Paul Graham and not being as right as he could be in “The Age of the Essay”

http://jseliger.com/2011/12/02/paul-graham-and-not-being-as-right-as-he-could-be-in-the-age-of-the-essay/

by jseliger • 15 years ago

133 51 15 years ago

Essay writing in school isn't about the art of writing -- its about teaching children to logically organize their thoughts into compartments using gramatically correct sentences, then present them in linear fashion. This is very important!

The art of writing is about expressing ideas, emotions, arguments, and passions through any visceral manner letters on paper allow you to.

Cushman• 15 years ago

Essay writing in public school is about teaching children the peculiarities of the format they will be graded on in their next standardized test. This is probably a wash.

tux1968• 15 years ago

This is a really well thought out and argued essay outlining the realities of teaching writing. There were quite a few lucid appraisals of students and the skills they lack which keep them from writing a "Real Essay". After reading each one however, I couldn't help but think that the author was in fact generating a very good syllabus for what should actually be the focus of his course.

If students are prone to Ad Hominem arguments for instance, doesn't that suggest that more time should be spent explaining this fallacy?

This was just one of many such examples.

BrandonM• 15 years ago

I totally agree. The author actually did great work in exploring what students need to improve to be able to write the types of essays that pg was talking about. It's too bad the author didn't actually realize that.

I also wish the author had basically eliminated the first two paragraphs. I almost didn't read the rest of it simply because the first part looked to be setting up a trivial "someone's wrong on the Internet"-style post instead of the well-thought-out piece that it actually was.

FreakLegion2• 15 years ago

This assertion (of PG's) caught my eye:

The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens.

That's no longer true at the university level. In fact, writing has been systematically dissociated from literary studies for a host of reasons, some political, some practical, as composition has established itself as a separate discipline. Only a minority of schools still link the two. (This isn't to say that writing courses aren't still grouped under the auspices of the English Department, only that literature, if it appears at all in a writing classroom, is used for reasons other than its literariness -- i.e. to introduce social issues, etc.)

Tloewald• 15 years ago

The problem with the idea being ascribed to Paul Graham (writing about whatever you are passionate about rather than English literature) is that it's a strategy for teaching smart, passionate kids — and they're not the kids the education system is most egregiously failing.

jacobolus• 15 years ago

We’re talking about high school here.

It has never been the case that serious university-level courses in, say, history or political theory or linguistics didn’t require serious paper writing.

screwt• 15 years ago

I had to write essays for subjects other than English from middle school onwards. IIRC mostly for history, with some geography as well. Key point being from my education, essays have always been about making a structured argument, and not exclusively about literature.

FreakLegion2• 15 years ago

High school is mentioned explicitly, but we aren't talking about it exclusively. "High schools imitate universities," in pg's words, and he spends rather a lot of time historicizing the issue in those terms.

(The account he offers is, well, not so much flat-out wrong as woefully incomplete. See A.J. Minnis' Medieval Theory of Authorship for a definitive scholarly account of the genesis of professional literary studies.)

absconditus2• 15 years ago

The author appears to be a university professor. There are also several indications that he is referring to university freshmen.

"Now, one could argue that students have been brainwashed by 12 years of school by the time I’ve got them, and to some extent that’s probably true."

waqf• 15 years ago

At the university level? I should hope not.

A high school freshman should be plenty old enough to defend a thesis on a subject of his or her choosing.

chillyconker• 15 years ago

The ability to write well co-evolves with having stuff that you want to say. Students don't get to choose their topics or when to write: they are acting under coercion, and those few who are relatively motivated remain anxious about grades.

Hence student essays are boring, while students' blogs are (often) interesting.

OFC, if authority figures started reading those blogs and assigning grades to blog entries then the blogs would disappear. If the blogs were subsequently required to re-appear with deadlines etc then they would quickly become boring, just like the essays.

Saddest is that if a teacher understood this and confined herself to helping students with stuff that they actually wanted to do, and only when asked, then she would lose her job!

sounds2• 15 years ago

tl;dr Paul Graham is working to improve education, specifically composition (for this article).

The article argues (successfully, I think) that reality is nuanced.

redthrowaway• 15 years ago

There's a kind of cosmic internet irony attached to throwing a tl;dr on an article about writing good essays.

andrewflnr• 15 years ago

A woefully inadequate tl;dr at that. A real summary would be nice though. In another piece of irony, I think it would have benefited from a thesis statement. It's hard to tell what it's really saying, at least after the first run-through.

derleth4• 15 years ago

Every academic paper has an abstract.

sounds2• 15 years ago

I apologize for the (apparently) bad summary.

mekoka• 15 years ago

I'm not an educator and I don't think of myself as a good writer either, but when I look around, I believe that I'm above average. I'll still permit myself to throw in an idea or two, that may help educators tap into new sources.

Are you looking for material to instill interest in your teenage students? Well, Youtube and IMDB are full of opinionated people in that demographic, with things to say. The message is often naive, the form usually bad, but the desire to express oneself is there. This to me is a sign of an opportunity to take something rough and refine it.

Make a game out of this. Mimic forum threads, organize teams, with the objective to come up with the best rebuttal in 500 characters. Forcing them to be creative in the language, while staying clean and to the point.

You want to steer them away from the emotional and moralizing narratives? Expose them to manipulative writing and show them how they fell victim of it. Explain phenomenon such as groupthink and ad-hominem attacks. Show evidence of it in real life and how it's used to steer the mass. Explain that if they're unable to address issues with rationality and analysis, they are being led like sheeps. Nobody wants to be a sheep. They'll be more careful with their arguments.

keithpeter• 15 years ago

    I'm not an educator and I don't think of myself as a good writer either,

I am a teacher and I have been paid to write learning materials. I always listen politely to advice offered by people who are not teachers. I listen especially carefully to my students of course as that is a critical part of teaching.

Activities similar to the ones that you have suggested here are used quite often in Further Education colleges in the UK. There is a general emphasis on 'active learning'. For more on this idea, read anything by Geoff Petty.

http://www.geoffpetty.com/

especially

http://www.geoffpetty.com/activelearning.html

commieneko3• 15 years ago

Interestingly, when I was in college, 30 years ago, the writing and communications classes were well segregated from the literature classes. They were very hands on and you could pick your own topics or choose from a selection the teachers provided; I usually wrote on topics from my field of study. The courses were rigorous, often touching on linguistic theory in addition to grammar.

I had one teacher that was very clear that authors not only could, but should be willing to break any rule of grammar or style as needed. We'd often get assignments that included breaking rules that we'd previously studied.

The one bit of literature that I remember creeping in, other than a few of the other student's essays (we read our assignments out loud in front of the class every day), were a couple of Max Shulman short stories. The teacher had us read them because they both concerned logic, presentation, and literary writing styles. They were also funny as hell and I became a lifelong Shulman fan. I can't remember the titles, but they were both Dobie Gillis stories.

Later, when I took some of the literature courses, I was surprised by the lower quality of the teaching and the coursework. Totally different teaching staff and curriculum.

Edit: FWIW, in my high school, the literary classes and grammar/writing classes were also separate; although the same teachers taught both types of classes. I remember writing essays in the literature classes, but the writing classes usually had assigned topics that were not about literature. The literature essays were definitely more concerned with the topic of the stories we were reading, and not about learning to write.

This was all in the mid southern U.S., in the late '70s.

derleth4• 15 years ago

> be willing to break any rule of grammar or style

If you can break it and be understood, it's style, not grammar. Grammar is why you don't say "Cat mouse mouse run run."; style is why you might cringe when someone else says "Whom is it?"

commieneko3• 15 years ago

You can break grammar rules and be understood. One of the points of some of the exercises was to show that communication is more complicated than the seemingly a priori rules. Human languages are not formal systems.

It's actually pretty easy with spoken language to completely mangle the rules and not only be understood but be even more evocative; that's how languages evolve.

It's more complicated with written words, but certainly possible.

One trick is to make up a completely new rule and "teach" it to the reader. Another is to create a pattern and then break it for effect. The results can be nonsensical, but quite meaningful.

Not something you might use in an everyday report or memo, but a good tool and a great way to de-provincialize language.

BTW, your "Cat mouse mouse run run." sentence can be made intelligible by inflection rather easily. In English nouns and verbs can often double as adjectives and adverbs. With a little preparation a reader can be made to "hear" the inflection and understand the meaning.

Try and puzzle this out:

((Cat mouse) (mouse run) run)

Loose meaning is something like: The catlike mouse runs with a mouselike gait.

Tarzan explaining something obvious to an idiot big game hunter...

(The movie Tarzan, though. The Tarzan in the novels actually spoke excellent English, but with a French accent.)

Another trick was to take grammars from other language and use English vocabulary. Or play Yoda like games.

Sorry, I ramble, and I've got to get up early...

ef4• 15 years ago

The underlying story I sense in this essay is a smart and motivated teacher slowly being corrupted by the unfixable system around him.

> I’m dealing with generalizations that don’t apply to each individual student. But class requires some level of generalization...

Yup, there's your problem right there. School is a one-size-fits-none system.

Of course you're going to get rambling pointless essays if you force kids to write when they have no interest in writing. Of course you'll get something slightly more coherent if you give very precise directions about things like thesis statements. All they have to go on is your directions -- they have no internal motivation at all.

Maybe this whole painful process gives them a tiny bit of useful practice assembling ideas. But the side effects are often terrible: a permanent distaste for reading, writing, and challenging thinking.

tytso• 15 years ago

I don't think "corrupted" is fair. Like any startup, teachers face constraints. Those constraints are not under their control; so you try to do the best thing that you can given those constraints.

That's like saying that a startup is being "corrupted" because they have to live under the constraints of the DMCA (and perhaps soon, SOPA). Do you think a startup has enough money to buy legislators the way Hollywood would? Do you think the VC's would think that was a good use of their investor's resource if they did? No, instead the startup would be urged to adapt and overcome the constraints of where the reality which surrounds them, and to pivot, if necessary. Would you call that "corruption"? I wouldn't. It's just the reality of what we all have to do.

Heck, engineers have to do the same thing. We make tradeoffs, and we work within the world that we live in --- not the world as we would wish it to be. Maybe by doing that, we can change the world, by fixing one small problem at a time --- just as teacher can change the world, one student at a time...

absconditus2• 15 years ago

The author appears to be a university professor. If his students have no interest in writing they probably should not be at university.

icarus_drowning• 15 years ago

An interesting note: Mike Schmoker's book Focus addresses most of the points raised both in Seliger's and pg's essays; indeed, he comes to many of the same conclusions that Seliger does, recommending heavy doses of close readings of texts as a "jumping off" point for learning how to write. It also mirrors a lot of pg's thoughts in that it stresses the incorporation of argumentative writing as well.

I'd highly recommend Schmoker for anyone who's interested in these issues, whatever your opinion of these articles:

http://www.ascd.org/Publications/Authors/Mike-Schmoker.aspx?...

I use most of Schmoker's methods even in my music classes, where students are consistently asked to write about the music they are learning, as well as to learn how to take a position about that music (e.g., "the woodwinds are not properly used in this piece because...") in addition to the more "dry, academic" writing (research papers on the Baroque era, etc). I've had a lot of success by simply following Schmoker's recommendations, which are almost universally applicable across the humanities.

jseliger• 15 years ago

Thanks! I'm getting it from the library. It reminds me of The Atlantic's "What Makes a Great Teacher" (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-mak...). Actual teachers seem to be ceaselessly re-learning what others already know.

nkoren• 15 years ago

With the caveat that I haven't read Paul Graham's original essay, I have to say that I take issue with a couple of key things in Paul Seliger's response.

First though, credit where it is due: Seliger obviously thinks and cares deeply about this, and has much more real-world experience with it than I. (I am not a formally-trained educator; however I'm a good essay-writer when I put my mind to it, and have been drafted into teaching it on a handful of occasions). Furthermore, Seliger's description of the students he encounters -- their default writing habits and innate ability to explore unfamiliar knowledge domains -- rings absolutely true. He clearly knows what he is talking about in this regard.

However he goes astray in two key respects.

First, he gives examples of formal domains of knowledge ("Money", "Baseball", "Paul Graham's views on Entrepreneurialism") which are both full of abstractions and relatively disconnected from most kids' lives. It should be no surprise that they have difficulty engaging with these subjects in depth or with passion. But Seliger then goes on to conclude that therefore, his students lack the capacity to engage with real-world unbounded knowledge domains.

This is wrong, and it comes from looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope. Instead of saying "here is an interesting and well-written body of non-fiction essays about [ money | baseball | ... ]; let's see if I can get my students to engage with it," one should say "here is an issue that my students are engaged with; let's see if I can get them to engage with it as writers / essayists".

Most kids' lives are richer and more problematic than adults comprehend. This offers plenty of material to unpack and examine, and flex their cognitive muscles in the process. For example: where I live in London, we had a series of major youth riots earlier this year. (Well, major for the UK; having grown up in California, they honestly seemed quite tame to me.) Many highschool students participated in these riots, or had friends who did, or had homes / communities / favourite social spaces which were affected by the riots. Certainly ALL young people in London are now being directly affected by the collective response to the riots, on the part of politicians, police, educators, etc. I frequently hear young people espousing various opinions on the subject at bus stops -- rarely very nuanced opinion, mind you; mostly just expressions of the degree to which something or other is bullshit, but no matter -- and that's a good signal that it is something which is sufficiently part of their lives, and which they feel sufficiently passionate about, that it merits exploration with improved analytical techniques.

So if I were teaching essay-writing here in London, I'd start with the riots. I wouldn't even start with the the literary response to the riots -- that's already a bridge too far for most highschoolers -- I'd begin with the television reporting about the riots, and seeing what kind of response can be elicited from that. Having engaged their interest within a relatively familiar medium, I'd then move gradually into the more literary explorations of the domain: first to short opinion pieces written in the daily papers; then to longer analytical essays and parliamentary addresses; finally to the various explicitly literary / artistic means of engaging with the subject, such as the plays about the riots which are now beginning to emerge.

In other words: start with the passionately familiar, and figure out how to get from there to the literary. Not the reverse. If you think that your students have nothing that they are passionately familiar with, then look harder. They do.

The second place where Seliger goes awry is in ascribing value to the process of conducting literary analysis within an explicitly bounded domain (ie a single essay). I hold the somewhat unfashionable view that this violates the very point of education. In my opinion, the whole and entire point of education should be to prepare people to engage with unbounded domains of knowledge in a confident and competent manner. Anything which avoids the necessity of teaching students how to do this is counter-productive, at least in the real world.

An example: along the way to getting an architecture degree, I once took a graduate-level architectural criticism / philosophy course, taught by a professor who very much came out of the tradition of French post-modern literary analysis. When I attempted to critique architectural manifestos from the perspective of social / environmental / economic / psychological / cultural utility, she gave me the lowest grade which would let me pass the course. Why? Not because of the poor quality of my thought or writing -- that same year, I won the grand prize in a national essay-writing competition on the subject of "Architecture as a Social Art" -- but rather because I had committed the grievous sin of suggesting that there was some kind of external objective reality which in any way had something to do with architecture.

In her literary-criticism universe, any system of thought could only be legitimately judged with reference to itself: how internally consistent was it? What interesting implications could be derived from the self-interaction of its principles? In other words: take a domain of knowledge / body of literature, treat it as though it is fully bounded, and procede from there. Although I can see how this is a useful technique for academic literary analysis, I would submit that it is in fact incredibly HARMFUL for any domain of knowledge which directly interacts with the external real world (ie the unbounded world).

So that's my second critique: literary-criticism techniques are only really useful with respect to literary-criticism, and should be considered harmful with respect to most other domains of knowledge. Educator who default to these techniques because their bounded domains are easier to deal with are doing their students a fundamental disservice. Writing essays about unbounded domains may be harder and messier, but if you don't do that, you're not doing your job.

jeffreymcmanus2• 15 years ago

It's not true that literary criticism is only useful for the study of literature. One key reason why we teach criticism is to develop critical-mindedness in general; this has important social as well as personal benefits for the students.

JMStewy3• 15 years ago

The only thing that literary criticism ever inspired me to criticize was literary criticism. Perhaps it was simply taught badly, but I received an excellent primary education - if the better schools around can't teach this stuff then I question how many students learn any critical thinking skills from it.

I learned a lot more about critical thinking from history classes. Those obviously have to be taught well, too. The standard regurgitate-some-dates won't impart any critical thinking either. But I think history as a subject is richer soil to grow these skills from, and isn't mixed up with the teaching of both writing and literature at the same time.

zecho2• 15 years ago

>He’s right in the sense that real essays don’t have to take a position and defend it, but teachers insist on thesis statements for the same reason bikes for three-year olds have training wheels: otherwise the student-writer will fall over.

This part got to me. Falling over is important. Why wouldn't a teacher allow a student to fail? I think the real issue with essay writing ultimately stems from a one-chance-only, end-all, be-all system of grading. (Which is also a gripe across many subjects, as it tends to produce Swiss cheese-like education.)

I was lucky enough to take composition courses in high school that focused on writing a single essay over the course of the entire semester. There was literally no other homework. Just draft after draft of the same essay. The teacher did hardly any lecturing and spent most of his time working students over intellectually, forcing us to sharpen our essays. I think if you want to teach writing, this is the way to do it.

aidenn0• 15 years ago

Falling down is only useful if you know you've fallen down. It is challenging for a teacher to do that when parents yell at you for giving their kid a bad grade. Of course, that's a whole different topic

zecho2• 15 years ago

That's exactly what I'm saying. The point of essay writing, or doing quadratics or reading about the Civil War isn't about getting a good grade, it's about learning something new, retaining that new information and applying it to future learning. The method of grading and class structures (in that a D-level student starts another year/semester with a clean slate along with all the A-level students from the previous year/semester, despite their obvious deficiencies) is insane when you think about how people actually learn. Grades are a way to motivate through fear of failing, not through interest in a subject. Failure is a natural part of learning and I think people know intuitively when what they're doing isn't working correctly.

But then, I'm a fan of the Montessori method, which focuses far more on process and progress than it does specific outcomes at predefined times. It's hard to translate that method to University, which uses the traditional method of grading. The want of grades has actually caused some Montessori schools to include them superficially to appease parents.

JMStewy3• 15 years ago

I was a student that bitterly resented English class, despite being an avid reader and (as a result) a not-terrible writer. Yet, just like all of jseliger's students, I would never have touched that "book or subject of your own choosing" option.

When assigned an essay for school, my priorities were:

1. Get an acceptable grade

2. Spend as little time/effort as possible

3. Enjoy the process/actually learn something

Asking students directly to prioritize 3 rather than 1 and 2 is just not going to work.

I actually agree that teaching thesis-based writing is a good training tool for analytical writing. But in the interest of expending little effort, students aren't going to consider evidence and then change their thesis. It's much easier to spackle liberally with bullshit, since teachers mostly let that slide.

Grading is the elephant in the room. Students must always take it into account and it's quite rational for them to be very risk-averse. Writing about bounded topics in a bullshit-friendly way is easier and much safer than trying to learn how to think through a subject in writing.

This whole discussion reminds me strongly of Lockhart's Lament (http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf) except for writing rather than math. If the whole system, years of education, is leading students down a garden path, it's not immediately clear that you can change how you teach your 2.5 hours a week to help. The students themselves will actively resist a single teacher trying to break the mold. That doesn't change the fact that there is a problem, a very big problem.

I think trying to fix math education is a harder problem, but unless you can somehow get around grading, English is a tough nut too.

tarkin2• 15 years ago

Are we so enamoured with pg that we must use such sycophantic titles?

ahoyhere2• 15 years ago

Here's a little literary criticism of pg's writing that I left as a comment on that blog post. Still awaiting moderation so I thought I'd share:

Anyway, you’ve probably noticed with close reading that Graham’s essays are almost entirely declarative. He tells, almost never shows.

With Paul Graham, everything is a statement, even the questions are really statements in disguise. He may talk about meandering, but really he doesn’t meander at all. His writing dictates, it doesn’t explore. And when he accuses thesis-driven essays of “blustering through” and “hand-waving”, it’s rather funny, isn’t it?

That’s exactly what Paul Graham does, all the time.

With all those statements, he doesn’t leave any room in his essays for the reader.

Added “bonus”: As a narrator, he never changes or grows, which makes it exceedingly boring for the reader unless they have a feeling of personal vindication over what he’s stating. (E.g., the reason you didn’t like school was because you are smart. As a hacker, you are god’s gift to the earth, etc.)

It’s like going to your boring grandfather’s house and being lectured to.

(Fun fact: so is listening to Paul Graham speak live. He reads an essay. I’m not kidding.)

Meanwhile changing and growing is the raison d’être of fiction, as you described yourself when you compared his essay to Sonny’s Blues.

Honestly, I’m not surprised that your students don’t like it [1]. Maybe one of the reasons they ask “Who is this guy?” is because that essay doesn’t even bother to establish sympathy or credibility. No “I was once a confused blah blah and learned the hard way blah blah.” No “Gee, isn’t it aggravating when adults tell you what to do with your life? Wellllll…”

He presumes that the reader will hang on every word for no other reason than that the writer is Paul Graham.

[1] it referring to the essay What You'll Wish You'd Known: http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

philwelch2• 15 years ago

> As a narrator, he never changes or grows, which makes it exceedingly boring for the reader unless they have a feeling of personal vindication over what he’s stating.

...

> Maybe one of the reasons they ask “Who is this guy?” is because that essay doesn’t even bother to establish sympathy or credibility. No “I was once a confused blah blah and learned the hard way blah blah.”

The real problem people have with pg's essays is that he just says, as literally as possible, what he has to say. He doesn't pussyfoot around it or grease it in social lubricant. A lot of people seem to need that, but literal-minded people, the type who usually become programmers, just get frustrated and confused by all that grease.

Still, in that essay he openly admits to many of his own past mistakes, and refers to learning most of it from personal experience:

"I wish I'd grasped that in high school."

"I let myself believe that my job was to be a high school student. And so I let my need to be good at what I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school."

"If I had to go through high school again..."

"That's what I did, and it was a mistake."

"In retrospect this was stupid."

"When I was in high school I used to write "existentialist" short stories like ones I'd seen by famous writers. My stories didn't have a lot of plot, but they were very deep. And they were less work to write than entertaining ones would have been. I should have known that was a danger sign. And in fact I found my stories pretty boring; what excited me was the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like the famous writers."

ahoyhere2• 15 years ago

Saying "I changed and grew" is not the same as the narrator changing and growing. You just agreed with everything I said: "he just says what he has to say."

That is engaging and persuasive for almost no one.

Moreover, him saying "I changed" comes late in the essay. It's too late to establish either credibility or sympathy.

No wonder the high school kids reject some random adult with boring, bald statement sentences telling them how they're all wrong.

joshuafcole2• 15 years ago

"I realized that I could avoid a lot of heartache on the part of my students by changing the way I was offering instruction, because students weren’t ready to write essays without taking a position and defending it."

Certainly as a student I can sympathize with your plight. I was one of the students who would wander frequently when given an open-ended writing assignment, much to the exasperation of my teachers (who were positive there was some sort of disconnect between my speaking and writing faculties).

That said, I understand that it may not be entirely practical, but I would rather spend time thinking about how students like myself can be elevated to produce more meaningful work rather than accepting the status quo. For me, the breakthrough came when I read "The Age of the Essay." I'm still by no means a great writer, but the Stanford Application essays I recently produced were my best work yet by an order of magnitude. It's made a substantial improvement in my writing by itself, but more importantly it has provided a kernel of understanding that snowballs with every new essay I have vetted by my friends and mentors. Instead of spinning my wheels, I'm making real strides towards becoming a better writer now -- I've learned how to learn the art of writing.

My recommendation, should you still be interested in experimentation, is to see if you can find a reliable way to reach out to your students and help them grasp your understanding of an essay. If they can see where you are coming from, they'll be able to learn whatever you have to offer unimpeded. They will still need to develop logically and analytically, but I think you might start to see a few more students (successfully) attempting the open assignments if you give them the tools to do so.

Paul Graham and not being as right as he could be in “The Age of the Essay”

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