5 ms·

I really don't understand why essays are bad. Is there any kind of research that goes into this? I agree with you that learning should be the goal. And any bus

I really don't understand why essays are bad. Is there any kind of research that goes into this? I agree with you that learning should be the goal. And any busy work that doesn't help should be eliminated. But I just don't know if we know what the right structure should be and if we can say for sure that things like writing essays don't actually help students cultivate their writing and critical thinking skills.

randomwalker 4y ago
I learned from one of the comments on my original post that many scholars have been saying this for a while, and that there's in fact a book that makes the same point! Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities https://www.amazon.com/Why-They-Cant-Write-Five-Paragraph/dp/1421427109 https://www.amazon.com/Why-They-Cant-Write-Five-Paragraph/dp...
lbotos 4y ago
It's an interesting question. I'd personally love to see more effort being given to "defend your point as succinctly as possible." I wrote a lot of "minimum word count essays and in the "real world" clarity trumps length every day. Length is used as some proxy for rigor, but we know it's only a proxy.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  I found that in elementary or secondary school page minimums were used to as a cheap proxy for effort. In college page maximums started appearing to encourage concision. Different needs for students at different points in their education.
- onos 4y ago
  I like this idea. Fwiw I feel I learned / grew a lot more in one technical writing class in college than I did in all my years of English classes. Later I picked ip a book “writing with style” that was also quite helpful. One issue for me in English was I really was not interested in the kinds of essays the English teachers were interested in having us write, eg coming up with a thesis on plot themes in Shakespeare. Just not my thing and so I couldn’t get anywhere in those classes.
- endtime 4y ago
  +100 When I write today, for work, the challenge is always to write less. My VP might have time to read two pages; he's almost certainly not going to read anything longer.
- adelie 4y ago
  My high school English teacher adamantly refused to read any essay over the length of one page, double-spaced. I learned more from that class than any other writing class I took.
dsr_ 4y ago
The American educational-system essay is an artificial construct designed to be easy to teach and easy to grade, without being useful for the purposes of educating the essay author or the audience or being persuasive. Writing is generally good. Expressing yourself is good. Analysis and critique are good. The artificial essay is useless.
- z3c0 4y ago
  Especially the 5-paragraph essay. Doubly so where paragraphs are rigidly-defined as "a collection of five or more sentences". I argued with a lot of teachers over that one. All it did was teach kids how to write boring simple sentences to meet the implicit "punctuation quota". An equal amount of content compacted into a couple of complex/compound sentences would actually result in marks off.
  - quacked 4y ago
    Which is exactly the type of writing that an AI excels at. Educators have made their own bed, and GPT-3 is just tucking them in.
  - _gabe_ 4y ago
    You have to learn the rules before you break the rules. The 5 paragraph essay taught me a lot about how to create a convincing written argument. The rules are: 1. Start with a hook. Engage the reader. 2. Present the ideas (2-3) that you will be discussing in the essay. Have you ever read a rambling blog post? Yeah, they suck. There's no direction and you don't retain much. Also, 2-3 ideas in one essay is a great number. There's all those studies that say we can only hold 5 things in working memory at once, blah blah blah. Keeping the essay focused on a few core ideas helps the reader retain them better, and the writer to have a well defined scope. 3. Extrapolate the concise ideas in 2-3 concise paragraphs. Ever read a rambling blog post? Yeah, they suck. Telling students to keep paragraphs in 3-5 sentences helps the essay communicate the ideas in a concise manner. It also helps block out the text in small visually appealing blocks. Ever read super condensed very long paragraphs? Yeah, they suck. It helps to break up your thoughts with some whitespace. (It's almost like coding benefits from this as well...) 4. Conclude your essay. Reiterate what you wanted to cover. This helps the reader retain the ideas, and it allows the author to tie up the ideas in a nice bow. I love when I finish a book or essay and everything comes together and reaffirms what I've been reading the whole time. This format is not only great building blocks, but it helps you write larger volumes. If you repeat these small steps several times, you create chapters. If you repeat these steps on a macro level, the chapters tie together into a cohesive piece of literature. These unnecessary "quotas" may sound meaningless, but a lot of people have thought very hard about how to create basic building blocks writers can follow. These building blocks allow the writers to create concise, well formed arguments. "Boring simple sentences" are extremely conducive to clear and concise writing. I'll take boring sentences that form complex ideas over complex fluff that describes nothing any day. (This is almost analogous to good code design too, weird...)
criddell 4y ago
I think you’re going at it backwards. If you are going to ask a student to write an essay, it’s on you to be able to show that it’s the best way to help that particular student cultivate their writing and critical thinking skills.
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  Perhaps I'm just... thick, but if a goal is to have someone write, say, 8 pages of thinking and ideas about a topic... I'm not sure there's 'better' ways than to have the person write 8 pages of thinking and ideas about a topic. If the goal is wrong, perhaps just don't do it, but... "it's on you to show that it's the best way". I don't get it. If I want to see that a student has writing skills, I would think expecting them to write is somewhat definitional? Maybe it's on someone else to 'show' a better way to demonstrate writing skills that doesn't involve writing.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > want to see that a student has writing skills This is a fine goal. Having “someone write, say, 8 pages” is not, it’s a task, and a tedious one at that. No good writer starts with a page goal. It’s a common criticism by great writer’s of bad publishers.
    - mgkimsal 4y ago
      Personally, my experience with page count assignments were... loose. The goal was never "write 8 pages" but "write about idea ABC" (book just read, subject we just studied). '5 pages' or 8 or whatever was a guideline, with the expectation that to get XYZ ideas across, it'll probably be around that length. If the guideline was X words or Y pages, and I got the ideas across in less (or more), but the ideas were strong, I still got a good grade. Perhaps some of that has changed, but... "write an essay about $foo", and you turn in 2 paragraphs... you'd get marked down. Again, it's been awhile since I've been in middle/high school, so it may have changed some.
      - 4y ago
quacked 4y ago
Essays are wonderful. It gives me great joy to write essays today, although they're sometimes called "blog posts" or "rants" or "emails" or "memos". I hated writing essays in school, because the assignment was always "reproduce a work of writing that adheres to the arbitrary standards of the institution for grading purposes". Great writing can't be graded, as its value is entirely subjective. As an example, here's an assignment that I might have completed under duress, vs. one that I'd complete voluntarily for fun: "Explain how the theme of Chaos is expressed in Slaughterhouse Five. Use at least five supporting examples from the text and cite your references MLA style. Four pages minimum." "Convince your best friend that Slaughterhouse Five is a terrible novel. Cite the text any way you please, ideally by comparing it to a book you think is actually good." Whatever I produced for the first prompt can be graded by ticking off boxes and looking at my grammar; whatever I produced for the second prompt would need a thorough investigation of my own writing style and a framework of grading that takes into account my own voice as an author. (To be clear--I don't think that giving my prompt in a modern classroom would immediately inspire students. They are far too burdened by the entire system for a single change to fix their experience. I am merely discussing the difference between "pointless essays" and "essays that authors care about".)
- mc32 4y ago
  I think you had a different experience. My experience with essays most typically was to choose your topic, research and write an essay. The standardized tests did usually ask you to choose from one of three topics, none of which was usually something you were enamored with, but that did force you to change from your comfort zone and adapt to situational necessity.
- allturtles 4y ago
  Leaving aside the fact that your two examples assess a pretty different set of skills, one has to deal with the reality that every teacher has many students. It's simply not realistic to expect them to do "a thorough investigation" of every student's style and "voice." Imagine you have 50 students across two classes, each turning in one of these essays. How long are you going to spend on each one? 5 minutes? That's 4 hours of grading time. 15 minutes? 12 hours. Now consider that most of your school day is already occupied with teaching, prepping for classes, office hours, and other responsibilities.
rustybelt 4y ago
I'll go a step further and defend "busywork". Unfortunately we don't live in a perfectly efficient society so being able to learn and execute a formulaic task that might not seem valuable is a necessary skill for most adults. Especially since individual actors may not have all the necessary information to fully assess the value of a task within a larger framework.
volkhavaar 4y ago
When I taught a class where I assigned essays I confirmed my own suspicions from when I was assigned essays: the majority of the sentences committed to paper are awful drudgery. I then flipped the requirements on their head and removed minimum page requirements and instead had extremely strict maximum page requirements (with of course the objective material requirements of the essay itself). So much improvement for everyone involved. I had to read through so much less pointless material and the students were forced to focus their ideas in a succinct way to be able to get to all of the objectives of the essay in the limited space. Everyone saved time and did better.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  When I taught a class, I had a strict 3 page maximum on lab reports for this reason. So many people are used to turning in 10's of pages of drudgery. I just want a few that get to the heart of the issue.
thwayunion 4y ago
Being a concert violinist is fun but playing scales isn't fun. I can't wait for the robots to learn how to play scales for me so I can focus on becoming a concert violinist. ;-)
cannabis_sam 4y ago
Writing essays is not the problem, grading the essays and grades in general are the problem. Feedback is obviously invaluable, but the point of grades, as used today, is solely to gatekeep who are allowed access to the next level of education. So instead of constructive feedback, it has become a set of filters entirely divorced from actual learning. (And yes, I got good grades, I just hate that so many people I know were denied opportunities based on a shitty system, wildly not fit for purpose)

randomwalker 4y ago

I learned from one of the comments on my original post that many scholars have been saying this for a while, and that there's in fact a book that makes the same point! Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities https://www.amazon.com/Why-They-Cant-Write-Five-Paragraph/dp/1421427109 https://www.amazon.com/Why-They-Cant-Write-Five-Paragraph/dp...

lbotos 4y ago

It's an interesting question. I'd personally love to see more effort being given to "defend your point as succinctly as possible." I wrote a lot of "minimum word count essays and in the "real world" clarity trumps length every day. Length is used as some proxy for rigor, but we know it's only a proxy.

HWR_14 4y ago
I found that in elementary or secondary school page minimums were used to as a cheap proxy for effort. In college page maximums started appearing to encourage concision. Different needs for students at different points in their education.
onos 4y ago
I like this idea. Fwiw I feel I learned / grew a lot more in one technical writing class in college than I did in all my years of English classes. Later I picked ip a book “writing with style” that was also quite helpful. One issue for me in English was I really was not interested in the kinds of essays the English teachers were interested in having us write, eg coming up with a thesis on plot themes in Shakespeare. Just not my thing and so I couldn’t get anywhere in those classes.
endtime 4y ago
+100 When I write today, for work, the challenge is always to write less. My VP might have time to read two pages; he's almost certainly not going to read anything longer.
adelie 4y ago
My high school English teacher adamantly refused to read any essay over the length of one page, double-spaced. I learned more from that class than any other writing class I took.

dsr_ 4y ago

The American educational-system essay is an artificial construct designed to be easy to teach and easy to grade, without being useful for the purposes of educating the essay author or the audience or being persuasive. Writing is generally good. Expressing yourself is good. Analysis and critique are good. The artificial essay is useless.

z3c0 4y ago
Especially the 5-paragraph essay. Doubly so where paragraphs are rigidly-defined as "a collection of five or more sentences". I argued with a lot of teachers over that one. All it did was teach kids how to write boring simple sentences to meet the implicit "punctuation quota". An equal amount of content compacted into a couple of complex/compound sentences would actually result in marks off.
- quacked 4y ago
  Which is exactly the type of writing that an AI excels at. Educators have made their own bed, and GPT-3 is just tucking them in.
- _gabe_ 4y ago
  You have to learn the rules before you break the rules. The 5 paragraph essay taught me a lot about how to create a convincing written argument. The rules are: 1. Start with a hook. Engage the reader. 2. Present the ideas (2-3) that you will be discussing in the essay. Have you ever read a rambling blog post? Yeah, they suck. There's no direction and you don't retain much. Also, 2-3 ideas in one essay is a great number. There's all those studies that say we can only hold 5 things in working memory at once, blah blah blah. Keeping the essay focused on a few core ideas helps the reader retain them better, and the writer to have a well defined scope. 3. Extrapolate the concise ideas in 2-3 concise paragraphs. Ever read a rambling blog post? Yeah, they suck. Telling students to keep paragraphs in 3-5 sentences helps the essay communicate the ideas in a concise manner. It also helps block out the text in small visually appealing blocks. Ever read super condensed very long paragraphs? Yeah, they suck. It helps to break up your thoughts with some whitespace. (It's almost like coding benefits from this as well...) 4. Conclude your essay. Reiterate what you wanted to cover. This helps the reader retain the ideas, and it allows the author to tie up the ideas in a nice bow. I love when I finish a book or essay and everything comes together and reaffirms what I've been reading the whole time. This format is not only great building blocks, but it helps you write larger volumes. If you repeat these small steps several times, you create chapters. If you repeat these steps on a macro level, the chapters tie together into a cohesive piece of literature. These unnecessary "quotas" may sound meaningless, but a lot of people have thought very hard about how to create basic building blocks writers can follow. These building blocks allow the writers to create concise, well formed arguments. "Boring simple sentences" are extremely conducive to clear and concise writing. I'll take boring sentences that form complex ideas over complex fluff that describes nothing any day. (This is almost analogous to good code design too, weird...)

criddell 4y ago

I think you’re going at it backwards. If you are going to ask a student to write an essay, it’s on you to be able to show that it’s the best way to help that particular student cultivate their writing and critical thinking skills.

mgkimsal 4y ago
Perhaps I'm just... thick, but if a goal is to have someone write, say, 8 pages of thinking and ideas about a topic... I'm not sure there's 'better' ways than to have the person write 8 pages of thinking and ideas about a topic. If the goal is wrong, perhaps just don't do it, but... "it's on you to show that it's the best way". I don't get it. If I want to see that a student has writing skills, I would think expecting them to write is somewhat definitional? Maybe it's on someone else to 'show' a better way to demonstrate writing skills that doesn't involve writing.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > want to see that a student has writing skills This is a fine goal. Having “someone write, say, 8 pages” is not, it’s a task, and a tedious one at that. No good writer starts with a page goal. It’s a common criticism by great writer’s of bad publishers.
  - mgkimsal 4y ago
    Personally, my experience with page count assignments were... loose. The goal was never "write 8 pages" but "write about idea ABC" (book just read, subject we just studied). '5 pages' or 8 or whatever was a guideline, with the expectation that to get XYZ ideas across, it'll probably be around that length. If the guideline was X words or Y pages, and I got the ideas across in less (or more), but the ideas were strong, I still got a good grade. Perhaps some of that has changed, but... "write an essay about $foo", and you turn in 2 paragraphs... you'd get marked down. Again, it's been awhile since I've been in middle/high school, so it may have changed some.
    - 4y ago

quacked 4y ago

Essays are wonderful. It gives me great joy to write essays today, although they're sometimes called "blog posts" or "rants" or "emails" or "memos". I hated writing essays in school, because the assignment was always "reproduce a work of writing that adheres to the arbitrary standards of the institution for grading purposes". Great writing can't be graded, as its value is entirely subjective. As an example, here's an assignment that I might have completed under duress, vs. one that I'd complete voluntarily for fun: "Explain how the theme of Chaos is expressed in Slaughterhouse Five. Use at least five supporting examples from the text and cite your references MLA style. Four pages minimum." "Convince your best friend that Slaughterhouse Five is a terrible novel. Cite the text any way you please, ideally by comparing it to a book you think is actually good." Whatever I produced for the first prompt can be graded by ticking off boxes and looking at my grammar; whatever I produced for the second prompt would need a thorough investigation of my own writing style and a framework of grading that takes into account my own voice as an author. (To be clear--I don't think that giving my prompt in a modern classroom would immediately inspire students. They are far too burdened by the entire system for a single change to fix their experience. I am merely discussing the difference between "pointless essays" and "essays that authors care about".)

mc32 4y ago
I think you had a different experience. My experience with essays most typically was to choose your topic, research and write an essay. The standardized tests did usually ask you to choose from one of three topics, none of which was usually something you were enamored with, but that did force you to change from your comfort zone and adapt to situational necessity.
allturtles 4y ago
Leaving aside the fact that your two examples assess a pretty different set of skills, one has to deal with the reality that every teacher has many students. It's simply not realistic to expect them to do "a thorough investigation" of every student's style and "voice." Imagine you have 50 students across two classes, each turning in one of these essays. How long are you going to spend on each one? 5 minutes? That's 4 hours of grading time. 15 minutes? 12 hours. Now consider that most of your school day is already occupied with teaching, prepping for classes, office hours, and other responsibilities.

rustybelt 4y ago

I'll go a step further and defend "busywork". Unfortunately we don't live in a perfectly efficient society so being able to learn and execute a formulaic task that might not seem valuable is a necessary skill for most adults. Especially since individual actors may not have all the necessary information to fully assess the value of a task within a larger framework.

volkhavaar 4y ago

When I taught a class where I assigned essays I confirmed my own suspicions from when I was assigned essays: the majority of the sentences committed to paper are awful drudgery. I then flipped the requirements on their head and removed minimum page requirements and instead had extremely strict maximum page requirements (with of course the objective material requirements of the essay itself). So much improvement for everyone involved. I had to read through so much less pointless material and the students were forced to focus their ideas in a succinct way to be able to get to all of the objectives of the essay in the limited space. Everyone saved time and did better.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
When I taught a class, I had a strict 3 page maximum on lab reports for this reason. So many people are used to turning in 10's of pages of drudgery. I just want a few that get to the heart of the issue.

thwayunion 4y ago

Being a concert violinist is fun but playing scales isn't fun. I can't wait for the robots to learn how to play scales for me so I can focus on becoming a concert violinist. ;-)

cannabis_sam 4y ago

Writing essays is not the problem, grading the essays and grades in general are the problem. Feedback is obviously invaluable, but the point of grades, as used today, is solely to gatekeep who are allowed access to the next level of education. So instead of constructive feedback, it has become a set of filters entirely divorced from actual learning. (And yes, I got good grades, I just hate that so many people I know were denied opportunities based on a shitty system, wildly not fit for purpose)