Don’t use the word “titties” that’s unprofessional street vernacular unfit for academic settings. /s
“So I’m sitting there, barbecue sauce on my norks.”
Better?
as someone forced to read essays written by children but not involved in the education process, I really wish we stopped teaching like this. about 99% of essays I read have a great lede, and then 98% of them veer off into tangents and get off track. It feels like American education is so focused on the lede that it ignores the nut graf completely.
This is so true, and it’s actively harmful when students go on to university. Many students write like their main goal is to impress their readers. The opposite is true in academic writing, where this kind of flamboyant writing actually weakens the substance.
This is exactly it. They think they’ll look better if their essay shows off two or three different things they’ve done, when the truth is that the best essays I’ve read are from students who pick one singular thing and fully explore it. Classic style over substance.
Where I grew up, they’d teach us the inner part of essays too… in the same way, every time, with similar length and structure.
So they would teach us to do it like so:
- Introduction (do really good or something we won’t tell you how)
- Claim (1 sentence, no more)
- Evidence (2 sentences, more if I in particular allow it in my class)
- Reasoning (3 sentences, must be at least 3 sentences regardless of the amount of reasoning required)
- Repeat 3 times (never 2, never 4 or more, regardless of topic)
Always the same length, always the same structure, and doing to many or too little sentences even if it would make sense (which led to people stretching their word count) would get you a bad grade, and doing any kind of different structure would also get you a bad grade (think: making a claim at the beginning, but only answering it at the end with a callback) while discussing other points between that.
When told to then write more narrative driven things, we were given absolutely no guide on how to do it, and just told to “write a story”.
I remember in school they at some point decided that literally every class must require students write a 5 paragraph essay every quarter. And those 5 paragraphs must be:
- Introduction
- Argument 1
- Argument 2
- Argument 3
- Conclusion
Absolutely no other line breaks were permitted regardless of existing grammatical/stylistic rules you may be breaking in the process and you must have exactly 5 paragraphs with exactly those contents, no more, no less.
Since literally every writing assignment was now a 5 paragraph essay, including both big English assignments where they wanted a couple thousand words, and the simple little one day assignments where they just wanted half a page, they all had to be exactly 5 paragraphs. I honestly entirely forgot how to properly paragraph my writing. It was fun, in the way that it was infinitely frustrating. Now whenever I see a 5 paragraph essay format I get emu war flashbacks to school and cringe so hard
It’s been over a decade and a half, but I had the opposite problem with my English courses.
My writing classes established such a rigid pattern to our essays that they would give us an outline with what kind of sentence went where, you filled in the blanks and ended up with an essay. Which is great for kids struggling, but it didn’t allow for any fucking deviation from the pattern at all.
Only need two supporting paragraphs with a little more in each to make your point? Like hell you do! Three supporting paragraphs or you lose points.
Things would flow better if you broke one of your supporting paragraphs into two smaller ones, for a total of four? Well that’s just impossible! Three supporting paragraphs or you lose points.
One of your supporting paragraphs have a point that needs two sentences to communicate well? No it doesn’t! One sentence for each detail in your supporting paragraph!
You have four supporting details/sentences instead of just three? Get fucked kid!
Lose points for any deviation.
It wasn’t until my junior year of high school (penultimate year of non-university school, for folks who use a different structure) that one teacher finally went “Hey, this kid is reading college literature course books for fun (Don Quixote, at the time) and can hold a decent conversation about the themes and such. Maybe I could try letting him off the leash.”
I went from the English class for kids who underperformed to the “Hey, take a college course for college credit early kiddo!” class, and killed it.
Oh hey I just wrote a comment about those damn five paragraph essays!
Holy shit I forgot about the struggle of either getting 3 good arguments or choosing only 3 arguments. Also the way they insisted we state the arguments 3 times, once I the introduction, once in that arguments section and once in the conclusion was clunky as hell and they did not like me trying to make it more elegant and have the writing flow better. You also reminded me of those fill in the blank worksheets that were just…holy shit.
I remember one of my college professors commenting my papers were some of his favorites simply because he could tell I understood structure. He spent many hours lamenting the lack of continuity he saw in even the STEM students known for thinking logically.
The part that really blows my mind is the kids who have published research papers but still don’t understand this. I know they understand the concept of a thesis statement! They know how to write a closing paragraph! Yet still, they’ll write a meandering essay about three unrelated topics with no attempt to tie them together.
It’s always the journalism kids that seem to actually understand how to write. The overfocus on STEM sucks.
My STEM college was still big on humanities. We were required to take a writing and communication class specifically focused on effective writing. They understood it doesn’t matter how good your engineering work is if you can’t convey it to anyone.
I think the problem is a more fundamental flaw in how we teach and convey ideas and a core problem with the education process.
I didn’t like having to take humanities classes in college but I’ve become an ardent supporter of it. Gen eds matter, a college degree is supposed to declare you generally educated but with a focus on something.
That’s at the college level though. Unfortunately, I work with high schoolers, and I have not seen the same levels of respect given to the humanities as I see STEM in US high schools. Hell, in some states they seem to straight up allow students to take more STEM courses in lieu of humanities.
I once got a 0 on an essay for my history class because I forgot to highlight my topic sentences. Meanwhile, another student wrote about goddamed dinosaurs (I swear I’m not making this up!) and aced it.
And this was a fucking gifted-level class in high school, not a remedial exercise in 5-paragraph essay structure. Or so I had thought, anyway.
Burn in Hell, Mrs. Funderburk, you incompetent bitch!
The education system isn’t about finding their full potential but about being economically prosperous and what you are describing is essentially what clickbait is which is what sells in the modern days.
I feel like ‘american education’ is almost an oxymoron and salute your brave Sisyphean curse/career¹ choice.
¹but not really one of those because those pay in money
don’t worry, I work at a non-profit so they barely pay me lol. It’s mostly a curse, but the job market is bad in the U.S. since we’re teetering on the brink of collapse. I don’t really like my job, but I’ve got no other prospects that wouldn’t betray my morals.
Really. I have enough disappointment in my life, I don’t need your bait and switch essay.
Instant “Oprah’s Book Club” selection
“It was a normal Tuesday afternoon until I violated the toaster, nothing was ever the same again.”
(Epic motorcycle escaping an explosion) The founding fathers had many new ideas.
