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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

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!

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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