Category: Writing

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Irrationality: How To Think Chapter 1

In the first chapter of his book How to Think, Alan Jacobs makes two main points: 1) thinking alone is impossible and 2) true thinking requires a marriage of reason and emotion. Perhaps his most salient takeaway comes as a result of those two facts: it is possible to have engaged in genuine thought and come up with the wrong answer, and it is possible to come up with the right answer for bad reasons without thinking at all.

Jacobs focuses on the way that we tend to denigrate the thinking process of others. If those we love have changed their mind from our viewpoint to one we oppose, we tend to assume they’ve been ensnared instead of thinking for themselves. If those we love do something we can’t understand, we tend to dismiss them as irrational or crazy.

After the break, I’ll talk about some ways I will attempt to work through these dilemmas with my students..

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Writing With Purpose: Five Takeaways

Yesterday, I had the chance to lead a session for Southern Wesleyan’s first cohort of EdD students. My assigned topic was Writing With Purpose, and you can find my worksheet after the jump.

My five big pieces of advice were…

  1. Begin with gratitude–for people, events, and God. Even the monumental task of writing a dissertation can be an occasion for thanks, and you can put the hard and often stressful work necessary into perspective when you begin by giving thanks.
  2. Find joy in your work–I had the students read out loud the answer to the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s question about the “chief end of man.” Yes, we are to glorify God, but we are also called to enjoy him. Joy can be a real part of the work we do.
  3. Define your purpose–Students wrote out their answer to a pretty simple research prompt: “I am studying X…because I want to find out Y…in order to help my readers better understand Z.” Yes, this kind of statement works for providing a 40,000 foot view of their project, but, when adapted, it could also easily apply to a single work session that would give each student a chance to measure their progress.
  4. Share–one of the cohort’s greatest resources are their other cohort members. I had them conduct a short conversation with a partner about their answers to the research prompt to help them see how helpful it is just to take five minutes and try to say out loud what they’re doing to another human being. Each of these students have people in their lives who care about them succeeding. Not all of those people have the ability to respond to the intellectual demands of their project, however. Finding someone you can talk to about your project is invaluable.
  5. Know what it takes for you to do your best work–this can change depending on the purpose. You might read best at home and write best in the office. But you need to know yourself well enough to know the details that are non-negotiable (e.g. you have to write before noon or it won’t get done) and ones you can experiment with (e.g. location).
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The Purpose for the Composition Course

[T]he essential purpose of this course goes far beyond the mere technicalities of grammar and rhetoric. Ultimately, this course engages your deepest needs and interests, your thinking, your feelings, your relationships with other people.

From Modern Rhetoric by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren

What is freshman composition for?

In the very first paragraph of their multi-editioned textbook, Brooks and Warren give the above answer. The purpose of the composition course, in their minds, is to unite a person’s feelings and thought as well as increase that person’s ability to commune peacefully with other people.

These are spiritual purposes, not pragmatic ones. Though Brooks and Warren are not explicit about the spiritual roots of their view, they do not simply reduce language to a tool that can be used to accrue power, money, or personal happiness. There is something metaphysical here, a kind of harmony with one’s self and others, that language affords. This is not a bad way of answering the question, “Why do I have to take composition?” though I would want to know what the assumptions are that give Brooks and Warren the warrant for making this argument.

Like every God-given facet of human culture, language is a means by which to love God and others more fully. Here are the assumptions that undergird the composition courses I teach.

  1. Language demands our attention because it’s part of God’s identity and thus is a crucial part of what it means to be a human made in God’s image. Jesus is called the word, and God reveals himself to us in words through sacred writings.
  2. Language gives us a concrete way of ordering and organizing the world.
  3. Language has rules and can be used correctly and incorrectly.
  4. Language not only can be used to bless and curse but can, upon being used correctly or incorrectly, precipitate blessings or cursings.
  5. Language that communicates truth will stand the test of time.

Language is at the core of who we are, how we know anything, and how we act in the world. Our relationship with language amounts to nothing less than our relationship with the God whose language brought the world into existence.

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Five Takeaways from the 2019 SECCL

This past weekend, I attended the Southeast Renaissance Conference on Christianity and Literature. I heard some great papers (on Rebecca, on disenchantment, on Richard Wilbur’s poem “Lying” among others), saw my students and wife give fantastic papers, and talked with friends old and new. Here were my five takeaways.

  1. The conference presenters consisted of undergraduates, graduate students, junior faculty, and senior faculty: the entire academic gamut.
  2. Unlike any other conference I’ve been a part of, my deep respect for these scholars as fellow disciples has fed into my desire to hear their scholarship, no matter what they’re writing about. I haven’t read anything Chad Schrock, Carissa Turner Smith, or Luke Mills (to name just three frequent attendees) have written about the last three, and I’m always glad I get to hear them anyway.
  3. It’s better in community, i.e. when you go with your colleagues and students. I was the only attendee from my school at my first SECCL in 2013. This year, I presented alongside my wife and three students. It was the first time in awhile that SWU was represented at the conference, and I’m committed to our department being a consistent presence there.
  4. You learn to let conversation happen rather than force it. I found time for productive discussions with new acquaintances and time enough for deeper reflections with long-time friends. I was intentional about being in conversation but not overzealous in making conversations happen. I showed myself friendly and was rewarded with friendliness in return.
  5. Post-conference papers are even better. I didn’t get to hear the papers of two people I wanted to hear, so I asked them for copies. They obliged, and I had a wonderful morning reading them after the conference ended. I was able to send comments and ask questions with more acuity than if I had simply heard the papers. What a blessing.
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Sentence By Sentence

I’m helping a student revise a paper for another course. Yesterday, we hashed out the paper’s main argument. Today, it was time to start revising.

I separated each of the paper’s paragraphs into a separate page, made the individual sentences in those paragraphs into bulleted lists, and worked through as many paragraphs as we could get through in two hours.

I had five takeaways.

  1. I was really impressed with the student’s willingness to engage in that intense kind of revision work for two hours.
  2. I need to do this kind of work (on a smaller scale) with as many of my students as possible. I may institute this as mandatory work for anyone who scores below a certain number on the first essay. It would get them in my office and give me a chance to show them what intense revision looks like.
  3. The revision happened as part of an actual conversation between the reader and writer. I asked for clarification, and the student asked me questions too. This is ideal.
  4. It can’t all be like this. The student came in with 3000+ words and something to say as well as the motivation to get the best possible score on the assignment.
  5. I think it is a way of helping the students learn because it shows that good writing is often collaborative.

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Close Reading the Beatles

As I wade through a pile of papers during finals week, I’m constantly in search of good body paragraphs built around close, insightful readings of the novel or play or poem under consideration.

When the pickings are slim, I gain sustenance from what I imagine is a typical source of comfort for literature professors, this paragraph from Rob Sheffield’s wonderful book Dreaming the Beatles where he details what Paul McCartney gets wrong in the song, “My Love.”

“My Love” is a fascinating disaster, if you happen to love Paul, because it’s a string of very un-Paul-like mistakes. He forgets all the Paul tricks he knows better than anyone else ever has. In fact, he goes so wrong here breaking his own rules, it’s an index of everything he usually gets right. His lifelong attention to pronouns fails him—this is a love ballad where the word “you” does not appear, nor do “she” or “her,” not even “we.” It’s all “I,” “me,” “my.” You can’t call this a rookie mistake since rookies know better, mostly because rookies are imitating Paul. So he wrote a love song and left out the woman; he also invited an orchestra, without giving them anything to play. He adds a colossally terrible guitar solo, when the track’s already way too long (four minutes, practically a minute per word). Not his own guitar solo: he lets a sideman barge in to make this butt-ugly (and no doubt sincerely self-expressive) noise. A ghastly sax solo would have made a certain sense, but this is a bluesy guitar solo, with no place in a lounge ballad like this.”

It begins with a nice debatable claim (i.e. “This song is a clunker, albeit one that clunks for intriguing reasons”), and follows it up with a brilliant analysis of the song’s pronouns. Of all the evidence Sheffield could give, I think his observation that “you” or “she” never appears in the song is so smart. He then develops this observation in a witty sentence: “he wrote a love song and left out the woman.” Sheffield never leaves a song half-analyzed, and in the remaining half of the song, he articulates what’s wrong with the song’s orchestration and guitar solo. It’s a new kind of evidence, and it receives its own development.

If Sheffield can muster up this kind of insight about a song just to show how poor it is, how much more should we be able to articulate the beauty of God’s truth both in our explication of scripture and in the books we’ve read that demand further unpacking.

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All Truth

On the final day of class last week, I had students read Arthur Holmes’s classic statement on Christian education: “All truth is God’s truth.”

It forced me to try and articulate for my students the truth I felt we had discovered together in our literature and writing courses. I realized that if I began and ended the course with Holmes’s statement, I probably would have had a good litmus test for what to emphasize and omit over the course of the semester. I tend to be so fixated on tactics that I forget to reiterate the deeper reason for the tactics. In other words, I err on the side of teaching students efficiency rather than effectiveness.

If the goal is to discover and learn the truth about the world, we’ll have a different orientation to reading and writing.

The basic premises of a Christian orientation to literature and writing are that:

  1. When we reading and interpret books, we exercise an aspect of God’s image in our lives and find a concrete place to see the gap between ourselves and our maker (i.e. our interpretations are limited and prone to error).
  2. Thus, reading provides us a place to discover truth (facts) and meaning (interpretation) about God’s world. Literature allows us to access those facts and interpretations in a different, and potentially more powerful, way then descriptive prose.
  3. When we write, we engage in a special form of communication that God used to reveal Himself to humanity.
  4. Thus, writing provides a means to more truthfully and faithfully think God’s thoughts after Him.

If I kept coming back to these points and used literature to illustrate them, I would give students a more affective relationship to the idea that all truth is God’s truth. It’s not enough to know or repeat this. This idea should be formative. As I consider that statement’s effect on my life, I will be more able to convey its important to my students so that their own wisdom begins with a proper relationship to God and truth.

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Description and Practice

I’ve been playing pickup hoops this academic year, and it’s been a blast. A colleague in the English Department was the one who talked me into playing, and one of the most enjoyable parts of the Tues/Thurs games is our inevitable text exchange about our respective performances that day and the games’ other points of interest.

Confession: I haven’t picked up a ball outside of these Tues/Thurs games. I run during the week, so I show up ready to burn some calories and play as well as I can. Over the course of the year, I’ve gotten better but I still play more unevenly than I would have hoped.

This wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but I find that I’m still replaying games in my head from the previous day, and as I ramp up to the noontime games the following day, I’m constantly thinking about how I can improve that day.

Today, I tell myself, I’m going to work on passing (no turnovers) or on help defense (rather than over-helping) or driving to the rim (instead of settling for jump shots).

I can describe those things to myself in my head all I want and even get feedback on them from my colleague, but the only way to improve is to actually play.

I’m encountering something similar in my writing courses this semester. I’ve given students the better part of a month to work on their final papers, projects that demand they choose their own novel and generate a research paper about them. I’ve given them lots of class time to work, and I’ve given them open-ended quizzes to keep them accountable.

At first, I asked for 150 words describing what they had done on their project since the last class. The point here was to have them summarize what they were reading, survey the criticism they had found in their initial research, and give them a space to ask questions about the direction their project was taking.

Now that we’re getting close to the end, however, I had them switch from description to writing that could actually end up in the paper. No more telling me about what they worked on. Instead, I want them to show me what that work has led to by writing a body paragraph as the day’s assignment. All of them struggle with this, but the practice is worth it because it forces them to apply the things they’re supposed to be working on outside of class. At some point, commentary and description are just ways of hiding. Just as my commitment to getting better at basketball will come down to whether or not I want to ever shoot outside of the two hours I play a week, so too will their commitment to improving their writing come down to their practicing output (i.e. actual body paragraphs) than recording input (i.e. a description of what they’ve done).

As I enter the summer, I will be thinking more about how to balance description and practice for my students so that they can apply what they’ve learned and then get some post-game commentary that helps them know how they can improve their performance. The answer is more practice, punctuated with helpful description.