Breakthrough Writer: How to Succeed in College, Lesson #3: Develop a Craftsman Mindset & Deep Work

Essay #1 One: So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Two Essay Options

Essay Option A. Support or refute Cal Newport’s claim that the Passion Hypothesis is both a misguided and dangerous idea.

Essay Option B. In context of Cal Newport’s craftsman mindset manifesto and other essays we’ve read about career building for college students, develop an argumentative thesis about what college students need to do to remain relevant in a changing economy.

Cal Newport's Book Page

Excerpt from Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You.

1A Grading Rubric

Review Fallacies of Passion Hypothesis

One. We don't know our passion.

Two. Our passion is capricious and subject to change.

Three. The PH is over simplistic.

Four. There is little evidence that PH works. Successful people have a more complex road to success.

Five. Passion without a skill set is almost worthless.

Six. Passion without a craftsman mindset is worthless.

Seven. Passion without adaptation and flexibility is worthless (student who changed to applied mathematics from neuro-biology).

If I were 18, I'm confident I would be passionate and successful majoring in history, political science, English, music, and philosophy, but what would those majors do for me?

Craftsman Mindset:

Success and happiness on the job are more complicated than passion alone. Craftsmen master their craft to develop capital, which makes them difficult to replace. Their "landing a job" is part hard work, part seeing opportunities, part luck, and part flexibility and adaptability. Their job satisfaction doesn't rely so much on the "right job" as it does their moral character and talent level.

To be a craftsman to have to go through the "suck phase" until you get good at it. I limited my opportunities in accounting and guitar when I was younger because I had no patience.

Newport Continued

A CAREER MANIFESTO

Career advice has fallen into a terribly simplistic rut. Figure out what you’re passionate about, then follow that passion: this idea provides the foundation for just about every guide to improving your working life.

The Career Craftsman rejects this reductionist drivel.

The Career Craftsman understands that “follow your passion and all will be happy” is a children’s tale. Most people don’t have pre-existing passions waiting to be unearthed. Happiness requires more than solving a simple matching problem.

The Career Craftsman knows there’s no magical “right job” waiting out there for you. Any number of pursuits can provide the foundation for an engaging life.

The Career Craftsman believes that compelling careers are not courageously pursued or serendipitously discovered, but are instead systematically crafted.

The Career Craftsman believes this process of career crafting always begins with the mastery of something rare and valuable. The traits that define great work (autonomy, creativity, impact, recognition) are rare and valuable themselves, and you need something to offer in return. Put another way: no one owes you a fulfilling job; you have to earn it.

The Career Craftsman believes that mastery is just the first step in crafting work you love. Once you have the leverage of a rare and valuable skill, you need to apply this leverage strategically to make your working life increasingly fulfilling. It is then — and only then — that you should expect a feeling of passion for your work to truly take hold.

The Career Craftsman thinks the idea that “societal expectations” are trying to hold you down in a safe but boring career path is a boogeyman invented to sell eBooks. You don’t need the courage to create a cool life. You need the type of valuable skills that let you write your own ticket.

The Career Craftsman never expects to love an entry level job (or to stay in that job long before moving up).

The Career Craftsman thinks “is this my calling?” is a stupid question.

The Career Craftsman is data-driven. Admire someone’s career? Work out exactly how they made it happen. The answers you’ll find will be less romantic but more actionable than you might expect.

The Career Craftsman believes the color of your parachute is irrelevant if you take the time to get good at flying the damn plane in the first place.

“Drivel” of the Passion Mindset

Or if you reject the craftsman mindset, you can have the passion mindset, which asks how much value your job is offering you.

Newport argues it is only by producing the craftsman mindset that you can create work that you love.

In terms of maturity, the craftsman mindset is the approach of a mature, fully realized human being.

In contrast, a passion mindset is the approach of a naïve, immature, lazy narcissist.

What is the pre-existing passion principle and why does Cal Newport reject it?

There are some who argue that musician Jordan Tice and comedian Steve Martin, both referenced in Newport’s book, are master craftsmen who work hard because they are doing so in the service of something they love, in work they are passionate about.

Newport rejects this argument. In the entertainment business, “the tape doesn’t lie.” Both performers work super hard because they want to improve their performance.

They both actually have doubt about their vocations as musician and comedian respectively.

What they are sure about is that if they are going to be good they are going to have to engage in deep work.

Both Jordan Tice and Steve Martin have developed consistent habits of hard work as the foundation of improving their craft.

They have developed a craftsman mindset.

Why does a craftsman mindset produce a great job?

Only by creating a great craft, bringing a great product to the job, does a person have a great job, which Newport observes is distinguished by three ingredients:

Creativity: Ira Glass reinvented radio.

Impact: Steve Jobs affected the way the world uses technology.

Control: Craftsmen are not micromanaged by their bosses because of the value they bring to the job.

What is career capital?

One, great work, which is rare and valuable.

Two, great workers, who have rare and valuable skills.

Three, craftsman mindset, which is determined to be so great they can’t ignore you.

Always Know How Much Career Capital You Have Before Making Career Change

On Cal Newport’s blog, he elaborates on the life of Lisa Feuer, who is featured in his book:

The Courage Fallacy

In 2005, Lisa Feuer quit her marketing job. She had held this same position throughout her 30s before deciding, at the age of 38, that it was time for something different.

As the New York Times reported in an article from last summer, she wanted the same independence and flexibility that her ex-husband, an entrepreneur, enjoyed. Bolstered by this new resolve, Lisa invested in a $4000 yoga instruction course and started Karma Kids Yoga — a yoga practice focused on young children and pregnant women.

Lisa’s story provides a pristine example of what I call the choice-centric approach to building an interesting life. This philosophy emphasizes the importance of choosing better work. Having the courage to leave your boring but dangerously comfortable job — to borrow a phrase from Tim Ferriss — and instead follow your “passion,” has become the treasure map guiding this philosophy’s adherents.

But there’s a problem: the endings are not always so happy…

The Economics of Remarkable Lives

As the recession hit, Lisa’s business struggled. One of the gyms where she taught closed. Two classes offered at a local public high school were dropped due to under-enrollment. The demand for private lessons diminished.

In 2009, she’s on track to make on $15,000 — not nearly enough to cover her expenses.

This, of course, is the problem with the choice-centric approach to life: it assumes that a much better job is out there waiting for you. The reality, however, is often more Darwinian: much better jobs are out there, but they’re only available to people with much better skills than most of their peers.

As I’ve argued before, the traits that make a remarkable life remarkable — flexibility, engagement, recognition, and reward — are highly desirable. Therefore, to land a job (or start a business) that returns these rewards, you must have a skill to offer that’s both rare and valuable.

It’s simple economics.

Lisa didn’t have a skill that was rare or valuable. She did receive professional Yoga training, but the barrier to entry for this training was the ability to write a tuition check and take a few weeks worth of classes. This skill wasn’t rare or valuable enough to guarantee her the traits she admired in the lives of successful entrepreneurs, and as soon as the economy hiccuped she experienced this reality.

Her courage to follow her “passion” was not enough, in isolation, to improve her life.

The Value of Nerves

This brings me back to the (perhaps) controversial title of this post. If you’re in a job that’s boring but tolerable, and you feel nervous about quitting, you might consider trusting this instinct. Your mind might be honing in on the economic truth that you don’t have a skill rare and valuable enough to earn you a substantially better deal somewhere else. Because of this, your mind understandably reacts to your career day dreams with jitters.

On the other hand, those who have built up highly desirable skills rarely feel much nervousness about the prospect of switching jobs. They’ve probably had other job offers or can name half-a-dozen clients that would pay handsomely for their consulting services.

For example…

Tens of thousands of bored cubicle dwellers fantasize about building their own companies. (Writers have built lucrative careers around pitching this message.) Most of these workers, however, are nervous about this idea due to the very real possibility that their business ventures will fold, leaving them, like Lisa, broke, without health insurance, and worse off than before.

By contrast, earlier this year I received a call from a head hunter trying to recruit me to work at a Manhattan-based start-up incubator that would, in essence, pay me to think up and try out business ideas. (Jeff Bezos was in a similar position at D.E. Shaw when he came up with the idea for Amazon.com.)

My point is that if I wanted to start my own company (which I don’t), I wouldn’t feel nervous. The reason is clear: By earning a PhD in computer science at MIT I developed a skill that’s rare and valuable to this particular economic segment. The market has made this value clear to me; ergo, no nerves.

The Hard Focus-Centric Approach

Though I’m not nervous about the idea of starting my own company, I am, at this point in my career, nervous about the path that most interests me: becoming a professor at a quality research university.

Instead of paralyzing me, however, these nerves provide wonderful clarity. My goal during my postdoc years now centers on eliminating this nervousness. To do so, I need to make myself unambiguously one of the top candidates in the computer science academic job market. This, in turn, requires incredibly high-quality research that promises to push my research sub-fields forward. This specific goal has trickled down into concrete changes in my day to day work habits. Most notably, I’ve recently rebuilt my schedule around hard focus, and I spend much more time reading the research literature and thinking about the long-term direction of my short-term work.

In other words, nervousness can provide more than just sober-minded warning. It can also help guide you in your efforts to build a remarkable life. Instead of grappling with vague worry — “Am I stupid for wanting to try this new career path?” — you can focus your energy toward a clear metric: building up a valuable skill until you’ve eliminated this nervousness.

Craftsman Mindset

One. What is one of the strongest advantages of the craftsman mindset over the passion-centric mindset?

Finding the right or ultimate job is a myth. In fact, we’re constantly agnostic about our job. We don’t know if our job is ideal or not. What we do know is we have to improve our craft.

Improving our craft makes us passionate about what we do, not the job, so we have more flexibility over what kind of job we do.

However, there are 3 Disqualifiers for Some Jobs

One, the job offers you few opportunities to distinguish yourself with rare and valuable work.

Two, the job makes you focus on useless or morally wrong activities.

Three, the job forces you to work with people you don’t like.

Two. Why did Jordan Tice excel in guitar in ways that Cal Newport did not in spite of their equal years of playing time?

“Discomfort with mental discomfort is a liability in the performance world.”

You must work through the discomfort to reach higher limits of your talent. Only then can you achieve breakthroughs and develop a skill that is rare and valuable.

Jordan practiced, and this meant a lot of repetitious tedium.

In addition to doing deep work, Jordan got instant feedback.

We learn that deep work is most effective when a teacher or mentor figure gives us feedback as we make our progress.

In contrast, Cal played casually. Jordan became a professional. Cal became a guitar-playing dilettante.

What is the 10,000-Hour Rule?

Excellence at performing a complex task requires a minimum of hours to accomplish. We’re not just talking any hours. We’re talking deep work hours, that is undistracted focus entailing a lot of mental discomfort.

Being willing to do 10,000 hours of deep work is a trait we see in people who labeled as geniuses like Mozart and Bill Gates.

Genius does not exist without deep work.

Talent without deep work is a flop, a dud, and a waste.

Is hard work enough to reach a level of mastery?

No. Deep work leads to deliberate practice, which requires feedback. Without deliberate practice and feedback, even a talented hard working person will hit a plateau.

What are the Five Habits of a Craftsman?

1: Decide what capital market you are in. There are 2 kinds of markets –

Winner-take-all: One killer skills with a few winners all over the world (e.g. Hollywood script writer)

Auction: Diverse collection of skills. Here, there are many different types of career capital and each person might generate their own unique collection (e.g. CEO of a Fortune 500 company)

2: Identify your capital type. Ignore this if you are in a winner-take-all market as there’s only one type of capital. (i.e. be amongst the top 10 script writers in the world to make it in Hollywood)

For an auction market, however, seek open gates i.e. opportunities to build capital that are already open to you. Open gates get us farther faster. Skill acquisition is like a freight train: Getting it started requires a huge application of effort, but changing its track once it’s moving is easy. (e.g. keep moving upwards in an organization and then laterally instead of trying to move laterally and start from scratch)

3: Define “good.” Set clear goals. For a script writer, the definition of “good” is clear – his scripts being taken seriously.

4: Stretch and destroy. Deliberate practice – that uncomfortable sensation in our heads that feels like physical strain, as if neurons are physically re-forming into new configurations.

5: Be patient. Look years into the future for the payoff. It’s less about paying attention to your main pursuit, and more about your willingness to ignore other pursuits that pop up along the way to distract you.

One. What is Deep Work and why is it important?

Definition

Deep Work is distraction-free concentration on professional activities “that push your cognitive abilities to your limit.”

To give us a clear grasp of the focus required for deep work, Newport quotes Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges:

“Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.”

Deep Work’s 3 Important Results

Deep Work has 3 important results: It creates new value, improves your skill, and creates unique work that is hard to replicate.

Science Supports Claims About Deep Work

Only through deep work can we maximize our intellectual capacity and see how far we can go with what skills and talents we have.

Neurological and psychological studies support the claim that pushing yourself in non-distracted focus and enduring mental discomfort in pursuit of your goals is the only way to improve your skills.

What Should be Obvious and Commonplace No Longer Is in the Social Media Age

It should be obvious that you need prolonged focus attention to maximize the quality of your work, and it should be commonplace that people follow such a principle.

However, in the age of social media, emails, messaging, and texting, we live in an age of Attention Fragmentation.

Shallow Work

The activities done in a state of multi-tasking and attention fragmentation amount to what Newport calls shallow work.

Shallow work has become the norm, the commonplace. We think it’s natural because everyone else does it.

But shallow work results in mediocrity at best, and more often than not shallow work results in us becoming “bottom feeders” in the competitive economy.

If we want to be on the top of the food chain, we have to engage in Deep Work, which means committing ourselves to losing our distractions.

It’s difficult to commit to deep work because we live in a culture that encourages shallow work. We work in multi-tasking work environments in which were required to instantly respond to email, text messages, not to mention people who are playing games and uploading images on social media sites.

Most people are in a fragmented state and are performing shallow work. What they do is easily replicated.

Shallow work also makes us unfocused, unhappy, depressed, and hollowed-out versions of ourselves.

Recent studies even show that huge declines in teen drug and alcohol use might be explained by drugs and alcohol being substituted with smartphone and social media addiction.

Two. What is the difference between influential people and most people who are employed in the “knowledge work” industry?

Influential people have one thing in common: They make deep work a priority. In contrast, most knowledge workers or white-collar workers do shallow work.

Three. What is shallow work and why is it so dangerous?

Shallow work is non-demanding busy “logistical” work that anyone can do. Shallow work is done in a state of distraction and multi-tasking.

In other words, shallow work is meaningless work, and we can safely conclude that meaningless work, while easy, will bore and depress us.

The vicious cycle of shallow work is the more we’re bored and depressed by our shallow work the more we crave distractions like social media sharing, so that we become trapped in a cycle of shallow work and depression.

When we get jobs that require shallow work, we reduce ourselves to “human routers,” and as such we are very replaceable by new software and new machines. Does anyone want a job that reduces them to a “human router?”

What adds to this tragedy is that as teens we become acclimated to being addicted to our smartphones, social media sharing, and multi-tasking so that at a very young age we are conditioning ourselves for shallow work and depression.

Another tragedy is that shallow work can cripple us so that we may never be able to deep work. As Newport writes: “Spend your time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.”

Four. What practical career matter does Cal Newport want to address in his book?

Newport is observing that as fewer and fewer people are engaging in deep work, deep work is becoming more and more prized so that to be able to perform deep work in this new environment makes one more sought after for the most desirable jobs.

In other words, committing yourself to deep work gives you a huge competitive advantage over shallow workers.

Newport presents this idea in his “Deep Work Hypothesis”:

The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.

Newport uses the example of Jason Benn who was a replaceable worker doing spreadsheets. He did shallow work and found himself addicted to distraction like checking his emails all the time. When he got replaced by a computer program, he forced himself to learn computer programming, a task that only deep workers can do.

He had to re-condition himself, unplug himself from his “drug”: smartphone distractions, and go into deep work. Only after becoming a deep worker did he surpass others in his field of computer science.

Your friends who think they’re cool, hip, and sexy being plugged in to their smartphones all day and night are conditioning themselves to be bottom-feeders, depressed members of the Shallow Work Society. Do you want to join their ranks or be a Deep Worker? It’s up to you.

Five. Why is deep work more important than ever?

Newport observes that we entering the Intellectual Machine Age, also called The Great Restructuring, in which robots and high-tech are replacing a significant amount of jobs. This job loss if very scary to the workforce.

However, there are 3 fields that will provide “lucrative” income to the American workforce and all 3 fields require deep work.

Being a superstar and a venture capitalist are 2 fields, but those fields are not realistic for most of us. However, Newport points to a third field that should interest us: Being able to work with Intelligent Machines.

The types of majors that allow us to work well with Intelligent Machines are computer science, math, and statistics.

All 3 of these majors require deep work. You’re not getting anywhere if you’re on your smartphone all day and night.

Six. What is deliberate practice and why is it important to deep work?

To do deep work, one must engage in deliberate practice, which requires two things:

One, is prolonged focus and this strains the mind. However, the longer you do prolonged focus the more you develop the myelin plasma shafts in your brain, which become thicker like bigger broadband. They are fatty tissue that allow brain circuits to fire in your brain. The stronger these brain circuits become the more they can fire effortlessly and effectively.

Later Newport explains that oligodenrocytes wrap layers of myelin around the neurons “cementing the skill.” Only intense focus achieves this.

Shallow work, in contrast, weakens the myelin brain circuits. Transforming yourself from a shallow to deep worker requires a re-hardwiring of your brain circuits.

Two, deliberate practice requires that you receive feedback so that you can correct and improve your approach.

Deliberate practice produces higher quality work. As Newport writes:

High-Quality Work Produced= (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

(The above formulation applies to students’ essays as well)

Seven. What is the relationship between multitasking and “attention residue”?

When we switch back and forth between Task A and Task B (and maybe Task D and C?), we suffer from attention residue in which the previous task is soaking our brain with residue that we’re not focused on the task at hand.

The result is loss of focus intensity, and this leads to mediocrity. We’re drifting into becoming “human routers” and bottom-feeders.

One. What is the Principle of Least Resistance?

Too many corporate environments scatter-brain their employees by making them do a lot of shallow work. Why? Because of the Principle of Least Resistance:

Without clear feedback on how shallow work affects the bottom line, companies surrender to a shallow work environment, not because it’s most effective, but because it’s the easiest of all available options.

Additionally, getting a quick response creates the illusion of productivity. “Constant connectivity” creates the illusion of professionalism and efficiency. “Constant connectivity” is an example of an Easy Stupid Thing.

Another Easy Stupid Thing is forwarding emails. It’s super easy to forward an email to everyone in your office, but then you make them sweat and labor over your half-baked thought for hours while you did nothing. These half-baked forwarded emails ruin productivity, but they are easy to do.

As a corollary, we can postulate that on a personal level we do the same thing with social media, allowing the smartphone to be the slow-opium drip machine hooked up to our brain: We don’t question the damage this does to our personal and professional life. We simply “fall” into it because it’s easy, peer pressure dictates a certain conformity, and social media brands itself effectively as a way of being hip, now, sexy, and successful when in fact it’s a complete lie.

Another seduction of shallow work is that we think we’re productive when we’re busy, but we’re not. We can be “human routers” of busy work, but not producing high-quality deep work.

Newport warns us to not let busyness be a proxy for deep work.

Another seduction of busyness that can drain our capacity to deep work and suck us into shallow work is the grand lure of “having an internet presence” on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

While such a presence may be important for a lot of people, too many people find these social media presences a “time suck” that takes away from deep work.

Fear of Being Invisible and Irrelevant in the Technopoly

We get sucked into the shallow work of having a social media presence (and constantly responding to comments and messages) because in the technopoly, the blind worship of technology for its own sake, we fear that not having an internet presence will render us invisible and irrelevant.

Two. What profound purpose is Cal Newport trying to achieve in his book?

Newport is trying to show us that a life hooked to social media, internet, and the technopoly is one of fragmentation, scatter-brained disorientation, soulless mediocrity, depression, shallow work and emptiness.

In contrast, a life of deep work in the service of becoming a master craftsman results in personal distinction that is valued by others, performance of high-quality work that cannot be easily replicated by others, deep satisfaction, and deep meaning in both one’s personal and professional life.

It’s like the difference between heaven and hell.

Focus, Not Desirable Circumstances, Lead to Happiness

Referring to the wisdom he finds in Winifred Gallagher’s book Rapt, Newport makes the point that a life of focus, not desirable circumstances, lead to happiness.

Focus helps unify our thoughts and makes us feel whole, complete, and happy.

The opposite is also true then: Attention-fragmentation makes us feel scattered, incomplete, empty and depressed. This emptiness and depression can afflict us even in the most desirable circumstances imaginable.

He quotes Gallagher:

“Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.”

If you love “sharing” on social media photos of your fish tacos from Rubio’s or your bread sticks from Olive Garden and in general your “happy” life with your friends at restaurants, then that’s you who are. But remember that your focus is shallow; therefore, you’re not experiencing meaning and happiness.

If you focus on honing your craft at the piano, or singing, dancing, acting, math, or architecture, to give a few examples, your mastering your craft and your focus and you will be happier than if you’re constantly “sharing” and doing shallow work.

Deep Work Equals Happiness

Citing the psychological studies of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on happiness, Newport quotes the researcher:

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

The above quote is an excellent reiteration of what it means to do deep work, and it leads to happiness no less.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi concludes that life is easier when we’re focused on deep work than when we’re lollygagging through free time. Deep work causes intense happiness called “flow.”

Piddling away several minutes or hours in a waiting room or on an airplane or in a classroom is a form of misery, yet we’ve been manipulated into believing by the social media industry that we’re having “fun.”

When we’re plugged into the slow-drip opium drug of our smartphone, we’re in hell, but we’re in denial of this fact.

Sentence Fragment Review

Sentence Fragments

No main verb

Fragment

An essay with a clear thesis and organization.

Corrected

An essay with a clear thesis and organization has a stronger probability of succeeding.

Fragment

An education system based on standardized tests with no flexible interpretation of those tests

Corrected

An education system based on standardized tests with no flexible interpretation of those tests will inevitably discriminate against non-native speakers.

No main subject

Fragment

With too much emphasis on standardized tests targeting upper-class Anglo students

Corrected

With too much emphasis on standardized tests targeting upper-class Anglo students, No Child Left Behind remains a form of discrimination.

Fragment

With my fish tacos overloaded with mango salsa and Manchego cheese

Correct

With my fish tacos overloaded with mango salsa and Manchego cheese, they fell apart upon the first bite.

Fragment

Until you learn to not overload your fish tacos

Correct

Until you learn to not overload your fish tacos, your tacos will fall apart.

Examples of Student Fragments

People are never happy with what they have. Always trying to be something they're not.

Star Trek predicted what the future would be like. A world where an abundant supply of technology helps the human race.

Since being drawn to social media, we're together now more than ever. Not communicating with conversation but only connecting.

Don’t allow gerunds and participles to stand alone.

Having Facebook friends whose GoFundMe accounts that are always asking for money.

Babbling about the Presidential election.

Stuffing my mouth with cream cheese and bagels.

Examining the reasons for staying in college.

Running toward the buffet table.

Running toward the buffet table is dangerous. (gerund noun phrase)

Running toward the buffet table, Mo tripped and broke his wrist. (participle phrase modifies Mo, so it’s also called an adjective phrase)

Eating bucket-fulls of cashew and walnut pesto larded with Parmesan cheese.

Eating bucket-fulls of cashew and walnut pesto larded with Parmesan cheese can lead to a heart attack. (gerund noun phrase)

Eating bucket-fulls of cashew and walnut pesto larded with Parmesan cheese, Augustine was oblivious of his girlfriend who sat across from him at the table looking at his exhibition of gluttony with horror and disgust. (participle phrase that modifies Augustine).

Augustine dreams of eating a ricotta pound cake smothered with whipped cream and strawberries. (gerund noun phrase is the object of the sentence)

Faulty

Elliot was a vulgar philistine. Evidenced by a love of gold and sequin-encrusted toilets.

Corrected

Elliot was a vulgar philistine evidenced by a love of gold and sequin-encrusted toilets.

Don’t let prepositional phrases stand alone.

A prepositional phrase starts with a preposition.

Under the bridge, the Red Hot Chili Peppers rock star contemplated the emptiness of his life and wrote “Under the Bridge.”

In "Growing Up Tethered" by Sherry Turkle is talking about why more teens are more focused on their phones than real people.

In the above, get rid of the preposition "In."

Faulty

I enjoyed my run. In spite of your choice to abandon me and leave me to run alone in the rain. (prepositional phrase can’t stand alone)

Corrected

I enjoyed my run in spite of your choice to abandon me and leave me to run alone in the rain.

Don’t let an appositional phrase stand alone.

An appositional phrase is the use of phrase to rename a noun.

My father, a military man, speaks in a loud, bombastic voice.

I listen to the loud voice of my father, a military man.

Faulty

Bo Jackson, the most freakish physical specimen of the last century, suffered a career-stopping hip injury. That sent his fans into mourning.

Corrected

Bo Jackson, the most freakish physical specimen of the last century, suffered a career-stopping hip injury, which sent his fans into mourning.

Faulty

My favorite athlete is Bo Jackson. The most freakish specimen of the last century.

Corrected

My favorite athlete is Bo Jackson, the most freakish specimen of the last century.

Faulty

I dreamed last night that I was sitting behind the wheel of a Lexus GS350. One of the greatest cars ever built.

Corrected

I dreamed last night that I was sitting behind the wheel of a Lexus GS350, one of the greatest cars ever built.

Faulty

In 1969, I swooned over my third-grade classmate Patty Wilson. A pulchritudinous goddess from another planet.

Corrected

In 1969, I swooned over my third-grade classmate Patty Wilson, a pulchritudinous goddess from another planet.

Don’t let an infinitive phrase stand alone. An infinitive phrase is a “to verb,” which is not a real verb.

To know me is to love me.

Faulty

Working in his lab for ten years, Dr. Kragen was obsessed with creating a new type of Greek yogurt. To see if he could create a yogurt with 100 grams of protein per cup.

Working in his lab for ten years, Dr. Kragen was obsessed with creating a new type of Greek yogurt to see if he could create a yogurt with 100 grams of protein per cup.

Don’t let an adjective clause stand alone.

An adjective clause is that or which followed by a subject and a verb.

I like cars that feel like they’ve been built with care and precision.

Spotify, which I joined last year, has kept me from spending money on iTunes.

Faulty

I spend most of my listening time on Spotify. Which costs me ten dollars a month and saves me from spending up to $100 a month on iTunes.

Corrected

I spend most of my listening time on Spotify, which costs me ten dollars a month and saves me from spending up to $100 a month on iTunes.

Faulty

People who lard their salads with candied nuts.

Corrected

People who lard their salads with candied nuts have to admit they can only eat salad if they make it taste like pecan pie.

Faulty

People who cut you off and then drive really slowly as if they're trying to enrage you on purpose.

Corrected

People who cut you off and then drive really slowly as if they're trying to enrage you on purpose are passive-aggressive miscreants.

Faulty

People who sign up for community college classes and then ignore the syllabus.

Corrected

People who sign up for community college classes and then ignore the syllabus are more in love with the idea of going to college than actually going to college.

Faulty

People who think marriage will cure them of their immaturity and give them instant status as winners in society.

Corrected

People who think marriage will cure them of their immaturity and give them instant status as winners in society are delusional charlatans who are on the road to divorce.

Don’t let an adverbial clause stand alone.

An adverbial clause modifies a verb.

I like to do my kettlebell workouts when my twins are in school.

When it’s too hot to exercise, I slog through my kettlebell workouts.

Faulty

I tend to inhale gallons of rocky road chocolate chip ice cream. As a depressive reaction to “Lonely Night Saturdays.”

Corrected

I tend to inhale gallons of rocky road chocolate chip ice cream as a depressive reaction to “Lonely Night Saturdays.”

Don’t let any long phrase or clause be confused with a complete sentence.

Faulty

Although I studied herpetology and kinesiology during my stay in the Peruvian mountains while keeping warm in the hides of Alpaca and other mountain-dwelling bovine creatures.

Corrected

Although I studied herpetology and kinesiology during my stay in the Peruvian mountains while keeping warm in the hides of Alpaca and other mountain-dwelling bovine creatures, I feel I didn’t retain much information during my two-year stay there.

Find Fragments and Comma Splices

The other night I consumed a tub of Greek yogurt with peanut butter and honey so I'd have enough energy to watch a documentary about world hunger.

I wasn't really hungry, I was anxious. Whenever I get anxious; which is all the time, I eat like a demon.

Anxiety propels me to stuff my face even when I’m not hungry. The mechanical act of eating. Using my greedy hands to lift food to my mouth and then hearing my mandibles and molars crunch the food matter into mush, has a soothing effect on my anxieties—like giving a teething biscuit to a baby.

Anxiety compels me to engage in the practice of “preemptive eating.” The idea that even though I’m not hungry at this moment, I might be “on the road” inside my car far away from nutritional resources so I had better fill up while I can. In truth, I’m not “on the road” that often evidenced by the fact that my nine-year-old car has only 33 thousand miles on the odometer. Clearly, then, my impulse for preemptive eating is indefensible.

But you see, my anxieties exaggerate the circumstances so that I have ample food reserves in my car—cases of high-protein chocolate peanut butter bars and a case of bottled water. All that unnecessary weight in the trunk compromises my gas mileage, but my anxieties are a cruel tyrant.

Anxiety is the reason that, in spite of my hardcore kettlebell workouts, I am a good twenty pounds overweight. Being twenty pounds overweight makes me anxious, and these anxieties, in turn, make me want to eat more.

Contemplating this vicious cycle is making me extremely anxious.

Good food makes me anxious.

Just thinking about good food can make me so anxious I’ll obsess over it in bed, so I’ll toss and turn all night. Like a heroin addict.

When I was in my early twenties, I ate donuts that were so good I wanted to drop out of college, give up on relationships, and hole myself up in my mother’s basement. Where I’d spend the rest of my life eating donuts.

I suffer from food insomnia. Meaning that fixating at night on a certain delicious meal I once had can prevent me from falling asleep.

There’s one food in particular that keeps me up at night—chocolate brownies.

Chocolate brownie are the best delivery system for sending an explosion of chocolate into the brain’s pleasure centers. Chocolate brownies saturate my brain with so much dopamine that after eating a brownie platter it’s not safe for me to drive or to operate heavy mechanical equipment. When I was a kid, I took cough medicine laced with codeine, and there was a warning label on the back: “Not safe to drive or to operate heavy mechanical equipment.” Chocolate brownie mix should have the same warning on the back of the box.

The best brownies mix I’ve ever had are Ghirardelli Triple Chocolate Chip Brownies from Costco. I’ve purchased the same brand from other stores, but the Costco version is the best. Costco apparently uses its special powers to have Ghirardelli make an exclusive proprietary formula that is far superior to other versions, this fact has been corroborated by conversations I’ve had with Orange County housewives.

I don’t live in Orange County, and I don’t normally have conversations with housewives. That I talked with them about the superior quality of the exclusive Costco version of Ghirardelli Triple Chocolate Chip Brownies mix attests to the severity of my unhealthy dependence on food.

Costco does a good job of making you think about food. Before you even walk inside Costco, you smell the freshly baked cinnamon rolls, chocolate chip cookies, and cream Danish. The smell makes you run inside the store.

Chronologically speaking, I am supposed to be an adult, but like a kid, I’m running toward the Costco entrance while pushing an empty shopping cart. I must be a scary sight. This 240-pound middle-aged bald guy aggressively pushing his battering ram into a giant food larder. Where he will pillage the spoils. I’m like an Old Testament warlord about to ransack a defeated city.

Purdue Owl on Parallelism

Correct the faulty parallelism by rewriting the sentences below.

One. Parenting toddlers is difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is that toddlers contradict everything you ask them to do; they have giant mood swings and all-night tantrums.

Parenting toddlers is difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is that toddlers contradict everything you ask them to do, they have giant mood swings, and they have all-night tantrums.

Two. You should avoid all-you-can-eat buffets: They encourage gluttony; they feature fatty, over-salted foods and high sugar content.

You should avoid all-you-can-eat buffets: They encourage gluttony, they feature fatty, over-salted foods, and the lard everything with sugar.

Three. I prefer kettlebell training at home than the gym because of the increased privacy, the absence of loud “gym” music, and I’m able to concentrate more.

I prefer kettlebell training at home than the gym because of the increased privacy, the absent gym music, and the improved concentration.

Four. To write a successful research paper you must adhere to the exact MLA format, employ a variety of paragraph transitions, and writing an intellectually rigorous thesis.

To write a successful research paper you must adhere to the exact MLA format, employ a variety of paragraph transitions, and write an intellectually rigorous thesis.

Five. The difficulty of adhering to the MLA format is that the rules are frequently being updated, the sheer abundance of rules you have to follow, and to integrate your research into your essay.

The difficulty of adhering to the MLA format is that the rules are frequently being updated, the rules are hard to follow, and the MLA in-text citations are difficult to master.

Six. You should avoid watching “reality shows” on TV because they encourage a depraved form of voyeurism; they distract you from your own problems and their brain-dumbing effects.

You should avoid watching "reality shows" because they encourage a depraved form of voyeurism, they distract you from your own problems, and they dumb you down.

Seven. I’m still fat even though I’ve tried the low-carb diet, the Paleo diet, the Rock-in-the-Mouth diet, and fasting every other day.

I'm still fat even though I've tried the low-carb diet, the Paleo diet, the Rock-in-the-Mouth diet, and the fasting diet.

Eight. To write a successful thesis, you must have a compelling topic, a sophisticated take on that topic, and developing a thesis that elevates the reader’s consciousness to a higher level.

To write a successful thesis, you must have a compelling topic, a sophisticated take on that topic, and a thesis that elevates the reader's consciousness to a higher level.

Nine. Getting enough sleep, exercising daily, and the importance of a positive attitude are essential for academic success.

Getting enough sleep, exercising daily, and maintaining a positive attitude are essential for academic success.

Ten. My children never react to my calm commands or when I beg them to do things.

My children never react to my calm commands or my lugubrious supplications.

Writing Effective Introduction Paragraphs for Your Essays

Weak Introductions to Avoid

One. Don’t use overused quotes:

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

“My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

“To be or not to be, that is the question.”

Two. Don’t use pretentious, grandiose, overwrought, bloated, self-regarding, clichéd, unintentionally funny openings:

Since the Dawn of Man, people have sought love and happiness . . .

In today’s society, we see more and more people cocooning in their homes . . .

Man has always wondered why happiness and contentment are so elusive like trying to grasp a bar of sudsy, wet soap.

We have now arrived at a Societal Epoch where we no longer truly communicate with one another as we have embarked upon the full-time task of self-aggrandizement through the social media of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et al.

In this modern world we face a new existential crisis with the advent of newfangled technologies rendering us razzle-dazzled with the overwhelming possibilities of digital splendor on one hand and painfully dislocated and lonely with our noses constantly rubbing our digital screens on the other.

Since Adam and Eve traipsed across the luxuriant Garden of Eden searching for the juicy, succulent Adriatic fig only to find it withered under the attack of mites, ants, and fruit flies, mankind has embarked upon the quest for the perfect pesticide.

Three. Never apologize to the reader:

Sorry for these half-baked chicken scratch thoughts. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night and I didn’t have sufficient time to do the necessary research for the topic you assigned me.

I’m hardly an expert on this subject and I don’t know why anyone would take me seriously, but here it goes.

Forgive me but after over-indulging last night at HomeTown Buffet my brain has been rendered in a mindless fog and the ramblings of this essay prove to be rather incoherent.

Four. Don’t throw a thesis cream pie in your reader’s face.

In this essay I am going to prove to you why Americans will never buy those stupid automatic cars that don’t need a driver. The four supports that will support my thesis are ______________, ______________, _______________, and ________________.

It is my purpose in this essay to show you why I'm correct on the subject of the death penalty. My proofs will be _________, _______, _________, and ___________.

Five. Don’t use a dictionary definition (standard procedure for a sixth-grade essay but not a college in which you should use more sophisticated methods such as an extended definition or expert definitions):

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines metacognition as “awareness or analysis of one’s own learning or thinking process.”

General Principles of an Effective Introduction Paragraph

It piques your readers’ interest (often called a “hook”).

It is compelling.

It is timely.

It is relevant to the human condition and to your topic.

It transitions to your topic and/or thesis.

The Ten Types of Paragraph Introductions

One. Use a blunt statement of fact or insight that captures your readers’ attention:

It's good for us to have our feelings hurt.

You've never really lived until someone has handed you your __________ on a stick.

Men who are jealous are cheaters.

We would assume that jealous men are obsessed with fidelity, but in fact the most salient feature of the jealous man is that he is more often than not cheating on his partner. His jealousy results from projecting his own infidelities on his partner. He says to himself, “I am a cheater and therefore so is she.” We see this sick mentality in the character Dan from Ha Jin’s “The Beauty.” Trapped in his jealousy, Dan embodies the pathological characteristics of learned helplessness evidenced by ___________, _______________, ________________, and _______________.

John Taylor Gatto opens his essay “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why” as thus:

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in the world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: Their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teacher’s lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel, they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

Gatto goes on to argue in his thesis that school trains children to be servants for mediocre (at best) jobs when school should be teaching innovation, individuality, and leadership roles.

Two. Write a definition based on the principles of extended definition (term, class, distinguishing characteristics) or quote an expert in a field of study:

Metacognition is an essential asset to mature people characterized by their ability to value long-term gratification over short-term gratification, their ability to distance themselves from their passions when they’re in a heated emotional state, their ability to stand back and see the forest instead of the trees, and their ability to continuously make assessments of the effectiveness of their major life choices. In the fiction of John Cheever and James Lasdun, we encounter characters that are woefully lacking in metacognition evidenced by _____________, ______________, _____________, and _______________.

According to Alexander Batthanany, member of the Viktor Frankl Institute, logotherapy, which is the search for meaning, “is identified as the primary motivational force in human beings.” Batthanany further explains that logotherapy is “based on three philosophical and psychological concepts: Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life.” Embracing the concepts of logotherapy is vastly more effective than conventional, Freud-based psychotherapy when we consider ________________, ______________, __________________, and ________________.

Example of Definition

In his essay "The Complacent Intellectual Class," Neil Theasby writes:

I WOULD LIKE TO COIN A PHRASE, the complacent intellectual class, to describe the overwhelming number of pundits, thought leaders, and policy wonks who accept, welcome, or even enforce slovenly scholarship. These people might, in the abstract, like research that maintains the highest standards, they might even consider themselves academics or bona fide researchers, when in fact they have lost the capacity of maintaining even the most basic standards of rigor.

I am motivated to do so after reading Tyler Cowen’s new book The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream. I propose the term with some trepidation. Cowen—a George Mason University economist, libertarian theorist, and “legendary blogger” (to quote the book’s inset)—is often a smart commentator who puts his finger on a lot of interesting social phenomena, introduces novel ideas, and proves worth reading from time to time.

But books are different from blog posts and op-eds. And this book fails so glaringly that it makes me despair for this country’s literary culture and intellectual life in general. So let me use Cowen’s latest venture to illustrate what we should all demand from the work of our intellectual class, lest our nation continue to vegetate in the pretend-thinking of #AspenIdeas pseudo-academia.

Three. Use an insightful quotation that has not, to your knowledge anyway, been overused:

George Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two great tragedies in life. The first is not getting what we want. The second is getting it.” Shaw’s insight speaks to the tantalizing chimera, that elusive quest we take for the Mythic She-Beast who becomes a life-altering obsession. As the characters in John Cheever and James Lasdun’s fiction show, the human relationship with the chimera is a source of paradox. On one hand, having a chimera will kill us. On the other, not having a chimera will kill us. Cheever and Lasdun’s characters twist and torment under the paradoxical forces of their chimeras evidenced by _____________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.

Four. Use a startling fact to get your reader’s attention:

There are currently more African-American men in prison than there were slaves at the peak of slavery in the United States. We read this disturbing fact in Michelle Alexander’s magisterial The New Jim Crow, which convincingly argues that America’s prison complex is perpetuating the racism of slavery and Jim Crow in several insidious ways.

We read that in the latest study by the Institute for Higher Education, Leadership & Policy at Cal State Sacramento that only 30% of California community college students are transferring or getting their degrees. We have a real challenge in the community college if 70% are falling by the wayside.

8,000 students walk through El Camino's Humanities Building every week. Only 10% will pass English 1A. Only 3% will pass English 1C.

99% of my students acknowledge that most students at El Camino are seriously compromised by their smartphone addiction to the point that the addiction is making them fail or do non-competitive work in college.

Five. Use an anecdote (personal or otherwise) to get your reader’s attention:

Ta-Nehisi Coates from "My President Was Black":

In the waning days of President Barack Obama’s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no one could then grasp. It was late October, Friday the 21st, and the president had spent many of the previous weeks, as he would spend the two subsequent weeks, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Things were looking up. Polls in the crucial states of Virginia and Pennsylvania showed Clinton with solid advantages. The formidable GOP strongholds of Georgia and Texas were said to be under threat. The moment seemed to buoy Obama. He had been light on his feet in these last few weeks, cracking jokes at the expense of Republican opponents and laughing off hecklers. At a rally in Orlando on October 28, he greeted a student who would be introducing him by dancing toward her and then noting that the song playing over the loudspeakers—the Gap Band’s “Outstanding”—was older than she was. “This is classic!” he said. Then he flashed the smile that had launched America’s first black presidency and started dancing again. Three months still remained before Inauguration Day, but staffers had already begun to count down the days. They did this with a mix of pride and longing—like college seniors in early May. They had no sense of the world they were graduating into. None of us did.

Jeff McMahon:

When my daughter was one years old and I was changing her diaper, she without warning jammed her thumb into my eye, forcing my eyeball into my brain and almost killing me. After the assault, I suffered migraine headaches for several months and frequently would have to wash milky pus from the injured eye.

One afternoon I was napping under the covers when Lara walked into the room talking on the phone to her friend, Hannah. She didn’t know I was in the room, confusing the mound on the bed with a clump of pillows and blankets. I heard her whisper to Hannah, “I found another small package from eBay. He’s buying watches and not telling me.” 

That’s when I thought about getting a post office box.  

This could be the opening introduction for an essay topic about “economic infidelity.”

As we read in Stephen King’s essay “Write or Die”:

“Hardly a week after being sprung from detention hall, I was once more invited to step down to the principal’s office. I went with a sinking heart, wondering what new sh** I’d stepped in.”

Six. Use a piece of vivid description or a vivid illustration to get your reader’s attention:

My gym looks like an enchanting fitness dome, an extravaganza of taut, sweaty bodies adorned in fluorescent spandex tights contorting on space-age cardio machines, oil-slicked skin shrouded in a synthetic fog of dry ice colored by the dizzying splash of lavender disco lights. Tribal drum music plays loudly. Bottled water flows freely, as if from some Elysian spring, over burnished flesh. The communal purgation appeals to me. My fellow cardio junkies and I are so self-abandoned, free, and euphoric, liberated in our gym paradise.
But right next to our workout heaven is a gastronomical inferno, one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, part of a chain, which is, to my lament, sprouting all over Los Angeles. I despise the buffet, a trough for people of less discriminating tastes who saunter in and out of the restaurant at all hours, entering the doors of the eatery without shame and blind to all the gastrointestinal and health-related horrors that await them. Many of the patrons cannot walk out of their cars to the buffet but have to limp or rely on canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and other ambulatory aids, for it seems a high percentage of the customers are afflicted with obesity, diabetes, arthritis, gout, hypothalamic lesions, elephantiasis, varicose veins and fleshy tumors. Struggling and wheezing as they navigate across the vast parking lot that leads to their gluttonous sanctuary, they seem to worship the very source of their disease.

In front of the buffet is a sign of rules and conduct. One of the rules urges people to stand in the buffet line in an orderly fashion and to be patient because there is plenty of food for everyone. Another rule is that children are not to be left unattended and running freely around the buffet area. My favorite rule is that no hands, tongues, or other body parts are allowed to touch the food. Tongs and other utensils are to be used at all times. The rules give you an idea of the kind of people who eat there. These are people I want to avoid.

But as I walk to the gym from my car, which shares a parking lot with the buffet patrons, I cannot avoid the nauseating smell of stale grease oozing from the buffet’s rear dumpster, army green and stained with splotches and a seaweed-like crust of yellow and brown grime.

Often I see cooks and dishwashers, their bodies covered with soot, coming out of the back kitchen door to throw refuse into the dumpster, a smoldering receptacle with hot fumes of bacteria and flies. Hunchbacked and knobby, the poor employees are old, weary men with sallow, rheumy eyes and cuts and bruises all over their bodies. I imagine them being tortured deep within the bowels of the fiery kitchen on some Medieval rack. They emerge into the blinding sunshine like moles, their eyes squinting, with their plastic garbage bags twice the size of their bodies slung over their shoulders, and then I look into their sad eyes—eyes that seem to beg for my help and mercy. And just when I am about to give them words of hope and consolation or urge them to flee for their lives, it seems they disappear back into the restaurant as if beckoned by some invisible tyrant.

The above could transition to the topic of people of a certain weight being required to buy three airline tickets for an entire row of seats.

Seven. Summarize both sides of a debate.

America is torn by the national healthcare debate. One camp says it’s a crime that 25,000 Americans die unnecessarily each year from treatable disease and that modeling a health system from other developed countries is a moral imperative. However, there is another camp that fears that adopting some version of universal healthcare is tantamount to stepping into the direction of socialism.

Eight. State a misperception, fallacy, or error that your essay will refute.

Americans against universal or national healthcare are quick to say that such a system is “socialist,” “communist,” and “un-American,” but a close look at their rhetoric shows that it is high on knee-jerk, mindless paroxysms and short on reality. Contrary to the enemies of national healthcare, providing universal coverage is very American and compatible with the American brand of capitalism.

Nine. Make a general statement about your topic.

From Sherry Turkle’s essay “How Computers Change the Way We Think”:

The tools we use to think change the ways in which we think. The invention of written language brought about a radical shift in how we process, organize, store, and transmit representations of the world. Although writing remains our primary information technology, today when we think about the impact of technology on our habits of mind, we think primarily of the computer.

Ten. Pose a question your essay will try to answer:

Why are diet books more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more fat?

Why is psychotherapy becoming more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more crazy?

Why are the people of Qatar the richest people in the world, yet score at the bottom of all Happiness Index metrics?

Why are courses in the Humanities more essential to your well-being that you might think?

What is the difference between thinking and critical thinking?

Eleven. Present the reader with a hypercritical point of view that shows off your assured writing voice. As we read in "Whitewash" by Chris Lehmann:

LIKE A RECUMBENT SLOTH JOLTED INTO A PANICKED FLIGHT RESPONSE, David Brooks has belatedly noticed the rancid politics of right-wing racial confrontation. The New York Times’ most venerable voice of conservative moderation is here to inform you, gentle reader, that the deranged incursion of Trumpinistas into the corridors of conservative power has transformed his beloved GOP into “more of a white party in recent years.” He seeks to nail down the flagrantly bogus argument that the Republicans had, over much of their modern career, been within the bounds of “basic decency on matters of race” via a single cherry-picked statistic: “A greater percentage of congressional Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act than Democrats.”

Well, sure—except that a “higher percentage” of Republicans meant very little, in absolute numerical terms, at the apogee of Great Society liberalism. Yes, Democrats predominated in the Jim Crow South, but once you controlled for that outsize regional influence, the apparent institutional commitment to civil rights within the GOP promptly vanishes. The significant difference wasn’t partisan—it was geographic. In states that were part of the Union cause, a higher percent of Democrats than Republicans voted for civil rights. And the same was true in states that were part of the Confederacy. Adjusting for this regional variance, “it becomes clear that Democrats in the north and the south were more likely to vote for the bill than Republicans from the north and south, respectively,” writes data journalist Harry J. Enten. “It just so happened southerners made up a larger percentage of the Democratic than Republican caucus, which created the initial impression than Republicans were more in favor of the act.”

Newport Study Questions