Reading should not be about skimming to the end of a text. Yet, in today’s digital world, our reading experiences become shorter and more superficial. Almost always, the conversation about or the reaction to a text focuses on what was said. Rarely do we converse about how it was said. Because of this focus on information and minimizing of structure, reading mistakenly equals zooming over the screen or page for keywords. With the prominence of high-stakes multiple-choice tests, students, too, train themselves--or educators erroneously train them--to search for information that can be pulled out to answer a question.
While skimming might help students to succeed on poorly designed teacher assessments or a few items on the ACT, SAT, or AP English exams, our high-school students don’t learn much from this.
I teach in a large urban district where the population is over 90% low income. Most of the students are first-generation and will be the first in their family to attend college. Therefore, in this context, which exists in so many of our public schools, a high-school English teacher should provide students with literacy experiences that build their ability to make it to and through challenging post-secondary academic settings.
In “Critical Thinking,” Robert Ennis explains how we should distinguish between basic clarification, building a basis for decisions, inferring, and challenging illogical thinking. We understand, then, that, in Ennis’s view, critical thinking is the well-reasoned problem-solving process where we examine information and decide what to believe, communicate, or do.
Our work as writing teachers in high school should focus on guiding students to engage with and think critically about the information they access.
As an AP English Language and journalism teacher, I must focus on getting students to make sense of and assess the validity of texts. Over the past twenty-three years, I increased the complexity of texts as my confidence and competence with teaching these increased. However, the trap for teachers (I’m probably guilty of it) is to spend most of our time helping students comprehend these texts. In Ennis’s view, this would be lower-level thinking.
In recent years, I’ve included experiences to help students assess the validity of texts by looking for fallacies. More recently, my focus moved into helping students analyze the structure of a well-written text, so they can make more effective writing decisions in their own essays. As a result, this unit highlights how teachers can engage high-school students with socially conscious, well-written essays and examine how the writer structures and develops ideas. Students can then take responsible, informed risks with their own writing at the paragraph and sentence level, thereby elevating their own style.
In Beyond Literary Analysis, Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O’Dell explain four tools students can use to explore the quality of texts in any area:
Passion: “The writer’s compass. Passion is the writer’s wholehearted investment in the text she is exploring. Deeper than just admiration, the writer takes her subject seriously, full of conviction that it matters.”
Ideas: “The places the writer explores. Ideas encompass everything the writer considers and discusses--claims, reasons, evidence.”
Structure: “The maps a writer uses to chart her course. Structure includes the writer’s focus, paragraphing, how she leads and concludes, and visual structure tools.”
Authority: “The writer’s know-how that enables her to explore a text. Authority speaks to a writer’s content knowledge, tone, word choice, and use of grammar and conventions.”
While all of these are important elements, this project will focus on the structure of personal essays by focusing on this question: How do we teach high-school students to examine the structure of a personal essay at the paragraph and sentence level, practice it, and mirror it in their own original writing?
Clarification of Terms
First, some clarification of terms. Sometimes, we hear the word “memoir” used to describe a personal piece of writing. As Fred Robinson tells us in “History of English and Its Practical Uses,” “French provides our terms of social formality, polite manners, the arts, and government . . . There is a cool detachment about most French-derived words, a feeling of social diplomacy.” Humorously, however, Robinson, adds: “Or, as someone else had said, “French is the true and native language of insincerity.”
In this seminar, I shared in a discussion how the term “autobiography” connotes a piece of writing that’s historical, technical, cold (as opposed to the “cool” mentioned above.) The use of “autobiography” might also connote the need to write an all-encompassing history of themselves in chronological order, which would likely result in a long, unengaging piece of writing with no true sense of audience.
Others might use the term “personal experience” to describe the type of essays we’ll discuss here. But that too might mislead writers to communicate an event, a situation that challenged the writer but does not have a “public point,” an insight for the reader. This issue of “public point” became a term mentioned frequently in our conversations at this Yale seminar after our professor explained this valuable approach to helping students understand an audience-centered task.
In On Writing Well, William Zinsser discusses the “transaction” that must take place between reader and and writer, which relates to the concept of a public point. “Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is” (5). After all, Zinsser explains, we, as readers, must understand “what holds [us] is the enthusiasm of the writer for his field. How was he drawn into it? What emotional baggage did he bring along? How did it change his life?” (5). Out of this transaction, the author explains that the writing will produce “humanity and warmth” (5).
This brings us to the term of “personal narrative.” The concern with this phrase rests with the idea that it might communicate a rudimentary story or a piece of fiction almost. It’s important to recognize what Zinsser tells us about in his chapter titled “Nonfiction as Literature:” this genre “enables [people] to write about what they know or can observe or can find out. This is especially true of young people and students. They will write far more willingly about subjects that touch their own lives or that they have an aptitude for. Motivation,” he reminds us, after all, “is at the heart of writing” (99).
So for the purposes of this unit, I’ll use the term “personal essay” to define the type of nonfiction writing students will read, examine, mirror, practice, revise, and publish in a responsibly fulfilling way. In French, as we likely know, “essayer” means “to try, to attempt.” The focus of this unit aims to create opportunities for students to try to mirror the writing of accomplished writers as they communicate a personal transformation struggle (theirs or someone else’s) that highlights a public point to a specified audience in a style and length that fit that rhetorical context. Finally, “personal essay” remains a term used on college applications and a term used commonly in the high-school classroom.
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