Prizing the Literature Essay

Should seventh graders write essays analyzing Steinbeck’s techniques or what’s wrong with Holden? I’m of two minds on this one. In one mind, I believe literary analysis to be a great way for kids to sharpen their ability to make an argument and support it with specific evidence. As Carol Jago, president of the NCTE, explained eloquently in a recent article, reading fiction allows kids to empathize with characters who are very different from themselves and to think about ethical dilemmas that they might encounter as they build their own lives. Writing about fiction allows them to dig deeper into the text, make meaning, and create a logical argument based on the meaning they see.

In the other mind, I keep thinking about authentic purposes for writing. Better writing usually comes from a more authentic purpose—so says pretty much every writing book I’ve read, and I also know it from experience. The seventh grade essays are pretty consistently painful. But, if I’m writing an email to complaining parents, I’m going to write a beautifully-crafted argument for why their child is actually doing fine despite the B- besmirching her record. The email will probably be better written than the briefs I wrote for law school. You don’t get much more authentic a writing purpose or well-defined an audience than those emails warding off evil parents. And I hope that’s not the best writing I do, but for certain it’s good writing—better than if someone gave me a prompt to write a pretend email.

That’s what some of our assignments are, right? “Pretend you’re writing this op-ed for a newspaper.” Or, “Pretend you’re writing this podcast for NPR.” For most others, we don’t even pretend there’s an audience: “Write a paragraph explaining a symbol in The House on Mango Street. Be sure to use at least two well-blended quotations.” Only occasionally do we give them real reasons to write: “Write an email to your congressional representative arguing for a more aggressive stance on an issue that matters to you. Remember to cc me on the email.” I’ve got to wonder, though—are those emails really going to be better written than the symbolism paragraphs just because the emails have an authentic purpose and audience? I suspect not, but I couldn’t put my finger on precisely why.

Yesterday, one of my colleagues made an interesting point about authentic writing. It’s not so much about purpose and audience—though these matter—as it is about the writer’s investment in the writing. Nell knows her vignette collection isn’t getting picked up by Random House, but she cares about what she’s writing because they’re about her life and the topics matter to her. She’s invested. And the writing is brilliant. Scout, Kate, and Sara know their podcast won’t air on NPR, but they care about the issue they’ve chosen—whether people act more like themselves with their families or their friends—so they’re invested. And the reason my email to those obnoxious parents is so brilliant isn’t that I have an authentic purpose and an authentic audience; it’s that I care about the writing. The writing matters to me. If we want students to write well, we have to get them to care about the writing: its purpose, its content, its effect.

Very often, the reason writing matters to the writer relates to how it will affect others. I want that parent email to have the effect of convincing those complainers that their child is learning and they need to get out of her way. I used to say to my classes that all writing is persuasive; authors are trying to convince us that their message is true or right. So sure, the purpose and effect of the writing make the writing matter. But the content can also make it matter. I’m writing this blog not because I want to convince anyone that I’m right, but because I care about what happens in my English classroom and I want to reflect upon my practices. I write books both because I hope others will read them, eventually, and because I care about the characters and their stories.

So I guess the way to resolve the literature essay problem is to make sure my students are invested, both in the text itself and in the thesis of the essay. Now that they’re finished with their Steinbeck books and the time has come to write their essays on “What makes Steinbeck Steinbeck,” I’m asking them to look through their notes for topics, themes, and techniques that they want to explore further. When many of them chose topics we’ve discussed to death in class, I urged them to think about who they are and what aspect of Steinbeck’s writing they connect to. “Look in your notes for items you wish we’d had more time to discuss,” I urged them. “Don’t pick foreshadowing or the power theme just because we talked about it in class. Find something that matters to you. Like, if you really care about nature, maybe you want to write about how Steinbeck portrays the natural world and the human relationship to it. Or if you’ve been in a conflict with a friend, maybe you want to explore the conflicts between friends in Steinbeck books. Find something that matters to you.”

It doesn’t feel quite as real as when I asked them to write vignettes on episodes from their own lives. With that project, it was easier for them to connect the assignment to what matters to them. But then again, and contrary to what they might think with their 13-year-old brains, the world isn’t just about them. Maybe, if we’re all lucky, they’ll choose topics they care about and learn something about how the world beyond themselves works. And maybe I will actually like reading them. Here’s hoping.

Leaning into Writing Discomfort

In her book Designing Writing Assignments, Traci Gardner quotes a line I can’t get out of my head: “Students translate an instructor’s goals into processes they can handle.” The line comes from the Mānoa Writing Program’s study of almost 200 writing students, which further concludes that students use “strategies they devised to deal with earlier writing assignments, and they may try to use these strategies again rather than risk something new.”

I’ve seen this phenomenon plenty of times. Last year, one new project I gave students asked them to make a podcast on a social issue that comes up in A Raisin in the Sun. For the project, each student was to interview someone and then analyze the interview. So if, for example, I interview my dad about his experiences with race, I might compare his experiences to my own, hypothesize why he had certain experiences, or fit his experiences into a larger framework I’ve studied. I was expecting wonderful insights in the podcasts, but instead, I got lots of summaries and descriptions, with very little analysis. If you want to talk Bloom’s Taxonomy, the podcasts were at the very bottom level of thinking, simple reportage.

I was disappointed then, and I sketched up some new lesson plans to give students a clearer sense of what “analysis” means. But now, having the problem framed for me as students doing what they think they can do because they’ve done it before, I realize my task is more complicated than defining “analysis” for students and showing them good models.

Here’s another example of how a learner changes the assignment into something surmountable. My daughter, who is two years old, calls the playground, “peegound.” It’s not an obsession with toilet training that makes her say it this way; it’s that she hasn’t yet figured out how to pronounce Ls, long As, and Rs. She deals with the L and the R in playground by simply omitting them. And the long A sound, she converts to a long E. So what is my daughter doing? She’s translating the implicit assignment, “Say the word playground,” into something she knows she can handle, “Say peegound.” And her coping mechanisms, changing or omitting problem elements, are exactly the methods my students use.

So, how can I make my students see that, as Barack Obama and César Chávez before him put it, YES THEY CAN do analysis? How do I show them they don’t have to pretend the instruction, “analyze,” isn’t there or hope their well-integrated quotations will satisfy me? Giving mini-lessons defining analysis wasn’t sufficient, nor was stating my expectations in clear and precise language. What will I do differently when I assign the podcast this year?

Not only do I need to share more models of analysis, I have to devote more class time to letting students discover what makes the good ones good. I didn’t have student models last year because it was a brand new assignment, and even this year I don’t have many student models because last years’ weren’t all that good. I’ll have to look on NPR and other radio sites for segments that analyze.

(Incidentally, I’ve been looking at The Norton Sampler as a source of good essays. It’s meant for college student writers, but the way the analogy frames techniques might help, and there’s a good companion website with links to more essays. I always say that students don’t write good essays because essays aren’t part of their reading repertoire. Time to change that. And, if reading good analytical essays translates into writing better analytical essays, maybe it’ll also translate into writing better analytical podcasts.)

Also, the purpose and audience of the podcast needs to be clearer. Why should they take a risk on writing if their only goal is to please the teacher? Why should they try something hard that they might do badly if they can do something easier and more familiar and still get an OK grade? If they’re writing their podcasts for a more authentic reason—say, to prove to their parents how much (or how little) has changed between the early years of the Civil Rights Movement and the early years of the Obama presidency—perhaps they’ll have more incentive to analyze the problem. If they’re going to bother with higher levels of thinking like comparing, categorizing, and theorizing, they need to know who they’re trying to convince and why. Perhaps I can get the podcasts published on the school website. What other audiences might motivate them?