Viewpoint

Writing: It Ain’t the Same Anymore

  • By Trent Batson
  • 05/07/08
Is the essay a native electronic text? No. Can rhetorical elements of the essay be better taught in a form that is native? Probably.

Why the Essay?

The defacto claim that the essay is the ordinal rhetorical form in higher education, particularly as taught by people from English departments or writing programs (as opposed to “writing in the disciplines” faculty), has been questioned for at least 40 years. Do English or writing folks structure an argument the same way as, for example, social scientists or biologists? Based on research from the 1970s, we know the answer is “no,” and so we have reason to question how generalizable the English department version of the written argument is.

Hybrid Orality

But now a much larger challenge faces the sacred essay: Since most writing in our culture is done as some form of hybrid orality, say in e-mail or texting or blogs or wikis, and since these electronic forms of writing now do the business of the world, why do we still mostly teach the essay, a form made popular in the 16th century? And designed as a print artifact?

What Kind of Writing Do We Do?

A Pew Internet & American Life Project study (see www.thejournal.com/articles/22512) suggests that “Teens See Disconnect Between Personal and School Writing.” The young students involved don’t think of their electronic writing as “real” writing. The senior researcher for the Pew study laments that “high-tech communication by teens might be affecting their ability to think and write.”

Does anyone else see the logical fallacy here? When English settlers arrived “on the green breast of the new land,” (Fitzgerald) they at first wore the leather shoes designed for city streets as they stumbled through the forests. Now, 400 years later, educators are the settler and they are once again claiming that “leather shoes” are the proper footwear, but “teens” are out there in the digital new land wearing boots. Which one is the group grounded in reality?

Native Written Forms

A native form (“the boots”) in the digital world is e-mail. Yes, the first reaction to suggesting e-mail is a form worth studying and teaching is, “Oh, e-mail is simple, nothing there to teach or examine.” Until you look under the hood, that is. We thought spoken interaction was pretty simple, too, back when many people predicted we’d have natural language processing software by 1967. Forty years later, we’re doing ok, but no one counted on it taking us 40 years.

In fact, e-mail is one of the most complex written forms any of us has ever written. Essays only seemed hard in school because educators made it artificially difficult: Though many writing teachers are changing the paradigm, the essay has traditionally been taught as an autonomous (not collaborative -- that’s “cheating”) structured communication written by a novice to an expert, telling him or her (the teacher) what that expert already knows.

Who can do that? Or, better, why do that? In real life, a novice learner trying to speak to an expert about her business would be rebuffed; it would be a demonstration of presumption. But those are the kind of assignments we’ve often given in writing class, thereby convincing a series of generations that they are not good writers.

The Value of Replacing the Essay with the E-mail Form

E-mail has attributes that should be tantalizing for the academy:

 - A choice of infinite possible audiences, primary, secondary, tertiary at first and then other potential audiences over time. Since audience and purpose are the key writerly criteria for good communication, the “To:” line in an e-mail alone is worth a couple of weeks of instruction.

 - And, how do you construct the “cc:” line and the “bcc:” line?

 - The subject line can be as simple as a topic, but in the e-mail firehouse, it is better thought of as an executive summary that includes purpose. You need to catch the attention of your intended audience knowing your e-mail may be one among a hundred in the inbox.

 - The diction in e-mail writing often shifts from a hybrid oral form and then back to a formal written form, sometimes in mid-sentence. How do you choose which diction to use with whom?

And so on. You get the point. E-mail is the ordinal form of this age. Higher education is adapting in small measure by including more courses in more different departments about writing for the Web or in electronic discourse. But in the collective conscience of higher education, the reference form when talking about writing is still the essay. And that’s too bad because we could teach writing principles so well by using e-mail as the standard current form, and we’d be teaching a form that students do anyway.

The essay is a design challenge (state your thesis in the first paragraph, limit yourself to five paragraphs, and conclude by summing up) whereas e-mail is a communication challenge. Designing a good e-mail is even more difficult than designing a good essay, but it’s more enticing and it’s suited to the writing landscape we are in now.

And, Now, the Conclusion to this Blog, er, Essay

Is “real writing” the context-less essay or is real writing what we all do during a large part of each day as we work at our computers? We wonder if the Pew study is coming to the right conclusions: Maybe it is not that teens are eroding their essay-writing skills, but that education has not evolved with the culture.

Comments

Thu, Feb 5, 2009 CB

There's a fair amount of irony in an author choosing the essay as the form for his argument that the essay is outdated. This hints at the primary problems with the argument, which are twofold. 1. The author doesn't seem to distinguish between professional writing and the kind of informal communication which is also older than dirt. E-mail can, for instance, be highly formal, or resemble a postcard or a dashed off note. Online slang derived from the immediatcy of chat rooms and other online forums requiring quick, short communications. In this regard, it's not much different from other versions of slang, which often develop as a means to shorthand communication or differentiate it altogether (Cockney Rhyming Slang, for instance). However, there is still a need for a common, professional approach to writing, one that offers a common ground for citing research, developing thought, and enabling comphehension. The essay is a foundational block in this kind of communication. Teaching the essay presents future writers with professional communications and forces them to rein in their informalities. Like any communications (or art) form. It is a way of teaching writers the rules, which they must know before they can truly start breaking them. The differences in the use of the essay within disciplines is really not so great as the author implies. The fundamentals of informing and persuading an audience are still present. Texting and other informal forms do not offer the same kind of general basis for communication. Indeed, as with most slang forms, the broader the acceptance of certain language, the more rapidly the group that originated it moves on to something else. 2. The essay has not remained static. Yes, we can look back at essays of the relatively distant past and gather meaning. This is a testimony to the timelessness of the form (which, again, the author testifies to by choosing it as his own form). However, the essay is just the raw form. Like poetry, the essay can be and has been stretched in many ways, some better than others. The basic form though is fundamental to writing. Combining these two ideas helps us to realize that when we imagine that certain types of electronic communication have presented us with something completely new we are really being quite fanciful. The fundamental forms of communication are still there: professional essay, informal notes, slang, technical terminology. The language, milieu, and mediums are simply different. Setting aside these fundamentals to chase after presumably new electronic forms will only lead us to diminish our ability to communicate effectively and artfully within those forms.

Fri, Jan 30, 2009 Lowry Pei Simmons College, Boston

I have about 30 years' experience directing writing programs, leading WAC, teaching writing (in various genres) and writing pedagogy. To me, there are two major flaws in this otherwise interesting argument. Both have to do with the conception of the essay form. First, if the assignment is to tell the teacher what she already knows, it's a lousy assignment; second, the five-paragraph exoskeleton model is perhaps useful in the eighth grade, but is developmentally far below college level. It's easy to dismiss the essay form if one trivializes it in the act of defining it, but this is a straw man argument. There is, however, a lot to think about concerning genre, form, and rhetoric in online writing.

Thu, Jan 22, 2009 Debby Michigan

My 13-year-old son received a cell phone with a QWERTY full keyboard for Christmas and has been texting almost nonstop since then. i got myself the same phone and have been learning to text. It just dawned on me last week that My son doesn't know how to write non-texting language, and I find it painful to write in texting. I told my son that he had to be bilingual, i.e., able to write in both texting and non-texting language. It is going to be difficult to make him write outside of texting because he hates to write...although he does love to text.

Thu, Jan 22, 2009 Leticia Solis San Juan, Puerto Rico

For thirty-six years I have dedicated much valuable time to teaching effective written communication through various modes; obviously the most important, for me, have been the lessons and opportunities I offer my students to express themselves in the most meaningful ways that will guarantee the success of letting people know exactly what they want to let them know. As an English teacher, I am satisfied and at ease with my conscience that I have been able to expose my students to the journey of effective writing, that which serves as a reference of the foundations of clear communication; nevertheless, I am aware that the times and the ever-speeding technology requires us to keep up with those times. I, too, must take that journey; but my students need to have the tools necessary to be able to create and recreate their thoughts in the world in which they live--a world that does demand knowledge and skill in both arenas.

Thu, Jan 22, 2009 Leticia Solis San Juan, Puerto Rico

For thirty-six years I have dedicated much valuable time to teaching effective written communication through various modes; obviously the most important, for me, have been the lessons and opportunities I offer my students to express themselves in the most meaningful ways that will guarantee the success of letting people know exactly what they want to let them know. As an English teacher, I am satisfied and at ease with my conscience that I have been able to expose my students to the journey of effective writing, that which serves as a reference of the foundations of clear communication; nevertheless, I am aware that the times and the ever-speeding technology requires us to keep up with those times. I, too, must take that journey; but my students need to have the tools necessary to be able to create and recreate their thoughts in the world in which they live--a world that does demand knowledge and skill in both arenas.

Wed, Jan 21, 2009 Scott Wisconsin

Dr. Batson is working from a large number of flawed presumptions. Firstly, there is no single email form. What you write to a friend is not at all the same thing as what you would write to an employer, a newspaper, or a colleague--all audiences that should receive differing treatments. I agree that students should be taught how to structure a comprehensible, intelligent, and convincing email. But I completely disagree that the essay is any less relevant than it was before the advent of the computer. If a writer wishes to persuade a reader, then he or she needs to understand the use of proper rhetorical devices and forms, the proper voice to use in order to convince, how to handle evidence and address potential counterarguments--in short, all the things that writing teachers have been attempting to instill in students for centuries.

Tue, Jan 20, 2009 Kay North Carolina

I take issue with Dr. Batson, who states, "most writing in our culture is done as some form of hybrid orality...and ... these electronic forms of writing now do the business of the world..." While such forms may predominate, I doubt they really conduct the business of the world today. A needed still exists for formally and *accurately* written correspondence (business plans, executive summaries, reports to shareholders, etc.). When students write exclusively in the popular brief-form, texting style, they risk corrupting any ability they ever had to write for a formal (business or other) audience..... Also I take issue with Lynne from Phoenix, who asserts that teaching should be revamped. This is what some refer to as dumbing down higher education. Many students today write poorly because they don't read. They are not held accountable for accuracy, perhaps as a result of K-12 superintendents and school boards (or was it parents?) who insisted that pupils be allowed to "express themselves" -- at the expense of learning English grammar. So now we have learners who are marginally literate as college students, even graduate students. They don't read, have never seen some words written, and therefore sound them out (a Southern accent complicates this further) and misspell. (Lynne provides some examples of this: comprehendible; it's)..... Writing is habitual; it's very difficult for students to write a quality research paper (that will be approved by the IRB) when they are allowed to insert *LOL* and other junk into the weekly (online) discussions in my courses. So now I require students to post (gasp!) formal (read accurate, polished) entries in our discussions. As a result, they are submitting papers that are eligible for A's, and their work sometimes is acceptable for publication. I would be doing them (and their future employers) a disservice by looking the other way.

Tue, Jan 13, 2009 Lynne Phoenix, AZ

Excellent article- succinctly represents the challenges faced by distance learning students! As a senior enrollment counselor (and student) at University of Phoenix Online, my students (and classmates) are fueled by the passion behind learning new information and trying to incorporate it into a comprehendible form of writing in this day and age of online communication. Any online program (worth it's weight in gold) focuses on written comprehension, but I have to agree with you that the common essay belongs with the extinction of the dinosaurs! New learning skills and techniques have to be taught to students as we emerge from the traditional classroom environment into an NEW age of learning. I am proud to work for University of Phoenix, which is incorporating higher learning skills and techniques to help students communicate and learn BETTER! I feel as you do, that "teaching" needs to be revamped to accommodate the changing times.

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