Why I Write Bad (MILO B. BECKMAN)

The Harvard Crimson
November 21, 2014

I just turned in a final paper. When it was finished, I gussied up the spacing and switched the font to Georgia. I stapled it neatly at a 45-degree angle, with a professional-looking cover page on top. Before my TF takes in a single word, he can deduce that I’m a smart guy and he’s about to read a great paper.

Here’s the problem: It’s not a great paper. I didn’t have a lot of points to make, so I made them glamorously. I used lots of adverbs. My title has a colon in it. There are 21 words in an average sentence, six letters in an average word. An online analysis tells me I’m writing at a 16th grade level. My TF is gonna love it.

Steven Pinker wrote in the Chronicle recently that academics have their heads too far up their own rears to write well. They know so much, he says, that they can’t imagine what it’s like to be a layman. But I think the problem is more systemic than that. Academics put out lousy writing because they went through 20 years of schooling that rewarded lousy writing.

What causes this upside-down incentive system? It’s signaling, plain and simple. You don’t have time to write good papers, and graders don’t have time to read them. No one ever got fired for buying IBM, so they slap a check-plus on whatever looks good. Consciously or subconsciously, you tune your writing to do just that: to look good. Who cares if it actually is good?

This is why my academic writing stinks. I’ll hammer out a response paper the hour before it’s due, throwing in as many “normative”s and “dichotomy”s as I can muster. “Do I sound smart yet?” my writing pleads. It’s all icing—like the staple and the font choice—layers and layers of icing on a tiny, bland cake. My TFs will often tell me I’ve improved as a writer over the semester, when really I’ve just figured out which kind of bullshit they prefer. Why risk writing something good in the hopes it’ll be recognized as good, when I can write garbage I know will be recognized as good?

This is also why section kid bothers you so much. You roll your eyes when he ends every sentence with “by any stretch of the imagination.” He’s building a McMansion of words, all oversized and gaudy and totally empty. Your TF’s eyes glazed over at the first, “Just to run with that for a minute…” She’ll give him full marks for participation. You hate him for shamelessly playing the game. But can you blame him?

This is even a driving force behind grade inflation. In a world where good ideas get good grades, the average would be around a C. Real eureka moments don’t come often. But in a world where fancy words get good grades, any skilled hoop-jumper can learn the formula and churn out regular As.

This is dangerous. The high marks seem nice today, but when we get spit out into the real world we’ll see the harm it’s done. I’ve nearly forgotten how to write simply. When I’m not paying attention, I quickly recommence pontificating mellifluously. Your boss won’t want 12 pages double-spaced; she’ll want clarity and pith. Interviewers would rather you be a real human who says things like “chill” and “legit” than some academic robot who won’t stop talking about intents and purposes.

So why not get a head start and cut the crap now? Spend more time coming up with ideas and less time beautifying them. Start your paper when you hit a thesis you’re excited about, not when you think, “I could probably argue that.” If you have a good point to make in section, you’ll sound just as smart leading with, “I dunno though,” as with, “Just to push back on that.” And to paraphrase a proverb: If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say anything at all.

 It’s not our fault that the system’s broken, but it’s on us to fix it. We have to change our habits even if we’re incentivized not to. Yes, a high GPA will help you get a job, but it’s your skills that’ll help with every step after that. Don’t boost your grades by developing toxic habits. Develop good habits, and the grades should follow. When you bullshit, you’re just bullshitting yourself. Stop it. Write well. Milo B. Beckman ’15 is a government concentrator in Eliot House.

Rhet Map

http://rhetmap.org

Cool.

Top Five Books on Genre (from WPA-L)

Bawarshi, Anis S., and Mary Jo Reiff. *Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy*. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2010.

Bazerman, Charles, Adair Bonini, and Débora de Carvalho Figueiredo. *Genre in a Changing World*. Fort Collins, CO & West Lafayette, IN: WAC Clearinghouse & Parlor Press, 2009.

Berkenkotter, Carol, and Thomas N. Huckin. *Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition, Culture, Power*. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995.

Devitt, Amy J. Writing Genres. *Rhetorical Philosophy and Theory*. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004.

Swales, John M. *Research Genres: Explorations and Applications*. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

What Doing Research Looks Like

Notes on Teacher Development

So this morning I am trying to think about teacher development, about my own development as a teacher. I feel like the story I am trying to tell in this book is wrapped up in my own process of development as a teacher, and I feel like I need to find someone who can help me talk about this. In other words, I felt the need, this morning, to do some research. To find other people who have studied what I’m interested in and see what I can learn from them.

Problem is, this means researching outside of my area of expertise and so I am basically a novice. I was fortunate to stumble upon a book that looks useful. And from this book, I was off to the personal website of the author, to see if she has written any articles that might be useful for me to look at. I found her and found an article and this lead me somewhere helpful. The article—well, within the first few pages, I knew I was onto something, but I was sort of also not on to something. I discovered a journal that might be useful for me—Teacher Education Quarterly—and I found, within the first few pages of her article some things that were definitely seeming to be on the right track.

The problem is, before I get to those, the problem is, this is a journal aimed primarily at people who teach teachers to become teachers, teacher education folks. So, I’m thinking, okay, I’m interested in the professional trajectory of folks in higher education, the journey that teachers in college settings go through, but perhaps these are similar to the journeys that teachers in the K-12 world go through. So, I’m following this source, allowing myself to look into it, within a given time-frame that I’ve established (a time frame whose end is quickly approaching!!!).

I felt like I was onto something on the first page of the article, when I discovered her research questions:

·      How does the pedagogical understanding of teachers grow or change over time?

·      What are some of the personal and professional influences on teachers' thinking?

These looked enormously promising! These are MY questions, as well, so I kept going.

Then, I stumbled upon something that looked REALLY interesting for me—and useful, although the dated nature of the material worries me a bit.

Levin references “a model of the development of teachers' thinking in the pedagogical domain.”

Development of teachers thinking. That’s what I want to know about. I want someone who can give me a model to help ME think about the development or trajectory of my own thinking, over time. As I encountered this framework and noted the names of the authors, so I could go look into their work myself, I felt myself growing really excited! And the firmness and confidence of this line really sort of blew me out of the water:

Since that time the model has been evaluated empirically in several studies (Animon, et al, 1985; Hutcheson & Anmon, 1986; Levin & Ammon, 1992, 1996) and found to represent the developmental trajectory of teachers' thinking about teaching and learning, behavior, and development.

Um, wow. This line suggest that not only is there a model out there, this model has been tested and proven, so to speak, empirically. Note the lack of “hedging” terms in that passage. So, this is a pretty good model, apparently. I stopped when I got to the bit about Appendix A and I scanned down to the bottom of the article to take a look. Maybe I should have gone out to look at the model itself, first? Or, this is the model. Okay.

So, I have spent a few minutes looking at this model and thinking about it. I note the word “cognitive.” She writes that this model is a “cognitive-developmental structure.” This is helpful. The word cognitive makes me think about mental growth or development and this is good, but as I spend some time with the table, I am interested, but I begin to realize that it’s not quite what I want. It’s helpful, but not quite what I want. The model seems to take the reader from empiricism through behaviorism to contructivism, with this last being the most highly-developed form of teaching. As I look at this model, I am asking myself if I do these things when I teach and where I fit into the framework, but I am also realizing that it’s not quite what I want.

And the word that I’m thinking about is the word emotional. I’m thinking about how teachers FEEL about their teaching and about their teaching journey. I’m thinking about how I feel about the kind of teaching I did early in my career and then as I progressed and then, also, now. It’s not just the cognitive growth or development that interests me. It’s the emotional development and disposition towards ones teaching that I want to learn more about. That’s the part I think about.

And so, there is new or more work to do, but first, I need to spend a bit more time with Levin’s article, just to be sure that it’s definitely NOT what I’m looking for.

Is this a dead-end?

Not really.

My concern going in was about the appropriateness of her research on K-12 teachers for me, given my interest in college-teachers. That concern is still there.

But, I’ve identified a journal I’d like to search in further and she has helped me to clarify my thinking about what I’m looking for or what I want to find. That’s a big part of the process it seems. You have a felt sense of what you want, but it’s hard to put into language. The revelation of the past 20 or so minutes, for me, is the realization that what interests me is both the cognitive development of a teacher but also how one FEELS about one’s teaching. The emotional development of a teacher.

--

Key Research Type: Case Study (what about in higher education?)

things that he is in flux about (35)

Goals and Pedagogical Beliefs

Developmental Stage Models (37)

“Still believed”

Not all teachers even identify-their sense of "self' as a teacher (Nias. 1989). (42)

Genre: Teacher Memoirs (Ayers, 1993)—see p. 45

Research on Teacher’s Professional Lives (46)

Stages of Development

Longitudinal studies

Essay collections, see Amazon.

What is a heuristic?

A heuristic is an alternative to trial and error. It is simply the codification of a useful technique or cognitive skill. It can operate as a discovery procedure or a way of getting to a goal. Many fields have them; for example, the scientific method is itself a heuristic, as is journalism's efficient Who? What? When? Where? Why? formula for collecting information. The important thing about heuristics is that they are not rules, wvhichdictate a right or wrong way, but are alternative methods for doing something-methods which often formalize the efficient procedure a good scientist or journalist would use unconsciously. Because they make an intuitive method explicit, heuristics open complex processes up to the possibility of rational choice. (Flower and Hayes, p. 45-51 "Problem-Solving Strategies and the Writing Process")

Sources that Make the Argument for WID/WAC

Alexander Astin, *What Matters in College: Four Critical Years Revisited*

George Kuh and Jillian Kinzie, *Student Success in College: Creating
Conditions that Matter*

Richard Light, Making the Most of College

Alice Horning's "The Definitive Article on Class Size" would also be useful. You can show directly the relationship between class size and learning. http://wpacouncil.org/archives/31n1-2/31n1-2horning.pdf

Findings from Research on Writing

Three lessons from the science of how to teach writing

* “Research-Based Practices and the Common Core: Meta-Analysis and Meta Synthesis,” (in press for The Elementary School Journal)--Steve Graham