The critical response essay was meant to teach you a skill that’s essential for college level writing, namely the ability to critically engage with texts on their own merits as well as with your own insights. And the Conversation Essay is going to teach you a new critical skill for University Writing, namely, the ability to put two essays into conversation with each other alongside your thinking. Where we worked with one text in the first progression, we’ll be working with two texts in the second progression. In this unit, you’ll write an essay that’s driven by a motivating question that uses at least two sources in conversation, and both of those sources will be centered around an exhibit, which is something that you’re examining—this could be a personal experience (think back to how we wrote anecdotes for the critical response essay), or it could be something that you’ve noticed, a very narrow topic, in the world today: a particular set of ramifications of an event, a particular social media trend, etc., but essentially an exhibit is something that you are looking at/examining as you write your essay.
The two sources that you’ll pair in conversation will help you see this exhibit differently. It will help you arrive at new knowledge or new understanding of a particular interpretive problem regarding that exhibit. You’ll work to discover what putting these texts together reveals about that interpretive problem. You’ll build your own argument, you’ll use your own voice, you’ll continue to develop your own style and act as a moderator of a conversation occurring between the two authors. You can literally imagine that you’re putting these two authors in a room and they’re having a dialogue together, and doing so will help you guide your essay towards a discovery, towards a significant claim about that exhibit.
The Conversation Essay is also designed to help you forget about two ineffective models that we’ve mentioned before. We’ve talked about the “combat model” and we’ve talked about the “answer model,” even though I haven’t named it as such. The combat model suggests that academic debate consists of experts who are trying to tear down each other’s theories in the hope of proving that their own theory is actually correct. And this encourages a destructive disregard for texts and ideas that might be of use to you as a thinker and writer. This model is often agonistic. It’s where you begin by assuming that the other essay or the other thinker has failed in some regard, and you begin by tearing them down. We’ve already talked about how we want to read these texts, identifying gaps in them instead of criticizing their failures, using those gaps as places to keep building knowledge upwards.
The answer model suggests that it’s only valuable to voice an idea if the idea is a solution or a new solution to a problem. And this encourages really broad, grandiose, and unsupportable claims. I’ve said before that you can’t cure cancer in a four page essay, and you can’t really—to use Young’s essay as an example, you can’t really propose in four pages a way of changing the entire core curriculum without actually doing so and to actually do so would take far more than four pages. The answer model also creates a fear within writers of getting the answer wrong. We are already instilled with this fear that there is a “right” way to do something, a “correct” way to do something, a “correct” answer that a professor is looking for. And the answer model spurs that right along.
I’d like you to forget both the answer model and the combat model and instead consider a third more useful and effective model: the conversation. In the conversation model, academic debate isn’t really a debate the way we think of a back-and-forth; it’s a dialogue. It consists of people interested in similar topics, listening to each other, trying to discover new things instead of attacking each other, in an ongoing conversation. You could think of it like a long discussion in which you talk your way deeper into a problem and discover new ways to think about it during the course of the conversation. The goal here is neither absolute proof nor unequivocal victory, but rather, the articulation of an idea or perspective that advances the conversation as a whole using your interpretations, your insights, and your critical thinking, supported by what you notice in these two texts individually, but also in what emerges from the conversation when you place them together. All of these things will raise the overall level of discourse that you’re having, by allowing you to consider ideas that you haven’t yet discovered in novel and unexpected ways.
I’ve given you two readings for this unit, and we’ll go over them together as a class and discuss them separately, and we’ll also talk about how to bring them together, and then you’ll develop an argument by placing those readings together in ways that support your argument about whatever topic or exhibit you’re looking at. Remember, the assessment of other people’s arguments offers you the opportunity to bring your own voice into the conversation as you create your own claims. Be confident in your insights; assume that you have a certain level of authority while you respect the ideas that the other authors are bringing to the table; make sure to acknowledge things like counter claims, and try to anticipate counter claims, both your own and those suggested by the texts.
If all your sources are in perfect agreement, know that they won’t have much to say to each other. As we worked on with Young’s essay, make sure that you’re looking for gaps, something that was missed or necessarily overlooked given page constraints or the author’s need to focus their conversation a little more deeply on a certain topic. That’s how you make sure that you’re not just repeating what the authors are saying and you’re not just agreeing with what your sources are saying. Disparate ideas can be usefully considered alongside each other as a way of arriving at your own new knowledge, so keep working on reassuring yourself—and in your writing, reassuring yourself in your writing—that locating problems and locating the parts that are tough, the parts that require a level of critical thinking and tangling with, those are the places where you can really delve into a topic and propose new insights and propose new interpretations where you’re building up the knowledge that the authors have proposed while also arriving at new insights of your own.
