I expect most of you learned the five paragraph model in high school, the template where you have an introduction, three body paragraphs, one of which might be a counter argument, and a conclusion. In University Writing, you’ll be introduced to a new model of the college essay, one that builds on the five paragraph model by virtue of being longer and more complex in nature. This model asks you not to prove a point through broad insistence and generalization, but—through openness and perpetual inquiry—arrive at a process of thinking that shows your reader how you got to your conclusion. In some ways, actually, the model of the college essay asks you to try a bottom-up approach, where you start by drawing a tentative conclusion about a phenomenon that you observe in a narrow sector of society or in your own experience. This tentative conclusion—or a hypothesis, if it helps to think of it that way—comprises your claim. The entirety of your essay is explaining how you arrived at that central idea. The academic essay is more often than not an articulation of your thought process instead of attempts to prove that you and only you are correct.
We’ll turn to a new vocabulary for the college essay, one that might be new to you, where we move away from arguments and towards interpretive problems. In class, you’ll hear me talk a lot about “claims” or “theses” or “interpretive problems” instead of “argument” or “proof.” The claims that you’ll make for most of your humanities papers in particular, and definitely in University Writing, will likely be kinds of interpretive problems where you begin with an idea and identify and explore a tension, a disparity, an irregularity, a gap, or some unquestioned aspect of that idea. Research and writing are processes of constant interrogation and self-reflection and the interpretive model is preferable in that regard. It’s preferable also to unsubstantiated opinion and binary opposition, where you’re solely disagreeing. And it’s also preferable to solely agreeing, or doing both, where you’re not really taking any kind of stance at all.
You may have been taught in high school to use unsubstantiated opinion or binary opposition as a way of proving something. Binary opposition, as a refresher, is when you approach another concept with complete disagreement, with the purpose almost of tearing it down. This is unfortunately how we’re trained to see academic argument, and it’s not really an effective way to either get your point across or question another idea. The only points that can be utterly invalidated are bigoted ones and bad-faith arguments, which is when someone is making an argument just to provoke you, but for the most part when engaging in academic research and writing, try to approach ideas first by assuming that there is something in them that you can validate and build on, or something that you can recuperate even if it appears problematic on the surface, and that you can use the idea as something that could help you better think through your own ideas.
I will never tell you not to use opinion, and first-person is fine and often encouraged, but where you use opinion, it must be the kind that you can substantiate. For example, if I were to say “My cat is the best cat,” this is an opinion I can’t really substantiate in any meaningful way. It’s true to me, but it’s feeling-based and highly personalized. I feel that way; I could offer evidence from my my own narrow experience of my cat; but another cat owner could do the same for their cat, and this would turn into a never-ending back-and-forth. By contrast, “I believe students are led to prioritize location, extracurriculars, and facilities when choosing which college to attend instead of looking at departments or faculty members” is a hypothesis drawn from research and observation (and perhaps also personal insight), making for a claim that could be researched beyond that a feeling-based framework. The initial specificity helps ground this; any following interpretations are less likely to be overly broad or generalizing.
You can and should offer your thoughts! Essays are largely about how you think and how you arrive at ideas. You’re not just parroting back what other people are saying or the logic they use to draw conclusions. But you must make sure that those thoughts go beyond just your feelings. Feelings and feeling-based beliefs are impossible to substantiate in academic writing. Feelings do not substitute for facts or for truth, which is paramount today since we exist in a disinformation/misinformation economy where feelings are swapped in for truths, and when discourse becomes based on feelings, productive discussion or questioning becomes impossible. Defensiveness is all that’s produced when you’re questioning a feeling or belief, and because we’re going to be doing a lot of reflection and questioning in this class, you should try to remain open to being challenged and questioned in and out of the college classroom and definitely in your essays. Learning improves with curiosity and a willingness to think and rethink, and the interpretive model of the college essay encourages this.
Finally, the college essay is largely not prescriptive. That is, it does not often begin with “should” or “ought to” claims, which are claims that by their very phrasing insist on change. Change is often imperative, and you may want to ask for change in your essays, and you may feel that change is necessary depending on what you’re talking about. But because of the short length of these essays, it’s better to save it for a suggestion in a “so what?” paragraph at the end where you’re leaving room for future work, or gesturing at what you might say in a future paper if you continued this line of inquiry. The difficulty with a prescriptive claim is that it becomes your task to offer concrete solutions in a kind of activist-oriented mindset. And while this can be done, it usually takes many, many, many pages to do. So it’s usually better to leave it as a suggestion for future work at the end or save prescriptive claims for longer and larger projects.
The ending monologue in the movie Pulp Fiction exemplifies the interpretive model of the college essay, so this might help you immediately think of what the college essay should look like or what work you should be doing in the essay. The video clip has been posted to the blog and on Canvas you’ll find a handout that we’ll work through together in class.
We’ll also talk about how to formulate specific claims, but for now pay attention to the structure of an essay: the interpretive problem, a process of demonstrating your thinking about a previously unconsidered tension or gap in some sort of conclusion you draw or hypothesis that you make.
