The Drawing Board

The limit

I loathe teaching formulaic writing. And we have been doing just that in College Comp for several weeks now. Most recently we have written a traditional five paragraph literary analysis. The assignment calls for them to select a story and analyze one of the story’s themes via three of the following elements, plot, character, setting, or symbol. Of course, they will use quotes from the story to support their analysis.

That’s the assignment, and I’d be naïve in thinking that my students won’t be exposed to this ruthless format in college (I recall a graduate course in literary criticism where our professor literally drew a five paragraph format style outline on the board for us to mimic for our final papers!). So I aquise and teach this format. And if students realize they hate it and that it limits their thinking and kill their voice . . . all the better!!

So to try and make this form as ‘user friendly’ as possible, I share little tricks or rules I go by whenever I have to write a formulaic essay. To compound matters, getting students to comprehend such things as using direct quotes and paraphrasing, in-text citation, analysis, avoiding lengthy summary, avoiding lengthy quotes . . . it’s almost overwhelming. And most students struggle. Some, though, do catch on to this right away and have no problem mastering the form and requirements. I envy them because I fought long and hard with those.

One of my little tricks I shared with my students was to think of my supporting paragraphs as inverted pyramids. I drew one on the board and sectioned it off into several parts.

The top part was, obviously, the widest part, so I told them this represents the topic sentence, which is often rather generic (for example, “The life cycle is a key theme in “The Swimmer,” and it is evident through the setting” – or – “The devil’s staffs in ‘Young Goodman Brown’ symbolize corruption.”). The trick was to start generic or broad and work toward a specific example and focused analysis.

I pointed out that students could go any number of ways with these sample topic sentences. Deciding what direction was what the rest of the pyramid/paragraph – and its ever narrowing structure – was for.

The next section on the inverted pyramid was committed to context/summary. Here I told students I like to fill the reader in on some background information that gives context, however briefly, to my topic sentence and it also prepared the reader for the direct quote, which serves as an example to support my topic sentence. If I don’t advise students to do this, they write paragraphs that have a topic sentence and then they jump right into a direct quote with no sort of transition.

The third section of the pyramid was designated for the direct quote or paraphrase.

Then the final section, and the most narrow, was devoted to analysis. I told students to really be very specific in their analysis. This would be their original thoughts and ideas (well, given that it’s a five paragraph theme, I don’t know how original their thoughts will actually be), so they should really concentrate on analyzing how their quote proves and relates to their topic sentence. This too will be the most vital part of their paper. The emphasis will be on illustrating the connection between their quote and how it relates to not only their selected theme but also their chosen element. Again, if I don’t do this, I tend to get analysis as succinct as this “When Brown tells his wife “Look to the Heavens,” he is resisting evil (14). This shows that Brown is not truly corrupted.”

For awhile, I was king of this in college. This shows was my favorite phrase. Never mind, as many of my professors noted on my papers, that it was MY job to show how the quote shows whatever it is I claimed it did. And they were right. I just didn’t really know how to analyze. Worse yet, I didn’t really know how to get that analysis down in writing or in a form.

So I told my students whenever they use the phrase this shows (or my next favorite phrase this clearly illustrates) that a bell or alarm should sound in their head warning them to be diligent and to fully analyze or explain how their quote or example shows. They should not leave it up to the reader to simply infer what the quote shows.

We went over the formula couple times, actually constructing paragraphs, sentence by sentence, together on the board.

I was quite pleased.

Then I got this from my fourth block class – instead of an actual paragraph in a final essay, one student wrote –

Topic sentence – in the story, corruption is one of the main themes displayed through the mysterious woods just outside of Salem.

Context/summary – Brown and the devil are walking deeper and deeper into the woods. The deeper Brown goes into the woods, the less he is able to resist the devil’s temptations.

Quote – as Brown grasps the devil’s second staff he storms off wildly through the woods where “The road grew wilder and drearier, and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward, with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil”

Analysis -- Well, I’ll spare you from the rest.

Everything I italicized above is precisely how it was put in the paper! I never thought students would actually write their paper in the outline format! I mentioned over and over to them to put it in paragraph format and that the outline was just a useful way of thinking about how to structure a paragraph so the writer includes some of the necessary elements of a supporting paragraph. I never thought they’d actually write like this! I mean we looked at half a dozen examples, and none were written like that.

Somewhere a long the way, we totally got screwed up.

At least I got a chuckle out of. Looks like it’s back to the drawing board.