From Montaigne to the five-paragraph essay: Resuscitating sophisticated academic writing in English (original) (raw)
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How do opinion, discussion, and argumentative convince readers? How does each of them look different from each other seen from the generic structure, and language use? This conceptual paper is exploring how three selected genres in academic writing differ from each other. By reviewing journals of related topic of recently published, the writer convinces that opinion genre is less strong in persuading readers, and argumentative is very strong in assuring readers, whereas discussion is neutral in affecting readers The implication is that each genre has its own place to make readers satisfied and each of which indicates the level of ego and sophisticated countering back the statement called rebuttal and arguments and example. By reading this article readers will detect the tone of each genre and to what extent does each genre reach the readers' mind. The implication is that any teacher or lecturer is best recommended to present this model, particularly in EFL context.
Teaching in Higher Education, 2003
There is no doubt that the essay is a noble and well-established genre in higher education, at least in the UK, Canada and Australia 1. Womack (1993) calls it the "default genre" for the assessment of understanding, not only in higher education but at the upper levels of school and college education too. In earlier work (eg Andrews 1995, pp9-18) , I"ve explored the etymological origin of the term "essay", coming as it does into English from the French essai meaning an "attempt". The term"s derivation from words meaning "first drafts" or "attempts" is not reflected in the current use of the term to describe finished assignments submitted for assessment or examination. Although students might be generally assumed to be attempting an analysis of a certain section of knowledge in order to demonstrate their emerging understanding of it, it is usually assumed in higher education that once the essay is submitted, the die is cast. The essay 2 represents the state of a student"s understanding and is assessed accordingly. The submission and the response (assuming a response of high quality) have a formative function, but their principal function is to gain a mark or grade on the way to a degree. In this respect, the essay is more like "an offering to a great personage"-one of the definitions of "essay" in the Oxford English Dictionary. A very short history of the essay Although the modern essay is assumed to start with Montaigne and Bacon, the derivation of the Renaissance essay is from the rhetorical speeches of classical Greece (and before) through sermons, progymnasmata (in effect, form and style exercises in the grammar schools of the early Renaissance), occasional pieces and other short expository forms. As Gross (1991) points out in The Oxford Book of Essays, the form "can shade into the character sketch, the travel sketch, the memoir, the jeu d'esprit" (p.xix) but its distinguishing marks post-Montaigne are "intimacy and informality" (ibid). This casualor seemingly casualstyle allows for the expression of discursive thoughts, not necessarily logically structured. However, the forms of the essay employed in school and higher education have departed significantly from those expected in literary magazines or as features in newspapers. While the latter are characterised by an intelligent informality, the former are bound by assessment demands, school/university genre conventions and "structure". And yet, even within the convention of the school/university essay, there is a spectrum ranging from the explicit, abstract and logically structured at one end, to the more personal, idiosyncratic and expressive-" a loose sally of the mind", to quote Dr. Johnsonat the other. It is this spectrum which makes sets of criteria for the assessment of essays so difficult to compose and apply; and, more importantly, for students to interpret. Despite Corbett"s (1965) seminal work for college students on what classical rhetoric can offer to shape academic writing, the essay has been a matter of concern in the last twenty years in school and higher education. Freedman and Pringle (e.g. 1980) set the tone with their analyses of the problems faced by school and university students in composing essays, whereas in the UK debate focussed largely on
A Proposal for Teaching the Literary Essay through a Rhetorical Analysis
1970
The literary essay is a heterogeneous genre that may contain expository, narrative, descriptive and argumentative types of text. Due to its indefinite nature, it is difficult to find critical studies that develop an accurate understanding of the essay that may lead to an objective teaching of this genre. However, as an exemplar of the argumentative discourse, the literary essay can be studied following a rhetorical model of analysis. Rhetoric can be seen as a general model of text production and as an instrument of textual analysis. In this vein, some rhetorical principles related to inventio, dispositio and elocutio can be recognised in the construction of the modern essay. Inventio is concerned with the generation of arguments. Dispositio is related to the order of the arguments, and contains the partes orationis: exordium, narratio/expositio, argumentatio and conclusio. By means of elocutio, the students recognise the expressive devices that contribute to defining the style of the essay, such as rhetorical figures. To illustrate my proposal, I use several extracts from Virginia Woolf's short essays. Woolf wrote a large number of literary reviews for the press that can be read following this rhetorical approach and that provide a rich source of arguments and rhetorical figures. In the course of my analysis, I offer undergraduate students of English language and literature some guidelines for the analysis. By using this model, these students can also acquire the training to examine other essays belonging to past and present essayists.
Western Essayist Literacy"--A Way of Teaching
1992
College students, when writing essays in writing courses, are generally called upon to show that they have an ability to organize the essay according to an established pattern which includes an introduction, the body of the text, and a conclusion. This pattern of discourse, called "Essayist Literacy," is most favored by mainstream society. However, enlisting students to learn and use the language of mainstream academia is obviously not all there is to learning how to write well. Writing instructors must look beyond what they teach to how they teach it. To examine how writing teachers teach and the effects of that teaching on students, a study was conducted by observing one basic writing course for an entire semester, audiotaping all class sessions, and taping conversations with the students and instructor as well as conferences. The discourse patterns of the essayist literacy style dominated the class both in written and oral communication. This discourse pattern is not limited to composition courses, but pervades the college and virtually all social groups. Composition textbooks and handbooks also strongly hold to these patterns. Writing instructors must look at this model of discourse carefully in terms of its implications for the classroom. Clearly, the farther a student's culture is from the mainstream culture, the more problems that student will have when it come to doing well in schools based on the essayist literacy pattern. (Eighteen references are attached.) (HB)
Beyond the Narrative Mode in the Composition Classroom: Embracing a Return to the Personal Essay
Cea Forum, 2013
There is no idea so frivolous or odd which does not appear to me to be fittingly produced by the mind of man.-Montaigne As spring finally takes a tentative hold of the newly green landscape of northeastern Kentucky, I am sitting comfortably in my living room, grading one last batch of student essays before the semester ends. The deer emerge confidently from the hillside for their usual evening snack of whatever it is they find to eat on my front lawn, and I watch them quietly as I reflect on the term now behind me. I am happy in the reminiscence that I organized my Freshman Composition course so thoroughly that I was able to keep my students on track throughout the term. My course evaluations will reflect that my course was a success, as students invariably agree that I am well organized, that I offer specific writing assignments, and that I am "easy to relate to" and always "there" for them when they need me. What they do not know, however, is that I have cheated them. Like the deer that tread confidently into my front yard because they know it is safe there, I have once again stepped lightly into the classroom, treating it as a safe space with my standard stock of tried and true thesis-driven essay assignments. Among other tasks, these assignments teach inductive and deductive reasoning, definition claims, and how to construct airtight, fallacy-free arguments with healthy doses of logos, ethos, THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2013 50 WWW.CEA-WEB.ORG and pathos on the side. I have convinced myself they are the kinds of assignments that will ensure my students' success in future classes outside of the English department, but in my heart, that space where my poet-self still resides, I know these assignments do not encourage my students to be writers in any real sense. My students may leave my classroom feeling as though they have gotten their money's worth, but I know they are shortchanged in the fact that I have not truly allowed them to discover any real joy in writing. The truth is, incrementally, almost imperceptibly, I have become one of those teachers who C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon say seem to believe that "what students say matters less than how they say it, that learning to manipulate strategies and genres is more important than thinking well in language or discovering personal stances and values" (47). While I know there is a better way, I have begun to place "emphasis on conventions instead of meaning," implying that the "conventions matter more than anything else, that manipulating audiences through technical virtuosity is the ultimate purpose of learning to write" (47). Knoblauch and Brannon might suggest I pry loose the grip that ancient rhetorical tradition has on my modern classroom, but I'm not convinced I can so easily abandon the ancient rhetoricians. Learning to embrace the different, more creative, and less frequently acknowledged elements of this tradition may be the way for me to go instead. The ancient art of rhetoric recognizes and celebrates the ambiguity of language; rhetoric speculates about the world and invites others to make their own speculations. The essays we assign our students to write, such as the narrative essay, however, discourage ambiguity and speculation. They force students to write about what they already know about their lives or the world around them. Composition instructors should turn, instead, to the personal essay via the father of the form, Michel de THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2013 51 WWW.CEA-WEB.ORG Montaigne. Montaigne's example encourages students to explore their lives and only attempt to make sense of them. Unlike the stiff narrative essay encouraged by modes-based readers, the personal essay is invigorated by creativity, spontaneity, and personal discovery. If we yearn for our students to experience writing in this light, we need to create a space in our classrooms that allows for Aristotle's art of wondering and encourages Plato's motley of ideas. We need to promote students' ruminations about life, rather than privilege their explaining of it, in a space that allows for vulnerability and contradictions along their paths to discovery. William A. Covino offers a way onto these paths in his description of the often unacknowledged creative elements of ancient rhetorical tradition in his essay, "The Classical Art of Wondering: Plato, Aristotle, Cicero." Covino notes that despite the fact that since the 1960's "invention and discovery in composition scholarship and pedagogy has recalled an Aristotle who provides 'topics' rather than rules, and who illuminates discourse as too complex for reduction to the terms of positivist science," a "common emphasis still prevails upon rhetoric as technique" (9). The history of rhetoric, Covino explains, is one of a "progressive denial of the ambiguity of language and literature," a slow ossification into "stock recitations and formulas" (9), so that by 1840 DeQuincey mourned the "forgotten rhetoric of ambiguity" and called for a "return to discourse that exploits uncertainty, the play of 'inversions, evolutions, and harlequin changes that eddy about the truth'" (9). The "forgotten" rhetors are those who elaborate Plato's conception of rhetoric as an "art of wondering, and writing as a mode of avoiding rather than intending closure" (9), Covino contends. In this light, we have done the ancients a disservice in assuming that "philosophical and literary 'greatness' is accomplished by philosophical and literary unity and coherence" (10). In taking Plato's Phaedrus as an example, Covino says THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2013 52 WWW.CEA-WEB.ORG critics' urgency to find a subject or purpose in the piece neglects the "irresolute complexity that informs philosophical rhetoric and writing for Plato" (10). By simply "understanding the Phaedrus as a unified system of discourse principles, or as a lesson about love or wisdom or beauty, we mimic the limitations of Phaedrus himself, the boy who would rather acquire and memorize facts and concepts than ask questions" (13). What the Phaedrus is ultimately about, however, is the "art of wondering, about rhetoric and writing and reading as play with an expanding horizon" (21). Covino explains that like the Phaedrus, Aristotle's Rhetoric is also often regarded as a "body of precepts and principles that can be represented schematically" (21). For Aristotle, however, a "rhetor's exploration is propelled by indeterminacy" (25). As evidenced in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, Covino says, "the art of rhetoric underlines the ambiguity of language; to practice the art, one remains mindful that all conclusions are provisional, tentative" (25). Finally, despite the fact that Cicero has come under fire by contemporary critics such as Knoblauch and Brannon for promoting a "ceremonial view of discourse among students" and reducing writing to a "ritual performance" (Covino 33), Covino reminds us that Cicero's contribution to the field of rhetoric can, like Plato and Aristotle's, be understood as the "identification of rhetoric and writing with irresolution and ambiguity" (34). Cicero, Covino argues, champions the importance of the orator as a philosopher, "constantly engaged in speculation in all the subjects that affect human affairs" (35). We should note, then, that Cicero's De Oratore should not be read as an exposition on rhetoric, but as a "demonstration of the vast art sketched in the introduction, a demonstration which warns students against the tendency to reduce rhetoric to an academic box by dramatizing the impossibility of settling on the nature of THE CEA FORUM
Rethinking Academic Essay Writing: Selected Genres in Comparison
2017
How do opinion, discussion, and argumentative convince readers? How does each of them look different each other seen from the generic structure, and language use? This conceptual paper is exploring how three selected genres in academic writing differ from each other. By reviewing journal of related topic of recently published, the writer convinces that opinion genre is less strong in persuading readers, and argumentative is very strong in assuring readers, whereas discussion is neutral in affecting readers The implication is that each genre has its own place to make readers satisfied and each of which indicates the level of ego and sophisticated countering back the statement called rebuttal and arguments and example. By reading this article readers will detect the tone of each genre and to what extent does each genre reach the readers’ mind. The implication is that any teacher or lecturer is best recommended to present this model, particularly in EFL context.
The process of essay writing in a literature course: the student’s views and the tutor’s feedback
2019
Writing academic texts is an inevitable component of contemporary higher education; writing in a more specific sense is an indispensable method when teaching a particular subject (Blau, 2003). As a species of text, essay-form is an integral piece of writing in which one expresses in depth his/her opinions or feelings on a particular subject. In higher education teaching, essay-form has been used mainly as an individually graded writing task, which enables students to align their own subjective points of view to more general philosophical or scientific perspectives. For this type of academic or English style essay, it is common to have a rather personal discursive overall mood, critical and argumentative perspective, and stylistic comprehension. While the essay, in its traditional form, involves logic, dialectics, and rhetoric, it still enables students to put forward their own personal views as well as to interpret the variety of generic features of the essay-form in a more general ...
Towards More Sophisticated Academic Writing: Moving Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay
Language Education in Asia, 2013
This article argues that due to test washback, simplicity of instruction, misconceptions of Western-heritage teachers about Asian students, and prevalence in ESL textbooks, the conventional five-paragraph essay is the dominant writing form taught to Asian university students. Yet as Dombek and Herndon (2004) observe, such a simplified form does not reflect the "periodic development" commonly found in the essays of proficient English-language writers and expected in Western university courses. To address this shortcoming, two sophisticated teaching methodologies used in language and liberal arts programs in Thailand and Japan are presented: the essay based upon periodic rather than cumulative development, and the Situation-Problem-Solution-Evaluation (SPSE) approach. Such pedagogies, it is argued, challenge students to move beyond formulas, to incorporate and integrate sources (in addition to personal experience), to engage in critical and creative analysis, and to enact a richer process of thinking in their writing. The Orthodoxy of the Five-Paragraph Essay In a compilation of critical perspectives on language instruction in TESOL Quarterly in 1999, Alastair Pennycook observed that work in TESOL had for a long time been "too narrowly constructed to be of much interest to people outside the area" (p. 346). In other words, the instrumentalist assumptions that underlie much of the field seem to have been accepted to degree that analysis rarely occurred in the discipline. This rigidity continues to be illustrated in the widespread use-and misuse-of the "five-paragraph essay." Any student who has been required to take an English proficiency examination, such as the TOEFL or IELTS, will have been taught this familiar several-paragraph thesis-driven form (typically five paragraphs, but
The five-paragraph theme, while widely used by writing instructors, has often been criticized for its tendency to focus on a rigid formula rather than a writer's ideas. This study investigates the decision of an early-career teacher, Leigh, to teach her eighth-grade students the five-paragraph model in the context of a state-mandated writing assessment that rewarded such writing. The key settings for Leigh in learning to teach were her structurally fragmented teacher education program, her relationship with her mentor teacher during student teaching, and, as she embarked on her first teaching job, her entry-year supervisory committee and her English department colleagues. Through an activity-theory analysis of field notes, observation-based interviews, and other data, we interpret Leigh's decision-making as a function of her participation in tool-mediated action in these settings. Leigh's teaching was affected by forces without (e.g., community expectations to produce passing scores on the state writing test) and within (e.g., her colleagues' pressure on Leigh to teach to the test). These pressures superceded the motives of other settings in which Leigh participated, primarily her administration's downplay of the need to teach to the test. The study concludes with a reflection on why Leigh in particular and other teachers in general find this form useful enough to serve as a primary tool in their approach to teaching writing.