know that this was a theater owned by
Andrew Lloyd Weber? Do you think I am just trying to mention a
famous name that readers will recognize? Will Andrew Lloyd Weber
figure prominently in the rest of the essay?
These are all reasonable questions to ask. They are not necessarily
the right questions to ask because there are no right questions. They
Mike Bunn84
certainly aren’t the only questions you could ask, either. The goal is to
train yourself to formulate questions as you read based on whatever
you notice in the text. Your own reactions to what you’re reading will
help determine the kinds of questions to ask.
Now take a broader perspective. I begin this essay—an essay about
reading—by talking about my job in a theater in London. Why?
Doesn’t this seem like an odd way to begin an essay about reading?
If you read on a little further (feel free to scan back up at the top of
this essay) you learn in the third full paragraph what the connection
is between working in the theater and reading like a writer, but why
include this information at all? What does this story add to the essay?
Is it worth the space it takes up?
Think about what effect presenting this personal information
might have on readers. Does it make it feel like a real person, some
“ordinary guy,” is talking to you? Does it draw you into the essay and
make you want to keep reading?
What about the language I use? Is it formal or more informal? This
is a time when you can really narrow your focus and look at particular
words:
Because of antiquated fire-safety laws, every theatre in the city
was required to have a certain number of staff members inside
watching the performance in case of an emergency.
What is the effect of using the word “antiquated” to describe the fire-
safety laws? It certainly projects a negative impression; if the laws are
described as antiquated it means I view them as old-fashioned or obso-
lete. This is a fairly uncommon word, so it stands out, drawing atten-
tion to my choice in using it. The word also sounds quite formal. Am
I formal in the rest of this sentence?
I use the word “performance” when I just as easily could have writ-
ten “show.” For that matter, I could have written “old” instead of “an-
tiquated.” You can proceed like this throughout the sentence, thinking
about alternative choices I could have made and what the effect would
be. Instead of “staff members” I could have written “employees” or just
“workers.” Notice the difference if the sentence had been written:
Because of old fire-safety laws, every theatre in the city was re-
quired to have a certain number of workers inside watching the
show in case of an emergency.
How to Read Like a Writer 85
Which version is more likely to appeal to readers? You can try to an-
swer this question by thinking about the advantages and disadvan-
tages of using formal language. When would you want to use formal
language in your writing and when would it make more sense to be
more conversational?
As you can see from discussing just this one paragraph, you could
ask questions about the text forever. Luckily, you don’t have to. As
you continue reading like a writer, you’ll learn to notice techniques
that seem new and pay less attention to the ones you’ve thought about
before. The more you practice the quicker the process becomes until
you’re reading like a writer almost automatically.
I want to end this essay by sharing one more set of comments by
my former student, Lola, this time about what it means to her to read
like a writer:
Reading as a writer would compel me to question what might
have brought the author to make these decisions, and then de-
cide what worked and what didn’t. What could have made that
chapter better or easier to understand? How can I make sure
I include some of the good attributes of this writing style into
my own? How can I take aspects that I feel the writer failed at
and make sure not to make the same mistakes in my writing?
Questioning why the author made certain decisions. Considering what
techniques could have made the text better. Deciding how to include
the best attributes of what you read in your own writing. This is what
Reading Like a Writer is all about.
Are you ready to start reading?
Discussion
1. How is “Reading Like a Writer” similar to and/or different
from the way(s) you read for other classes?
2. What kinds of choices do you make as a writer that readers
might identify in your written work?
3. Is there anything you notice in this essay that you might like
to try in your own writing? What is that technique or strategy?
When do you plan to try using it?
4. What are some of the different ways that you can learn about
the context of a text before you begin reading it?
Mike Bunn86
Works Cited
Bishop, Wendy. “Reading, Stealing, and Writing Like a Writer.” Elements of
Alternate Style: Essays on Writing and Revision. Ed. Wendy Bishop. Ports-
mouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997. Print.
Jauss, David. “Articles of Faith.” Creative Writing in America: Theory and
Pedagogy. Ed. Joseph Moxley. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1989. Print.
Moran, Charles. “Reading Like a Writer.” Vital Signs 1. Ed. James L. Collins.
Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1990. Print.
Straub, Richard. “Responding—Really Responding—to Other Students’
Writing.” The Subject is Reading. Ed. Wendy Bishop. Portsmouth, NH:
Boynton/Cook, 2000. Print.
Tate, Allen. “We Read as Writers.” Princeton Alumni Weekly 40 (March 8,
1940): 505- 506. Print.
Walker, Nancy. “The Student Reader as Writer.” ADE Bulletin 106 (1993)
35–37. Print.
Chapter 6
•
•
Learning Objectives
In this chapter, you will learn to:
6.1 Explain the differences between one-sided, multisided, and
delayed-thesis arguments.
6.2 Determine the degree of your audience’s resistance to your
views in order to shape the content, structure, and tone of your
argument.
6.3 Use one-sided argument to appeal to supportive
audiences.
6.4 Use classical argument to appeal to neutral or undecided audi-
ences,
using refutation and concession.
6.5 Consider using delayed- thesis argument to appeal to resistant
audiences.
Chapter 5 discussed strategies for moving your audience through appeals to ethos,
pathos, and kairos. In this chapter we examine strategies for addressing opposing
or alternative views whether to omit them, refute them, concede to them, or
incorporate them through compromise and conciliation.
83
84 Chapter 6
One-Sided, Multisided, and
Delayed-Thesis Arguments
6.1 Explain the differences between one-sided, multisided,
and delayed-thesis arguments.
Arguments can be one-sided, multisided, or delayed thesis:
• A one-sided argument presents only the writer’s position on the issue with-
out summarizing and responding to alternative viewpoints.
• A multisided argument presents the writer’s position, but it also summa-
rizes and responds to possible objections and alternative views.
• A delayed thesis argument has a strong component of inquiry in which
writers present themselves as uncertain and invite resistant readers to become
partners in the dialogue. By keeping the question open (and not presenting
the writer’s own view until later), the writer considers and values multiple
perspectives. However, if an issue is heatedly contested, it may be fruitful
to move beyond argument altogether and to use instead the listening and
negotiating strategies of collaborative rhetoric explained in Chapter 10.
One-sided and multisided arguments often take an adversarial stance in that
writers regard alternative views as flawed or wrong and support their own claims
with a strongly persuasive intent. Although multisided arguments can be adver-
sarial, they can also be made to feel conciliatory and dialogic, depending on the
way the writer introduces and responds to alternative views.
At issue, then, is the writer’s treatment of alternative views. Does the writer
omit them (a one-sided argument), summarize them in order to rebut them
(an adversarial kind of multisided argument), or summarize them in order to
acknowledge their validity, value, and force (a more dialogic kind of multisided
argument)? Each of these approaches can be appropriate for certain occasions,
depending on your purpose, your confidence in your own stance, and your audi-
ence’s resistance to your views.
How can you determine the kind of argument that would be most effective
in a given case? As a general rule, if an issue is highly contested, one-sided argu-
ments tend to strengthen the convictions of those who are already in the writer’s
camp but alienate those who aren’t. In contrast, for those initially opposed to a
writer’s claim, a multisided argument shows that the writer has considered other
views and thus reduces some initial hostility.
An especially interesting effect can occur with neutral or undecided audi-
ences. In the short run, one-sided arguments are often persuasive to a neutral
audience, but in the long run, multisided arguments have more staying power.
Neutral audiences who have heard only one side of an issue tend to change
their minds when they hear alternative arguments. By anticipating and rebut-
ting opposing views, a multisided argument diminishes the surprise and force
of subsequent counterarguments. If we move from neutral to highly resistant
audiences, adversarial approaches even multisided ones are seldom effective
because they increase hostility and harden the differences between writer and
reader. In such cases, a delayed thesis argument can be helpful. When conflict
is emotionly heated, we may even choose to turn from argument to collabortive
Responding to Objections and Alternative Views 8
5
rhetoric, where we simply listen to those with whom we disagree in an effort
to open up channels of communication and consensual problem-solving. These
collaborative, dialogic approaches have the best chance of establishing common
ground for inquiry and consensus (see Chapter 10).
In the rest of this chapter we will show you how your choice of writing
one-sided, multisided, or delayed-thesis arguments is a function of how you
perceive your audience’s resistance to your views, your level of confidence in
your own views, and your purpose to persuade your audience or open up
dialogue.
Determining Your Audience’s
Resistance to Your Views
6.2 Determine the degree of your audience’s resistance to your views in
order to shape the content, structure, and tone of your argument.
When you write an argument, you must always consider your audience’s point
of view. One way to imagine your relationship to your audience is to place it on a
scale of resistance ranging from strong support of your position to strong opposi-
tion (Figure 6.1). At the “Accord” end of this scale are like-minded people who
basically agree with your position on the issue. At the “Resistance” end are those
who strongly disagree with you, perhaps unconditionally, because their values,
beliefs, or assumptions sharply differ from your own. Between” Accord” and
“Resistance” lies a range of opinions. Close to your position will be those leaning in
your direction but with less conviction than you have. Close to the resistance posi-
tion will be those basically opposed to your view but willing to listen to your argu-
ment and perhaps willing to acknowledge some of its strengths. In the middle are
those undecided people who are still sorting out their feelings, seeking additional
information, and weighing the strengths and weaknesses of alternative views.
Seldom, however, will you encounter an issue in which the range of disagree-
ment follows a simple line from accord to resistance. Often, resistant views fall
into different categories so that no single line of argument appeals to all those
whose views are different from your own. You thus have to identify not only your
audience’s resistance to your ideas but also the causes of that resistance.
Consider, for example, the issues surrounding publicly financed sports sta-
diums. In one city, a ballot initiative asked citizens to agree to an increase in sales
taxes to build a new re-tractable-roof stadium for its baseball team. Supporters
of the initiative faced a complex array of resisting views (Figure 6.2). Opponents
of the initiative could be placed into four categories. Some simply had no interest
Figure 6.1 Scale of res istance
Accord
Undecided/Neutral
strongly supportive supportive with conditions uncertain mostly opposed
Resistance
strongly opposed
86 Chapter 6
Figure 6.2 Scale of resistance, baseball stadium issue
Accord
strong support
for publicly funded
stadium
Undecided/Neutral
uninformed or uncertain
Resistance
opposition I [no interest in sports]
opposition 2 [opposed to public funding of sports]
opposition 3 [opposed to raising taxes]
opposition 4 [opposed to retractable roof]
in sports, cared nothing about baseball, and saw no benefit in building a huge,
publicly financed sports facility. Another group loved baseball and followed the
home team passionately, but was philosophically opposed to subsidizing rich
players and owners with taxpayer money. This group argued that the whole
sports industry needed to be restructured so that stadiums were paid for out of
sports revenues. Still another group was opposed to tax hikes in general. That
group focused on two principles: (1) reducing the size of government and (2)
using tax revenues only for essential services. Finally, another powerful group
supported baseball and supported the notion of public funding of a new stadium
but opposed the kind of retractable-roof stadium specified in the initiative. This
group wanted an old-fashioned, open-air stadium like Baltimore’s Camden Yards
or Cleveland’s Progressive Field.
Writers supporting the initiative found it impossible to address all of these
resisting audiences at once. If supporters of the initiative wanted to persuade
those uninterested in sports, they could stress the spinoff benefits of a new ball-
park (for example, the new ballpark would attract tourist revenue, renovate a
deteriorating downtown neighborhood, create jobs, make sports lovers more
likely to vote for public subsidies of the arts, and so forth). But these arguments
would be irrelevant to those who wanted an open-air stadium, who opposed tax
hikes categorically, or who objected to public subsidies for millionaires.
The baseball stadium example illustrates the difficulty of adapting your
argument to your audience’s position on the scale of resistance. Still, doing so is
important because you need a stable vision of your audience before you can create
audience-based reasons that appeal to your audience’s values, assumptions, and
beliefs. In the next sections, we show how you can adjust your arguing strategy
depending on whether your audience is supportive, neutral, or hostile.
Appealing to a Supportive Audience:
One-Sided Argument
6.3 Use one-sided argument to appeal to supportive audiences.
One-sided arguments may occur early in an argumentative conversation when
a writer’s aim is merely to put forth a new or different point of view. When an
issue is highly contested, however, or when the targeted audience is indifferent,
one-sided arguments are used mainly to stir the passions of supporters or to
Responding to Objections and Alternative Views 87
inspire the apathetic for example, to convert belief into action by inspiring a
party member to contribute to a senator’s campaign or a bored office worker to
sign up for a change-your-life weekend seminar.
Typically, appeals to a supportive audience are structured as one-sided argu-
ments that either ignore opposing views or reduce them to “enemy” stereotypes.
Filled with motivational language, these arguments list the benefits that will fol-
low from the reader’s donations to the cause and the horrors just around the cor-
ner if the other side wins. One of the authors of this text received a fund-raising
letter from an environmental lobbying group declaring, “It’s crunch time for the
polluters and their pals on Capitol Hill.” The “corporate polluters” and “anti-
environment politicians,” the letter continues, have “stepped up efforts to roll back
our environmental protections relying on large campaign contributions, slick PR
firms, and well-heeled lobbyists to get the job done before November’s election.”
This letter makes the reader feel like part of an in-group of good guys fighting the
big business “polluters.” Nothing in the letter examines environmental issues from
business’s perspective or attempts to examine alternative views fairly. Because the
intended audience already believes in the cause, nothing in the letter invites read-
ers to consider the issues more thoroughly. Rather, the letter’s goal is to solidify
support, increase the fervor of belief, and inspire action. Most appeal arguments
make it easy to act, ending with an 800 phone number to call, a website to visit, an
online petition to sign, or a congressperson’s address to write to.
Appealing to a Neutral or Undecided
Audience: Classical Argument
6.4 Use classical argument to appeal to neutral or undecided audiences,
using refutation and concession.
The in-group appeals that motivate an already supportive audience can repel
a neutral or undecided audience. Because undecided audiences are like jurors
weighing all sides of an issue, they distrust one-sided arguments that caricature
other views. Generally the best strategy for appealing to undecided audiences is
the classically structured argument described in Chapter 2.
What characterizes the classical argument is the writer’s willingness to sum-
marize opposing views fairly and to respond to them openly either by trying
to refute them or by conceding to their strengths and then shifting to a different
field of values. Let’s look at these strategies in more depth.
Sum.m.arizing Opposing Views
The first step toward responding to opposing views in a classical argument is to
summarize them fairly. Follow the principle of charity, which obliges you to avoid
loaded, biased, or “straw man” summaries that oversimplify or distort opposing
arguments, making them easy to knock over.
Consider the difference between an unfair and a fair summary of an argument.
In the following example, a hypothetical supporter of genetically engineered
foods intends to refute the argument of organic-food advocate Lisa Turner, who
opposes all forms of biotechnology.
88 Chapter 6
UN
FAIR SUMMARY OF TURNER’S ARGUMENT
In a biased article lacking scientific understanding of biotechnology, natural-
foods huckster Lisa Turner parrots the health food industry’s party line that
genetically altered crops are Frankenstein’s monsters run amok. She ignorantly
claims that consumption of biotech foods will lead to worldwide destruction,
disease, and death, ignoring the wealth of scientific literature showing that geneti-
cally modified foods are safe. Her misinformed attacks are scare tactics aimed
at selling consumers on overpriced “health food” products to be purchased at
boutique organic-food stores.
FAIR SUMMARY OF TURNER’S ARGUMENT
In an article appearing in a nutrition magazine, health-food advocate Lisa
Turner warns readers that much of our food today is genetically modified using
gene-level techniques that differ completely from ordinary crossbreeding. She
argues that the potential, unforeseen, harmful consequences of genetic engineering
offset the possible benefits of increasing the food supply, reducing the use of
pesticides, and boosting the nutritional value of foods. Turner asserts that genetic
engineering is imprecise, untested, unpredictable, irreversible, and also uncontrol-
lable because of animals, insects, and winds.
In the unfair summary, the writer distorts and oversimplifies Turner’s argu-
ment, creating a straw man argument that is easy to knock over because it doesn’t
make the opponent’s best case. In contrast, the fair summary follows the principle
of charity, allowing the strength of the opposing view to come through clearly.
For Writing and Discussion
Distinguishing Fair from Unfair Summaries
Individual task:
Use the following questions to analyze the d ifferences between the two summaries of Lisa Turner’s article.
1. What makes the first summary unfair? Explain.
2. In the unfair summary, what strategies does the writer use to make the opposing view seem weak and
flawed? In the fair summary, how is the opposing view made strong and clear?
3. In the unfair summary, how does the writer attack Turner’s motives and credentials? This attack is
sometimes called an ad hominem argument (“against the person” -see the Appendix for a definition
of this reasoning fallacy) because it attacks the arguer rather than the argument. How does the writer
treat Turner differently in the fair summary?
4. Do you agree with our view that arguments are more persuasive if the writer summarizes opposing
views fairly rather than unfairly? Why or why not?
Group task:
As a group, write a fair and an unfair summary of an argument that your instructor gives you, using the strat-
egies you analyzed in the Turner examples.
Respond ing to Objections and Alternative Views 89
Refuting Opposing Views
Once you have summarized opposing views, you can either refute them or con-
cede to their strengths. In refuting an opposing v iew, you attempt to convince
readers that its argument is logically flawed, inadequately supported, or based
on erroneous assumptions. In refuting an argument, you can rebut (1) the writer’s
stated reason and grounds, (2) the writer’s warrant and backing, or (3) both. Put
in less specialized language, you can rebut a writer’s reasons and evidence or the
writer’s underlying assumptions. Suppose, for example, that you wanted to refute
this hypothetical argument from a writer we’ll call Jason Jones:
Students should limit the number of internships they take because internships
are time-consuming.
We can clarify th e structure of this argument by showing it in Toulm in terms:
ENTHYMEME
CLAIM: Students should limit th e numb er of
internships they take
REASON: because internships are
time-consuming.
WARRANT
Time-consu ming in ternships are bad for students.
One way to refute this argument is to rebut the stated reason that internship s are
time-consuming. Your rebuttal might go something like this:
I disagree with Jones’ argument that internships are time-consuming. In fact,
organizations and businesses are usually very upfront, realistic, and flexible in the
weekly hours that they ask of students. The examp les that Jones cites of overly
d emanding internships are exceptions. Furtherm ore, these internships have since
been retailored to students’ sched ules. [The writer could then provide examples of
effective, limited-time internships.]
Or you could concede th at in ternships are time-consuming but rebut the
argument’s warrant that a time-consuming internship is bad for students:
I agree that internships take sizable chunks of students’ tim e, but investment
in real-world work environments is a worthwhile use of students’ time. Through
this investment, students clarify their professional goals, log work experience, and
gain references. Without interning in these work environm ents, students would
miss important career prep aration.
Let’s now illustrate these strategies in a more complex situation. Consider
th e controversy inspired by a New York Times Magaz ine article titled “Recycling Is
Garbage.” Its author, John Tierney, argued that recycling is not environmentally
90 Chapter 6
sound and that it is cheaper to bury garbage in a landfill than to recycle it. Tierney
argued that recycling wastes money; he provided evidence that “every time a
sanitation department crew picks up a load of bottles and cans from the curb,
New York City loses money.” In Toulmin’s terms, one of Tierney’s arguments is
structured as shown below.
ENTHYMEME
CLAIM: Recycling is bad policy
REASON: because it costs more to recycle
material than to bury it in a landfill.
GROUNDS
• Evidence of the high cost of recycling [Tierney
says it costs New York City $200 more per ton
for recyclables th an trash .]
WARRANT
We should dispose of garbage in th e least
•
expensive way.
A number of environmentalists responded angrily to Tierney’s argument,
challenging either h is reason, his warrant, or both. Those refuting the reason
offered counterevidence showing that recycling isn’t as expensive as Tierney
claimed. Those refuting the warrant said that even if the costs of recycling are
higher than the costs of burying wastes in a landfill, recycling still benefits the
environment by reducing the amount of virgin materials taken from nature. These
critics, in effect, offered a new warrant: Conserving the world’s resources is an
important goal of garbage disposal.
Strategies for Rebutting Evidence
Whether you are rebutting an argument’s reasons or its warrant, you will frequently
need to question a writer’s use of evidence. Here are some strategies you can use:
• Deny the accuracy of the data. Arguers can disagree about the facts of a case.
If you have reasons to doubt a writer’s facts, call them into question.
• Cite counterexamples and countertestimony. You can often rebut an argu-
ment based on examples or testimony by citing counterexamples or counter-
testimony that denies the conclusiveness of the original data.
• Cast doubt on the representativeness or sufficiency of examples. Examples
are powerful only if they are believed to be representative and sufficient.
Many environmentalists complained that John Tierney’s attack on recycling
was based too largely on data from New York City and that it didn’t accurately
take into account the more positive experiences of other cities and states.
When data from outside New York City were examined, the cost-effectiveness
and positive environmental impact of recycling seemed more apparent.
Responding to Objections and Alternative Views 91
• Cast doubt on the relevance or recency of the examples, statistics, or
testimony. The best evidence is up-to-date. In a rapidly changing universe,
data that are even a few years out-of-date are often ineffective. For example, as
the demand for recycled goods increases, the cost of recycling will be reduced.
Out-of-date statistics will skew any argument about the cost of recycling.
• Question the credibility of an authority. If an opposing argument is based
on testimony, you can undermine its persuasiveness if you show that a person
being cited lacks current or relevant expertise in the field. (This approach is
different from the ad hominem fallacy discussed in the Appendix because it
doesn’t attack the personal character of the authority but rather the author-
ity’s expertise on a specific matter.)
• Question the accuracy or context of quotations. Evidence based on testi-
mony is frequently distorted by being either misquoted or taken out of con-
text. Often scientists qualify their findings heavily, but the popular media
omit these qualifications. You can thus attack the use of a quotation by putting
it in its original context or by explaining how scientists qualified their find-
ings in the original source.
• Question the way statistical data were produced or interpreted. Chapter 4
provides fuller treatment of how to question statistics. In general, you can rebut
statistical evidence by calling into account how the data were gathered, treated
mathematically, or interpreted. It can make a big difference, for example, whether
you cite numbers or percentages or whether you choose large or small incre-
ments for the axes of graphs.
Conceding to Opposing Views
In writing a classical argument, a writer must sometimes concede to an opposing
argument rather than refute it. Sometimes you encounter portions of an argument
that you simply can’t refute. For example, suppose that you are a libertarian who
supports the legalization of hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin. Adversar-
ies argue that legalizing hard drugs will increase the number of drug users and
addicts. You might dispute the size of their numbers, but you reluctantly agree
that they are right. Your strategy is thus not to refute the opposing argument but to
concede to it by admitting that legalization of hard drugs will promote heroin and
cocaine addiction. Having made that concession, your task is then to show that
the benefits of drug legalization, such as a reduction in crime and fewer people
serving time in America’s prisons, still outweigh the costs you’ve just conceded.
As this example shows, the strategy of a concession argument is to switch
from the field of values employed by the writer you disagree with to a different
field of values more favorable to your position. You don’t try to refute the writer’s
stated reason and grounds (by arguing that legalization will not lead to increased
drug usage and addiction) or the writer’s warrant (by arguing that increased drug
use and addiction is not a problem). Rather, you shift the argument to a new field
of values by introducing a new warrant, one that you think your audience can
share (that the benefits of legalization outweigh the costs of increased addiction).
To the extent that opponents of legalization share your desire to stop drug-related
crime, shifting to this new field of values is a good strategy. Although it may
seem that you weaken your own position by conceding to an opposing argument,
you may actually strengthen it by increasing your credibility and gaining your
92 Chapter 6
Uses person al
example to illustrate
problems of low-wage
workers
Thesis statement
Forecasts rebuttal of
three opposing views
raised by Saltsman
Summarizes Salts-
man’s first objection
to minimum wage
Rebuts argumen t by
citin g more recent
research
audience’s goodwill. Moreover, conceding to one part of an opposing argument
doesn’t mean that you won’t refute other parts of that argument.
Exam.ple-of a Student Essay Using Refutation
Strategy
The following essay by student writer Trudie Makens grew out of her research
into the issue of raising the minimum wage to a living wage. Trudie’s essay illus-
trates how a classical argument appealing to a neutral or even mildly resistant
audience engages with alternative views. Note the use of both concession and
rebuttal strategies. (Trudie’s in-text parenthetical citations and her
Works Cited
list follow the MLA documentation style explained in Chapter 18.)
Student Essay
Bringing Dignity to Workers: Make the Minimum Wage
a Living Wage
Trudie Makens
Having worked as a busser in a pizza restaurant, a part-time barista, and a
server at a dumpling cafe, I have worked a number of minimum-wage jobs.
My coworkers have ranged from students like myself to single parents and
primary providers for their families. As a student, I have always had my
parents as a safety net protecting me from financial hardship. However, my
coworkers whose only income is their minimum wage endured financial
hardships daily. I witnessed one of my coworkers, Maria, lose her home
trying to balance supporting her two children and paying her rent. At work,
Maria would describe her anxiety as she bounced from relative to relative,
straining her family relations and image of herself as an able provider. With-
out a living wage or the government’s providing social insurance programs
to ensure financial security for all citizens, families like Maria’s are locked
into poverty. Raising the federal minimum wage to a livable standard is
an important and necessary step to eradicate poverty and ensure dignified
living for individuals and families.
Yet some argue that a higher federal minimum wage will do more harm
than good. Michael Saltsman, the research director of the Employment
Policy Institute, elaborates the pro-business objections to a minimum wage
in several op-ed pieces published in national print or online newspapers.
Saltsman primarily makes three arguments against raising the minimum
wage. Each of them, I contend, is weak or flawed.
First, Saltsman warns that raising the minimum wage will force busi-
nesses to cut jobs. In order to maintain profit and to keep prices low, Salts-
man argues, businesses will pay for a higher wage by slashing the number
of workers. Worse, businesses may cut entire departments in favor of auto-
mation, such as having fast-food customers order their meals from computer
touch screens. Saltsman’s argument, however, depends on older studies
that, according to University of California economist Michael Reich, are
“fundamentally flawed” (Maclay). In a study published in 2010, Reich and
Responding to Objections and Alternative Views 93
his coauthors find that these earlier studies fail to account for all the critical
variables besides w ages that influence employm ent levels. By comparing
employ m ent levels b etween states w ith higher versu s lower minimum-
wage levels, Reich and his colleagues provide empirical evidence that rais-
ing the minimum w age produces n o ” adverse employment effects” (954).
Saltsman’s second objection to a higher minimum w age is that it targets
the wron g p eople and thus won’ t reduce overall p overty levels. According
to Saltsman, a majority of p eople living in p overty are unemployed while a
m ajority of minimum-wage workers are from h ou seholds ab ove the p overty
line. Although Saltsman may be correct that a higher minimum wage won’t
help a jobless person, he ignores the benefits of a living wage to the work-
ing poor who would be lifted out of poverty. Moreover, a higher minimum
wage might itself stimulate jobs because minimum-wage workers with more
money in their pockets are apt to spend it, increasing demand for goods.
Finally, Saltsman argues that the minimum wage is less effective at
reducing poverty than the Earned Income Tax Credit, which boosts the
income of low-wage workers while not giving any income boost to workers
who are already above the poverty level. However, the Earned Income Tax
Credit, like the minimum wage, does nothing for the jobless poor. Moreover,
the Earned Income Tax Credit puts the burden of poverty relief on taxpayers
rather than employers and corporate shareholders, doing little to shift the
economy in an equitable direction. We need both an increased minimum
wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit.
It seems clear that to combat poverty, the United States needs a many-
pronged effort, with a hike in the minimum wage being only one of the
prongs. Although a higher minimum wage will not by itself eliminate pov-
erty, it will certainly help. It needs to be combined with investments in
infrastructure to create jobs, with affordable higher education, with better
job training, and with other safety-net systems such as those in place in
Europe to give dignity to all citizens. Rather than our government and mar-
ket system prioritizing corporations and profit, the rights and dignity of
workers should be held foremost important. Raising the minimum wage to
a living wage will help change the structure of a market system that often
exploits workers.
Works Cited
Maclay, Kathleen. “Minimum Wage Hikes Don’t Eliminate Jobs,
Study Finds.” UC Berkeley News Center, 1 Dec. 2010, news.berkeley.
edu/ 2010 I 12/01 I minimumwagejobs.
Reich, Michael, et al. “Minimum Wage Effects Across State Borders: Esti-
mates Using Contiguous Counties.” Review of Economics and Statistics,
vol. 92, no. 4, 2010, pp. 945-64.
Saltsman, Michael. “The Wrong Way to Reduce Poverty.” USA Today,
20 Sept. 2013, www.usatoday.com/story I opinion/2013/09 /20/
minimum-wages-poverty-column/2839003.
—. “To Help the Poor, Move Beyond ‘Minimum’ Gestures.” The Huffing-
ton Post, 26 Apr. 2013, updated 26 June 2013, www.huffingtonpost.
com/ michael-saltsman/ earned -income-tax-credit-minimum-
wage_b_3165459 .html.
Summarizes Salts-
man’s second
objection
Concedes that higher
minimum wage won’t
help jobless, but
shifts to other ben-
efits that Saltsman
•
Ignores
5
Summarizes Salts-
man’s last argument
Rebuts this argument
by showing weak-
nesses in the Earned
Income Tax Credit
~preach
Uses conclusion to
summarize additional
measures (besides
higher minimum
wage) to combat
poverty
94 Chapter 6
For Writing and Class Discussion
Refutation Strategies
Ind ividually or in groups, examine each of the following arguments, imagin ing how the c laim and reason
could be f leshed out with grounds and backing. Then attempt to refute each argument. Suggest ways to
rebut the reason, or the warrant, or both, or to concede to the argument and then switch to a d ifferent field
of values.
a. The criminal justice system shou ld reduce sentences for low-level, nonviolent offenders because this
change will save taxpayers’ money.
b. Majoring in eng ineering is better than majoring in music because engineers make more money than
• •
mus1c1ans.
c. The SAT exam for college entrance should not be required by colleges and universities because high-
school grades are a better predictor of student success than SAT scores.
d. The United States should bui ld more nuclear reactors because nuclear reactors w ill provide substantial
electrical energy w ithout emitting greenhouse gases.
e. People should be al lowed to own handguns because own ing handguns helps them protect their homes
against potentially violent intruders.
Appealing to a Resistant Audience:
Delayed-Thesis Argument
6.5 Consider using delayed-thesis argument to appeal to resistant
audiences.
Whereas classical argument is effective for neutral or undecided audiences, it is
often less effective for audiences strongly opposed to the writer’s views. Because
resistant audiences hold values, assumptions, or beliefs widely different from
the writer’s, they are often unswayed by classical argument, which attacks their
worldview too directly. Unlike a classical argument, a delayed-thesis argument
assumes either an initial exploratory approach to a subject or an approach that
focuses on shared values, evoking sympathy for the audience’s views. With some
issues, you may want to convey that you are still thinking out your position,
finding your way through a thicket of alternative views and the complexities of
the issue. On other issues, you might simply want to focus first on shared val-
ues. Under these rhetorical conditions, a delayed-thesis argument enables you
to establish initial rapport with your audience. Instead of declaring a claim and
reasons early in the argument, you may work your way slowly to your claim,
often delaying your thesis until the end.
Let’s look at an example of a delayed-thesis argument, examining its form
and its emotional impact. (For another example of a delayed-thesis argument,
see Ellen Goodman’s “Womb for Rent for a Price” in Chapter 7.) The following
essay, by British journalist Alexander Chancellor, appeared in the conservative
British magazine The Spectator:
Responding to Objections and Alternative Views 95
Oh, Ho-w I Will Miss the Plastic Bag
Alexander Chancellor
It has taken years, but finally England has joined the rest of the United Kingdom
and other countries around the world in declaring war on the plastic carrier bag.
This week for the first time English supermarkets are being forbidden by law to
give plastic bags away for free. From now on they will have to charge Sp for every
one of them. It is the beginning of the end. The plastic bag is heading for oblivion.
The most useful shopping tool of the last half-century will soon, I imagine, be
extinct.
It seems only appropriate at this point to say how wonderful plastic bags
have been. They are the most useful carriers ever invented strong, light, capa-
cious, and absurdly cheap to produce. Life without them will never be so easy
again. In future, anyone wanting to buy a few things from the supermarket on
the way home from work will have to remember to take a reusable shopping bag
out with him in the morning. Anyone stocking up with food at the weekend will
have to set out with a supply of his own bags in the car. I already try to do this,
but usually forget. Oh, how I will miss the plastic bag.
But the remarkable thing is that the end of the plastic bag, when it happens,
will not have been an imposition from above but a fulfilment of the popular will.
A consultation exercise carried out eight years ago found, for example, that 90
percent of Londoners were in favor of banning plastic bags altogether. Ninety
percent of Londoners wanted to abolish one of the greatest conveniences of their
everyday lives! Who can say that people are always selfish?
The popularity of the new measure against plastic bags, the docile acceptance
of having to pay for something that always used to be free, is evidence of how
responsive people can be to campaigns for the wider public good. The campaign
against smoking has been successful, too, but smoking kills individuals, which is
rather different. Plastic bags just threaten the world.
That threat, however, is impressive. The statistics are enough to alarm any-
one. Hitherto in Britain, billions of plastic bags have been given to shoppers
each year, and they have all got thrown away. About 60,000 tons of them have
ended up in landfills, where they can take more than 400 years to decompose-
a process that promotes climate change by releasing carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere.
Throughout the world, between 500 and 1,000 billion plastic bags are thought
to be consumed annually, more than a million a minute. And those that don’t
reach landfill sites get blown about on the wind from the North Pole to the South,
littering every continent and polluting every sea.
Those floating out at sea have a devastating effect on marine life. Turtles eat
them, thinking they are jellyfish, and die in consequence. Altogether, more than
100,000 mammals, including whales and seals, and up to one million seabirds are
thought to be killed each year from eating or getting tangled up in plastic. And
like the poignant photograph of a dead child on a beach in Turkey that got the
campaign to admit refugees to Britain going, it took a distressing image to spark
the revolution against plastic bags.
Title shows fondness
for plastic bags
Provides context
and explains new
law requiring stores
to charge for plastic
bags
Establishes rapport
with audience by
praising the useful-
ness of plastic bags
Elaborates his shared
view with the audi-
ence- the value of
plastic bags
Surprises reader by
acknowledging that
British citizens, not
the government,
voted to ban the bags
Credits the ban to
the unselfishness of
people, who put the
environment ahead
of convenience
Provides evidence of
the environmental
damage caused by
discarded plastic bags
Provides more evi-
Glence of the damage
caused to oceans and
marine life
96 Chapter 6
Shows the dra-matic
power of a visual
image to turn citizens
against plastic bags
States his thesis:
Plastic bags “are not a
good thing”
It was the sight of some albatross chicks dying from eating plastic on a beach
in Devon that eight years ago upset Rebecca Hosking, a BBC camerawoman, so
much that she persuaded shopkeepers in her hometown of Modbury to give up
plastic bags altogether, thus launching the campaign of which we are seeing the
results today.
Discarded plastic bags may occasionally have their uses. I am told that in
some parts of Africa there has developed a cottage industry in which people turn
them into hats. But on the whole I have to say that even I am convinced that they
are not a good thing. So I will try not to mourn them. I will stock up on sturdy
canvas bags and try to remember to take them with me to the supermarket. Or
maybe I should do the sensible thing and start getting my groceries delivered to
my home instead.
If Chancellor had chosen to write a classical argument, he might have declared
his position in the first paragraph, perhaps with a thesis statement like this:
The forthcoming British ban on plastic bags is a good thing because the ban
will help reduce the plastic pollution of oceans and other environmental damage
caused by discarded bags.
He would have then presented his evidence about environmental damage caused by
plastic bags, particularly to marine life. Near the end of his argument, he might have
summarized an opposing view (“Of course, many people like plastic bags … “),
conceded that the plastic bags had many uses, but then switched to another field of
values: “However, the environmental harm caused by pollution outweighs the ben-
efits to consumers.” Organized as a classical argument, Chancellor’s essay would
use a Toulmin schema similar to our plastic bag example in Chapter 3.
But Chancellor delays stating his thesis until the last paragraph and instead
begins his argument with what looks like a lament for the loss of the plastic bag-
” the most useful shopping tool of the last half-century.” As a cultural conservative
writing for a conservative British magazine, he imagines his readers being angry
at the government for banning these wonderful plastic bags. He assumes that his
readers will expect him to oppose the ban on plastic bags, viewing the ban as an
example of an overreaching liberal government. But instead he surprises them
halfway through by supporting the ban.
His delayed thesis structure allows him to bring in a second argument in
favor of the ban an argument praising the unselfishness of British citizens who
voted overwhelmingly to go against their own selfish interests. The actor in this
happy story is not an overreaching liberal government but rather the average Brit-
ish citizen, whose unselfishness is made more vivid by the writer’s and readers’
shared love of the plastic bag. The title of the essay and the opening paragraphs
give readers a chance to identify first with their beloved plastic bags and then
second with the unselfishness of good people acting to save the world. Whereas
the classical argument can often seem to divide stakeholders into pro and con
camps, Chancellor’s delayed-thesis approach unites writer and readers as unself-
ish, good people placing the needs of the world above themselves. Conservatives’
grumbles against an overreaching government dissolve into warm feelings about
being unselfish and doing good for the world.
Responding to Objections and Alternative Views 97
Writing a Delayed-Thesis Argument
Clearly, where you place your claim can affect your argument’ s impact on its
audience. We should note, however, that a delayed-thesis argument is not sim-
ply a classical argument turned upside down. Instead, it promotes empathy for
the audience’s views, inviting rather than compelling them toward the writer’s
stance. It places value on enriching and complicating the discussion by explor-
ing different perspectives. It entails some risk to the writer because it leaves
space only at the end of the argument for developing the writer’s claim. More-
over, it can backfire in a confusing way if the writer simply seems to change
positions without explanation. When done well, however, it may lead the writer
and readers to a deeper understanding of the issue, provide clarification, and
promote further discussion. Although there is no set form, the organization
plan in Figure 6.3 shows characteristic elements often found in delayed-thesis
arguments.
Figure 6.3 Organizational plan for a delayed-thesis argument
Organization Plan for a Delayed-Thesis Argument
Introduction
Option 1: Truth-seeking exploration
of issue*
Option 2: Establishment of shared
values**
Delayed thesis and support
Conclusion
• Establish the problem under discussion and (when
appropriate) the occasion that makes the issue timely
(kairos).
• Explore the problem from multiple perspectives,
showing the validity of different views
• Show how you are wrestling with the problem
• For a good portion of the argument, keep the
problem open, building some suspense about
what your thesis will be
• Focus on values or beliefs that you share with the
resistant audience
• Show openness and sympathy toward your audience’s
view of the issue
• Present your thesis-claim later in the argument
• If you present your thesis at the end, it should grow
out of reasons and evidence presented earlier
• If you present your thesis in the middle, then support
it with reasons and evidence
• Leave a last impression favoring your thesis
*This exploratory approach is illustrated by Ellen Goodman’s ” Womb for Rent- For a Price” in Chapter 7.
** The shared values approach is illustrated by Alexander Chancellor’s ” Oh How I Will Miss the Plastic Bag ” in this chapter.
98 Chapter 6
Conclusion
This chapter explained strategies for addressing alternative views. When intending
to engage supportive audiences in a cause, writers often compose one-sided argu-
ments. Neutral or undecided audiences generally respond most favorably to clas-
sical argument, which uses strong reasons in support of its claim while openly
summarizing alternative views and responding to them through rebuttal or con-
cession. Strongly resistant audiences, who might not be persuaded by classical
argument, may be reached more effectively through a delayed-thesis argument that
begins with openness toward opposing views.
Writing Assignment
A Classical Argument or a Delayed Thesis Argument
Option 1: A Classical Argument
Write a classical argument following the explanation in Section 2.1 at the beginning of Chapter 2 and using
the guidelines for developing such an argument throughout Chapters 2-6. Consider carefully how you w ill
handle alternative views in your argument, based on your awareness of your audience’s degree of resistance
to your claim and reasons. How will you rebut opposing views? Where will you concede to them? Depend-
ing on your instructor’s preferences, this argument could be on a new issue, or it could be a final stage of an
argument in progress. For an example of a classical argument, see “The Dangers of Digital Distraction” by
Lauren Shinozuka (below). Note how Lauren uses research to show that she is joining a larger public conver-
sation on her generation’s use of digital technology.
Option 2: A Delayed-Thesis Argument
If you imagine a strongly resistant audience, write a delayed-thesis argument following the model of either
Alexander Chancellor in this chapter or of Ellen Goodman in Chapter 7.
Reading
The following essay, by student writer Lauren Shinozuka, illustrates a classical
argument. This essay grew out of Lauren’s own wrestling with her immersion in
social media. She decided to persuade her peers to see the problem her way with
the goal that they will join her in new awareness and new habits.
Student Essay
The Dangers of Digital Distractedness
Lauren Shinozuka
We are the Net Generation, the Facebook Generation digital natives.
Cultural critics praise us for our digital skills, our facility with multimedia,
and our ability to interact electronically with others through collaboration
and co-creation. But at what cost? If we are honest, the following antisocial
Responding to Objections and Alternative Views 99
scene is familiar. You are sitting at a table with friends, and then you hear
various pings and look up to see every one of your friends with squinted
eyes, checking social media apps and text messages, scrolling away on their
phones and furiously punching a reply. What kind of togetherness is this?
We seem to feel some urgency or need to know what the world wants from
us in that moment, prompting us to check our smartphones every six and a
half minutes a day. Although we may seem to be skillfully interactive tech-
nologically, I argue that our behavior represents dependence, even addic-
tion, that has deep, pervasive consequences. It harms us by promoting an
unproductive habit of multitasking, by dehumanizing our relationships,
and by encouraging a distorted self-image.
I can hear my peers immediately rejecting these claims as too extreme
and too critical, and I acknowledge that a good case can be made for our
digital savvy and the benefits that it brings. Armed with smartphones and
laptops, we believe we are masters of technology because we can access so
much information easily and immediately. Thanks to our cell phones, all
of our friends are only a mere click or swipe away for starting a conver-
sation or sending an invitation to meet up. I also have to admit that our
digital knowledge gives us on-the-job advantages. At my part-time job
at a high-end retail store, I constantly use a mobile point-of-sale system
to ring up customers for fast and easy “on-the-spot checkout,” receiving
compliments for my competence. With my comfort with the company’s
technology, I can troubleshoot easily and help other employees. Because
technology facilitates much of what we do and keeps us plugged into the
rest of the world, I recognize that it can be difficult to see the negative
aspects of our relationship to digital technology, but it is time for serious
self-examination.
In college, we tell ourselves that multitasking with technology helps
us use our time wisely, but in actuality we become even less productive. I
notice that while I study, I feel the need to stop every five or ten minutes to
check my phone, or log onto a website and allow myself to get distracted
before going back to my task. These momentary distractions eat away at my
time; when I sit down to write a paper at 9 P.M. I am often startled to find
that it is suddenly 12 A.M. and I have less than a page written. We Millen-
nials think we are so cutting edge with our multitasking, yet we get little
done with our time. We submerge ourselves into a technological bubble
consisting of laptops and music and cell phones, convinced that by arming
ourselves with these tools, we can really do it all. In actuality, as writer John
Hamilton explains in his report for National Public Radio, our brains cannot
“focus on more than one thing at a time.” Hamilton cites MIT neuroscientist
Earl Miller, who says that our minds are “not paying attention to … two
things simultaneously, but switching between them very rapidly”; thus,
multitasking in itself is a myth. Furthermore, as we continue to overload our
brains with multiple tasks, we also begin to reshape our thought processes.
Technology the Internet in particular helps us avoid the hard work of
concentration and contemplation. In the article “Is Google Making Us Stu-
pid?” nonfiction business and technology writer Nicholas Carr describes
this way we take in and distribute information as a “swiftly moving stream
(continued)
1 00 Chapter 6
of particles.” We skim rather than read; we rapidly switch tasks rather than
truly multi task. I recognize this superficial way of operating in the world in
my own behavior. I often turn to Google for an immediate answer to a ques-
tion I have: Who’s the current Speaker of the House? How many ounces
are in a cup? Then I click on the first link I see, and more often than not, I
see the little subheading that states, “You’ve visited this page X times.” I
realize my mental instincts tell me that it’s much easier to Google an answer
multiple times rather than just learn the information. Because I constantly
overindulge in my technology, I have engrained the habits of skimming
streams of information, constantly bouncing from one task to another, but
never stopping to bask in its depths.
Our obsession with technology and social media not only reshapes the
way we think, but also fosters a type of false superficial friendship with
people we barely know, dehumanizing the kinds of relationships we have.
Since coming to college, I’ve made hundreds of new Facebook friends and
attracted dozens of new followers on Twitter. To be fair, a number of these
people are truly my good friends, but most of these “friendships” came
from a one-time meeting at a party or a class I had with them during my
sophomore year. Although some will insist on the vital role social media
plays in keeping them connected to distant family and friends, we need to
address more directly the extent and pervasive effects of our more com-
mon arbitrary cyber friendships. Last summer, while I taught a program
at a local elementary school, I would occasionally post a Facebook status
of something funny that happened that day, or a picture of my class. Back
home later for a short vacation, I ran into a girl from high school whom I
hadn’t seen in four years and barely knew then. When we stopped to chat,
she asked me all about my summer program, and she commented that
all my students were so cute! After our chat, I left feeling perturbed and
uneasy. Immediately, I thought she was so “creepy,” but I realized that
ultimately I chose to share my life with the rest of the world. Speaking
about these digital relationships, Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and author
of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each
Other, labels our behavior “a Goldilocks effect”: “We can’t get enough of
one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we
can control: not too close, not too far, just right.” That moment when my
distant “friend” reached out to me about my summer felt so disturbing
because she crossed that Goldilocks line through a personal face-to-face
conversation. I am embarrassed to say that I was comfortable only when
she was one of the masses; I didn’t want to engage in a true interpersonal
connection.
s This lack of intimacy through false relationships leads to the creation of
a distorted identity. We begin to form a social identity through our conscious
decisions of what we choose to share with the rest of the digital world. We
want to post pretty pictures that will garner us a number of “likes,” and
we want to tweet something witty or profound so others will retweet us.
When I began to reevaluate my own social media identity, I found that I
consciously try to word my Facebook status in order for people to find it
Respond ing to Objections and Alternative Views 101
funny, and I’m obsessed with editing my pictures with the r ight filters to
achieve that h ipster artist effect. I realized that I was interpreting my own
life experiences in such a way that I would seem interesting or entertaining
to all of my “friends,” as if I were performing for an audience I was trying
to please. That image of myself is dishonest: It conveys the person I want
people to think I am, not the real me.
We see this willful self-distort ion in a growing trend called “catfishing”:
an Internet phenomenon where one person creates a false online identity
to engage in a romantic relationship with another person physically far
removed. Instead of using his or her own photo, the “catfisher” substitutes
photos of attractive, talented people to create a false identity. A documen-
tary named for this phenomenon, Catfish, features these long-distance lovers
traveling across the country for a chance to meet the person who is really
on the other side of the screen. Often that person’s appearance and even
gender and motives are strikingly at odds with the self-portrayal. While it
is easy for us to judge negatively these extreme cases of catfishing, Molly
McHugh, writer for Digital Trends, points out what she calls the “slippery
slope of catfishdom.” These cases may seem extreme, but to an extent, all
of us who embrace social media are indeed “catfish” as well. We succumb
to what McHugh calls the “aspirational beast” of social media, bending the
truth online to some degree in order to portray the self that we want to be.
With our growing reliance on social media and technology, the tendency
for our romantic relationships to blend into our digital selves becomes even
more prevalent. When we continue to mix this intimate, personal self w ith
the demands and desires of social media, we produce tragic, ill-formed
identities that no longer resemble our true selves.
Of course, we may draw a sharp d istinction between our own digi-
tal dependence and the growing number of young users who are actual
technological addicts. (According to Carolyn Gregoire’s Huffington Post
article, there is now an inpatient Internet rehabilitation center designed
specifically for true addicts.) However, our own participation in the more
widespread digital craze remains a serious problem too. Yet by taking the
first step of making the unconscious conscious, I believe we can combat
the digital damage in our lives. I have begun by taking several steps. I
purposefully put my phone across the table so I physically need to get up
to check it; I let myself binge-check all my social media apps only once, just
before going to bed, rather than ten times a day, and I have stopped trying
to take pictures of every pretty meal I consume or sunset I see because I
know that those are my own special moments, not some glamorous, envy-
inducing image I want to project. I have begun to avoid friends who find
their phones more interesting than the immediate world around them, and
this new company has made it easier to break away from my own addic-
tion. I am trying to rehumanize my friendships, and I am finding solace in
deep reading once more without the distractions of cell phone vibrations.
I invite members of my generation to join me, so we can be together, no
longer alone together.
(continued)
1 02 Chapter 6
Works Cited
Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing
to Our Brains.” The Atlantic, July-Aug. 2008, www.theatlantic.com/
magazine I archive I 2008 I 07 I is-google-making-us-stupid/ 306868.
Gregoire, Carolyn. “Welcome to Internet Rehab.” The Huffington
Post, 25 Sept. 2013, updated 25 Oct. 2013, www.huffingtonpost.
com/2013 I 09/25 I this-is-where-people-are-_n_3976240.html.
Hamilton, John. “Think You’re Multitasking? Think Again.” National
Public Radio, 2 Oct. 2008, www.npr.org/templates/story /story.
php ?story Id=95256794.
McHugh, Molly. “It’s Catfishing Season! How to Tell Lovers from Liars
Online, and More.” Digital Trends, 23 Aug. 2013, www.digitaltrends.com/
web I its-catfishing-season-how-to-tell-lovers-from-liars-online-and-more.
Turkle, Sherry. “The Flight from Conversation.” The New York Times, 21
Apr. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/ 04/22/ opinion/ sunday I the-
flight-from-conversation.html.
Critiquing “The Dangers of Digital Distractedness”
1. How does Lauren Shinozuka establish the kairos of her argument? In what
ways does she use pathos to reach her primary audience of Millennials?
2. What is her claim? What reasons does she use to support her claim?
3. What evidence does Lauren employ to support her reasons? What pieces of
evidence do you find especially effective?
4. Where has Lauren anticipated resistance to her argument and how has she
responded to opposing views?
5. If you were discussing the issue of digital distractedness with Lauren, what
ideas would you contribute to further support, complicate, or refute her
argument?
PARTT
•
7 Analyzing Arguments Rhetorically
8 Argument as Inquiry: Reading, Summarizing, Responding
– ,. –
Across th e country, p rotests like this on e are raising awaren ess of the poverty-level wages
of fast-food workers, who are not represented by unions and w h o often depend on public
assistan ce su ch as food stamps to get by every month. While protestors argue for a minimum
wage of $15 per hour, opponents argue that raising th e minimu m wage would increase food
prices and reduce the number of jobs. If you were m aking a brochure or poster in favor of an
increased minimum wage for fast-food workers, how effective would this realistic, low-key
photo b e in raising sympathy for the cause? Ch apter 8 explores the issue of a living wage for
unskilled workers.
103
6 Responding to Objections and Alternative Views
