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CHAPTER 1
On the Writing of Essays
So much writing surrounds us that a textual environment has emerged as a complex and supremely detailed subuniverse. We as readers inhabit it as we take it in. All over the place — on cellphones, billboards, bottle caps, cereal boxes, the Internet; in magazines, newspapers, books — the written word proliferates. Yet the writing of short essays, "themes," or "term papers" has become an activity confined to students. Poor, beleaguered students. Louis Menand, an essayist and literary historian, claims that term-paper composition is "one of those skills in life that people are obliged to master in order to be excused from ever practicing them again" (92). One naturally wonders what other skills Menand has in mind — maybe the ability to do burpees? — but his point stands. Outside the college classroom, there is little direct use for writing of the kind done therein. The short, exploratory, focused, argumentative essay, though now starting to re-emerge in an abbreviated form in blog entries, still has only one secure home: academia.
But that's OK. I will contend here that the academic argument, the subject of this book, forms the central and most important kind of nonfiction writing that you should master, even if you don't get a chance to use it after graduating from college. Is this assertion "ridiculous," as one of my CUNY colleagues declared? I hope not. Argument is important because it draws on elements of all the other forms of nonfiction writing and hence allows you to move to any of those forms relatively easily. It also replicates the method by which ideas are created and tested. It teaches you to think in an intellectual way.
That's my belief, anyway. Mastering the type of writing I outline here will help not just students who want to become professional writers or professors but also those of you who work in any position that requires honest, sustained appraisal or scrutiny of issues, ideas, people, texts, or situations. It's writing that replicates the kind of thought needed to uncover, as much as possible, The Truth, though this use of the definite article, as I suggested in the Introduction, is something that we need to take with a grain of salt, or to recognize, with Emerson, as essentially "unbarrelable" (see page 5). If there is no such thing as The Truth, though, at least there is a truth that is provisional, convincing, and defensible right now. Essays seeking it look not only for confirmatory evidence (that is, evidence to support a given position) but for disconfirmatory evidence as well, and they end up using both kinds of evidence to develop their ideas. They aim to persuade yet also to provide as fair, honest, and complete an analysis as possible. For it is only such a fair and honest analysis, only such a careful appraisal of alternative and competing positions, only such a scrupulous but dispassionate scrutiny that will advance knowledge and understanding as it simultaneously opens up more questions.
While such goals are lofty ones, keep in mind too that writing such essays will also help you improve and clarify your own thoughts and insights, even about things that you thought you were already quite sure of. Sometimes, for example, you will have feelings and insights about an issue or a book or a film, but won't exactly know what they are — what they stem from, on what assumptions they might be based, or how they might connect with those of others. But writing the argumentative essay requires you to articulate these thoughts about an issue or text, and to organize your inchoate feelings and insights into a form accessible to others. Moreover, writing this kind of essay compels you to understand argumentation, a form of discourse that will be useful in any situation that requires analysis.
Once I had a position at an alternative newspaper (I was a contributing writer), and my job was to review science fiction movies. This would not have been difficult, except that I was always on a tight deadline — and I often would not really know what I wanted to say about movies like Nightwing or Dawn of the Dead. Yet I had to come up with something, maybe 1,500 words or so, and usually on the same night I had seen the film. So I had to mentally review that film first; I had to figure out what was special or striking or curious about it. And too I had to figure out if it worked — if I liked it. Then I wrote my review. Only by this exercise, really, was I able to determine, say, that Alien was a major achievement — and Nightwing was a flop. Argumentative writing helped me clarify both my feelings and my thoughts.
Before examining argument in detail, I'd like to look at more immediately recognizable and familiar kinds of writing. It seems to me that there are at least three discrete and historically established types of nonfiction writing, all of which differ from the kind of essay I describe here. The first might be called "essay as literature." Such a historically-established genre is quite capacious, and it can include personal essays or opinion pieces — these might resemble essays from magazines such as Harper's or the Atlantic, or from journals such as the American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, or Raritan. This literary genre of nonfiction, sometimes called "belles lettres," forms part of our Literary Tradition. It might include the works of Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, Addison and Steele, Margaret Fuller, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Loren Eiseley, Richard Rodriguez, Jordan Kisner, James Hannaham, Wendy Rawlings, and many others. The essay as work of art — memoirs, autobiographies, and other kinds of "creative nonfiction" — might fall under this rubric. Courses examining (and requiring) such writing are often offered by English departments.
Other university courses (often called "Technical Writing") are widely offered on the second major type of nonfiction writing, namely, "informative writing," a type of writing that intends primarily to convey information, not necessarily in a literary or artful manner, and often of a relatively quotidian sort — instruction manuals for our gadgets and appliances, software documentation so that we know how to use computer programs, statutes, warning labels, that sort of thing. Such writing also includes some reportage — journalism. It is the language of much business writing, such as memos, reports, announcements, email blasts. Hence such writing courses are often taught in schools of journalism or in business departments.
And finally, the third main category of nonfiction has as its primary goal persuasion: this writing attempts to make you do something, take a particular position, vote for a candidate or issue, buy a particular car or beer, drug or deodorant. Such writing appears in political speeches, legal cases, and advertising: it will use any tactic imaginable — whether logic, blatant appeals to guilt or emotion, or even thinly veiled threats of various kinds — to persuade its audience. Writing of this kind often forms the subject for courses in mass communication or media studies departments.
I hasten to add that these categories are by no means as clearly separated or nonoverlapping as I've made them out. Much informative writing seeks to persuade. Journalism can be "artful" and literary. Belletristic writing is often informative, as are some political speeches or even advertisements. But the general categories hold up, I think — even if we look at the kind of writing available on the Internet, which no doubt makes up a sizable moiety of what Americans read today.
Though all of these categories differ from one another, they do share some similarities as well. For example, writers in all these subgenres aim their work at a certain audience — and heed what they think are its expectations. They all rely on a series of conventions that writers must respect — what kind of format to use, what level of formality, what tone to adopt, what syntax, language, and vocabulary to employ. They all have a readily apparent organizational structure, which should be more or less evident from the outset.
So where does the "academic argument" fit in here? I propose that it hovers somewhere in the middle, drawing on the standard aspects of nonfiction writing, in that it attends to audience, conventions, tone, language, organization. But it also shares some specialized qualities with each of these three subgenres. Writers of the academic argument pay considerable attention to the way things are stated — often striving not necessarily to "be" artistic but to present points in a creative manner, a manner that has the artist's or craftsperson's sensitivity to form, precision, and image. This type of essay also must convey some information, some facts; it roots itself in the actual. Finally, the academic argument seeks to persuade, but not to persuade at any cost — it strives to convince through the use of logical argumentation, giving as fair, honest, and complete an analysis as possible.
In fact, the essays that I require students to write in classes must do more than just impress, convey information, or persuade. They try to offer a reasonable insight or idea and try to demonstrate to a specific audience how that idea is reasonable. The staple of "scholarship," this kind of writing resembles what professors — in many disciplines — must themselves do.
What is their writing like? While an academic argument certainly does express its author's opinion, this opinion is more than "just an opinion," a knee-jerk response, or an unexplored prejudice. Rather, academic argument offers a point of view buttressed by evidence. It provides an educated, considered, and reasoned opinion — an opinion not just offered or asserted, but argued for.
Professors argue their points of view, seeking to persuade, but they additionally examine other scholars' works and situate their writing within what might be called the "dialectical discourse" — in opposition to some works and in partial agreement with others. They convey information, drawing on secondary resource material. Such writing tends to be "formal," and it almost always appeals primarily to specialized audiences, such as those for New Literary History (literary theorists), Paeduma (scholars studying medieval literature), Urology (medical doctors who specialize in urology), or Behavioral and Brain Sciences (psychologists, philosophers, neurologists).
These "presumptive audiences" consist of other specialists in the field, and scholars can take for granted that their audience dwells within what the historian Carl Becker calls the same "climate of opinion": its frames of reference will be similar, and it will share at least some notion of the value and scope of the subject matter. People in it will have read a lot of the same source material and will be interested in the argument.
Throughout, I want to stress that the very writing of the essay itself — the process of writing — has just as much value as the finished product. And while that finished product may well form the basis for a published article or essay, the thought, the writing, the doing, the slaving-away-at-the-keyboard effort that the finished essay required has value in and of itself. Ultimately, too, you need to realize that this effort of writing a paper is even more rewarding and meaningful than the grade or what the professor has to say about the finished product. In a variation on the expression "The spoils is the game, not the victory," I want to offer "Writing finds its rewards in the I'm-writing, not the I've-written." Now, getting you to believe this — that will be part of my challenge in this book.
The Argument Essay Defined
In a way it is unfortunate that we need to use the term "argument" to describe a kind of writing, for "argument" most typically means a heated dispute, an altercation, a verbal fight. Actual fights may indeed follow the verbal fight of an "argument" too — an argument is a serious, emotional, and confrontational experience. It's worse than a spat, angrier than a discussion, more heated than a mere debate.
But forget all that, or put it in square brackets as something that does not map directly onto the rhetorical mode of "argument." Here (and in other textbooks about argumentation), "argument" refers to a kind of discourse, an organized verbal attempt to persuade an audience through the use of logic and reason. Obviously there are other ways to persuade people — ranging from torture and coercion, on one hand, to cajolery, satire, burlesque, or advertisement, on the other. But logical argument — if you will permit a value judgment — is the most civilized, the most high-minded mode. It's the mode most valued in the Academy anyway, and it has its own system of rules and prohibitions, its own structure, and its own ontology, some of which I will attempt to delineate in the following pages.
Written argument may take many forms. For example, a description might strive to show a new way of looking at something, such as a poem, a system of government, or a tax loophole; a classification would place something in an overarching organizational matrix or system; an evaluation makes a judgment about something based on comparison of that thing with a stipulated ideal type; a proposal might suggest a future course of action or present a problem that needs to be addressed; a comparison-contrast might compare two different things, issues, ideas, or texts in an effort to illuminate something about one or both of them; a cause-effect paper might show how a situation or state of affairs could lead to or cause another; a definition might argue for a new way of characterizing something. In his Rhetoric Aristotle gives twenty-eight valid "topics" for argument, but these can for the most part be distilled into the seven modes I have suggested above.
These modes — description, classification, evaluation, proposal, comparison-contrast, cause-effect, and definition — give you the structure or subgenre of your whole paper, but they don't tell you in any detail what you actually have to do. Basically, working within these modes, your paper needs to explain something. Usually a paper will attempt to explain something relatively complex and difficult — something in need of explanation — but sometimes the simplest things only seem simple. On closer inspection, they reveal themselves as not quite so simple and hence really do need to be explained.
Let me be more specific and offer some strategies that you might use when you attempt to explain something. Although these strategies are not mutually exclusive — many in fact overlap — I nonetheless offer them as examples of what an argumentative paper can usefully do by way of explaining. Your paper might do one or more of the following:
1. Interpret. An interpreter usually renders one language into another, and in some sense that is what an interpretation paper does as well. It is often seen as valuable, since it argues meaning or elucidation of something difficult and perhaps obscure. It translates one version of English into a more accessible version. (Susan Sontag challenges the value of interpretation, though, in her famous essay "Against Interpretation," which ultimately concludes that we need an "erotics of art" [20]). In an interpretation, you might focus on some aspect of language, or you might look at what various "key words" mean. This involves more than merely defining them — you might conceive of what special meanings the words have in the context of the work. For example, when the philosopher John Rawls writes about "the veil of ignorance," you need to know what kinds of things he has in mind with respect to creating a fair system of organizing a society. You also need to know dictionary definitions of words. On one exam I took in high school, I was given a poem, "The Chambered Nautilus" by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and asked to explicate it. My task was made far easier by the fact that I for some reason knew the nautilus to be a type of seashell. I was the only one in the class who knew this, so I felt like a star. Make sure that you look at all aspects of a work, including the title. For example, W. S. Merwin's short poem "Little children you will all go / but the one you are hiding / will fly" (404) makes some sense on its own, but its title, "Song of Man Chipping an Arrowhead," gives it a different meaning altogether. When Marshall McLuhan chose his famous book title, The Medium Is the Massage, he implied that a medium does more to "massage" than to convey any "message."
2. Uncover assumptions. Often a question or problem will include or imply assumptions that need to be unpacked or unmasked. Whether an essay examines a speech, a paleontological theory, a novel, or a yacht, there are underlying assumptions and elements inherent in the makeup of each of these things (speech, theory, novel, yacht), as well individual variations from novel to novel, or yacht to yacht, for example. This kind of paper would argue not just that certain underlying assumptions exist, but that they function in some interesting, elaborate, or perhaps unusual way. Sometimes an author's words themselves embody preexisting theoretical commitments. In fact, even the author might not know these implicit assumptions or they are so deeply rooted in the collective psyche that all of us might be unaware of them. But looking for these is often a useful, even sobering, task.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Imaginative Argument"
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