The purpose of a writing class is to develop a meaningful thesis, direct or implied, that will generate a compelling essay. Most importantly, a meaningful thesis will have a strong emotional connection between you and the material. In fact, if you don’t have a “fire in your belly” to write the paper, your essay will be nothing more than a limp document, a perfunctory exercise in futility. A successful thesis will also be intellectually challenging and afford a complexity worthy of college-level writing. Thirdly, the successful thesis will be demonstrable, which means it can be supported by examples and illustrations in a recognizable organizational design.
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You Need the 6 Pillars of Literacy to Flourish in College, the Job Market, and Your Humanity
We can define literacy in the practical and the philosophical sense.
In the practical sense, literacy is s being able to articulate yourself in an intelligent way to make you valuable in the job market.
Secondly, literacy is about adhering to writing conventions so that you can succeed in college.
There’s third practical kind of literacy, what is called financial literacy. This is about the management of money and having a basic understanding of common consumer transactions, especially relating to interest rates, commonly known as APR or annual percentage rates.
I had a student many years ago who excitedly told me he had just bought a used Ford Explorer for 5K. My first question was what is your APR? He didn’t know. I’d like to know. Bring me the paperwork. I showed him that the APR was something like 21 percent, so that after 60 months his “5K car” was in actuality a 25K car. He tried to get out of the deal. He brought his mother to the dealership, but they weren’t playing ball, so he parked the Ford at their dealership with the keys inside and said, “I’m not making payments; it’s yours.” Whatever he did to screw up his credit doesn’t compare to spending 25K on a 5k car. He learned a lesson in financial literacy.
Those are the practical concerns of literacy, and they are important ones.
But literacy is also important from the philosophical or humanistic aspect: The goal in this realm is for flourish as a human being.
Unfortunately, most of us don’t have a comprehensive understanding of literacy. To understand literacy more clearly, we should break it down into its Six Pillars.
One. You need advanced language skills to understand human psychology.
The inability to articulate what’s going on inside your head, other people’s heads, results in disorientation, inaccurate judgment of others, and anxiety.
I’ll give you two examples:
Why is the jealous man so jealous, for example? He’s jealous because he is the worst offender of infidelity and he projects his own cheating impulses on his girlfriend or wife. He’s paranoid because he assumes everyone, including his spouse, is as incurable a cheater as he is.
You may have sensed this instinctively about jealous men, but literacy allows you to give clear language to the psychology of a cheater and now you have a clearer picture of how such a person operates.
We can’t even have this discussion of the jealous man unless we have some literacy and understanding of terms.
Let’s take another example of the narcissist: This is someone who craves the admiration of others but doesn’t recognize others as viable human beings and therefore has contempt for others.
Therefore, the narcissist is ruled by an irrational contradiction: Craving adulation from the very people he disdains.
We read in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s New Yorker essay “The Inexplicable,” about the mass murderer and narcissist Anders Behring Breivik that he was frustrated with his identity: “He is a person filled to the brim with himself. And that is perhaps the most painful thing of all, the realization that this whole gruesome massacre, all those extinguished lives, was the result of a frustrated young man’s need for self-representation.”
What does he mean by self-representation?
Self-representation refers to the way we want to be seen by others. We want to be seen a certain way by others for a variety of reasons.
Some of us want to be highly esteemed by others and garner their admiration, even their deference.
Some of us want to be seen as being right. We want people to value our opinions and beliefs. We want vindication for our beliefs.
These motives speak to the egotism of the narcissist. What is a narcissist? A narcissist is someone who craves admiration of others while at the same time is so absorbed by his delusional sense of self that he has no connection to other human beings.
A mass murderer such as Anders Behring Breivik who massacred dozens of innocent people, including children, is the extreme narcissist who is so disconnected from human beings that he kills without remorse while obsessing over being dehydrated and having a cut finger in the interrogation room. While being imprisoned, he’s also suing the government for not getting him updated computer games and issuing him a pen that is causing injury to his fingers.
Our discussion of this heinous murderer and the psychological profile that informs his behavior rests on an understanding of basic human psychology and having the language to articulate that psychology.
Another example is the hedonic treadmill in relation to pleasure. We acclimate to pleasure so that every source of pleasure eventually becomes boring and numbing so that the pursuit of pleasure as a way to reach happiness always fails.
Getting on the hedonic treadmill is always part of addictive behavior and addictive behavior is always about valuing the thing you’re addicted to over yourself and others. As a result, addictions always result in moral dissolution, the dissolving of your moral self. We can’t even have this discussion unless we have basic literacy.
Two. You need language skills to form a basic understanding of how communities and societies work, or don’t work.
For example, you need to understand societal reciprocity and self-interested altruism. (Use the story of the bouncing ball and the babysitters and the garbage on the curb).
Three. You need to develop the habit of having critical thinking skills; otherwise, you’ll be little more than a mindless consumer obedient to marketing and advertising ploys to steal money from your pocketbook.
Critical thinking consists of the tools to deconstruct common assumptions and to see if these assumptions are really true or not. Did Columbus really “discover” America? What does the word discover mean? Discover suggests something heroic, courageous, and noble. However, if we replace the word discover with conquer and steal and we have more negative connotations.
Does Baby Einstein really make your children smarter? Perhaps it’s not Baby Einstein. Perhaps people who buy Baby Einstein have more economic resources than those who don’t and the connection between smarter kids and Baby Einstein is correlative, not causal, and we need literacy to know the difference between correlation and causation.
Critical thinking is about going deeper than common assumptions. It’s about developing informed opinions.
You may not want to have informed opinions. Most people don’t. Their opinions are habitual and mindless or formed to conform to the herd.
Most people want Bread and Circus, cheap food and cheap entertainment and they’re content being mindless consumers obedient to the dictates of advertising.
I can’t tell anyone what to do. It’s your choice.
Remember the famous scene in The Matrix where you can swallow the blue pill (the pill of calm ignorance) or the red pill (the choice of often painful truth). It’s your choice.
Four. You need to know the conventions of debate and argumentation.
Because conflict and disagreement is part of every day experience, you need to learn how to debate the issues.
You need to understand the importance of making a claim, supporting a claim, exploring your critics’ opposition to your claim and why having knowledge of your critics strengthens your arguments.
You need to understand logical fallacies. There are hundreds. We can look at the either/or fallacy and the coach who says, "Either you play football for me or you're not a real man!"
Five. You need historical context.
If you read that mass incarceration and the industrial prison complex is perpetuating Jim Crow laws, that argument won’t make sense unless you have a history of Jim Crow and the prison chain gangs that were used in the Jim Crow South.
You need a basic understanding of history to see patterns of behavior and make appropriate comparisons to what’s going on in the news today.
Six. You need to use your literacy to forge a hard-fought worldview or philosophy of life.
Your philosophy of life is an appropriate response to what you see as the human condition.
Here are some examples of things that make up some people’s worldview:
One. The world is run by morons and madmen. Or as I remember it, "Morons and madmen reign in high places." This is taken by Henry James. I believe that.
Two. George Carlin was right when he said, “When you’re born, you’re given free front row tickets to the freak show.
Three. No matter how bleak the world is, we have to look at the human race as being in this mess together. We can’t be misanthropes who say, “The hell with the rest of them.” In other words, if you try to get to Paradise on your own, you’ll never get to Paradise. You’ll find yourself alone in Hell.
Four. Related to number three, you have to cultivate a certain degree of self-interested altruism.
Five. Never feel like you’re entitled to anything. What I have is good fortune, but I see tens of thousands, or rather millions, who don’t have a quality of life that is close to mine.
Six. Our lifestyle and cost of living is dependent on others who work for nearly slave wages and thus what we enjoy comes from a system of economic injustice.
Seven. We haven’t really lived until someone has handed us our ( ) on a stick. When we’re exposed for who we really are, we have an opportunity to confront reality and change our lives for the better.
Eight. Related to number seven, even the best of us can go into a downward spiral of self-destruction or what I like to call “( ) the bed.” You just ( ) the bed, dude. Now you got to clean it up and make sure you don’t ( ) the bed again because the cleanup was hellacious. Learn your lesson.
Nine. Borrowing from Tolstoy: You won’t achieve anything meaningful in life unless you cultivate self-control and discipline.
Ten. Show your values with your actions, not with your words. I had a Vietnamese student several years ago who took care of her mother who was dying of cancer.
Eleven. Happiness is not an abundance of great things; it’s an absence of BS.
Course Catalog Description:
This course is designed to strengthen the students’ ability to read with understanding and discernment, to discuss assigned readings intelligently, and to write clearly. Emphasis will be on writing essays in which each paragraph relates to a controlling idea, has an introduction and a conclusion, and contains primary and secondary support. College-level reading material will be assigned to provide the stimulus for class discussion and writing assignments, including a required research paper.
Course Objectives:
1. Recognize and revise sentence-level grammar and usage errors.
2. Read and apply critical-thinking skills to numerous published articles and to college-level, book-length works for the purpose of writing and discussion.
3. Apply appropriate strategies in the writing process including prewriting, composing, revising, and editing techniques.
4. Compose multi-paragraph, thesis-driven essays with logical and appropriate supporting ideas, and with unity and coherence.
5. Demonstrate ability to locate and utilize a variety of academic databases, peer-reviewed journals, and scholarly websites.
6. Utilize MLA guidelines to format essays, cite sources in the texts of essays, and compile Works Cited lists.
Student Learning Outcomes:
Upon completion of this course, students will:
1. Complete a research-based essay that has been written out of class and undergone revision. It should demonstrate the student’s ability to thoughtfully support a single thesis using analysis and synthesis.
2. Integrate multiple sources, including a book-length work and a variety of academic databases, peer-reviewed journals, and scholarly websites. Citations must be in MLA format and include a Works Cited page.
3. Demonstrate logical paragraph composition and sentence structure. The essay should have correct grammar, spelling, and word use.
To read critically, we have to do the following:
One. Comprehend the author's purpose and meaning, which is expressed in the claim or thesis. Rewrite the author's thesis in your own words.
Two. Examine the evidence, if any, that is used
Three. Find emotional appeals, if any, that are used
Four. Identify analogies and comparisons and analyze their legitimacy
Five. Look at the topic sentences to see how the author is building his or her claim
Six. Look for the appeals the author uses be they logic (logos), emotions (pathos), or authority (ethos).
What Does It Mean When Students Get “Help” on Their Essays?
With students finding new ways to adapt to instructors’ defenses against plagiarism, such as making students submit their typed essays to turnitin.com, more and more students are attempting to beat the system by getting “help” from a variety of sources. “Help” is a loaded word with many meanings, many of which indicate that students are not giving me authentic representations of their writing. While there are many shadings of meaning to the word “help,” I will break it down in its two basic applications:
The tutor proofread your essay for grammar and diction errors, but didn’t explain these errors to you so that essentially you’ve enjoyed a proofreading service without learning anything. In this scenario, if I find grammar errors, in spite of the tutor’s “help,” you sometimes shout at me in self-righteous indignation, “But my tutor promised me there were no mistakes!” Clearly, you don’t know how to identify your own grammar and diction errors. Nor do you understand that your anger is misdirected toward me. However, you still think, erroneously, that you have leverage for a semester A grade. If plagiarism exists on a scale from 0-10, we can call this type of “help” Plagiarism Code 7. The student’s essay evidences that the proofreading service was performed in the absence of any teaching experience for the student; therefore, the essay gets at the very highest a D grade. A lot of students will protest that this isn’t fair. But is it fair for me to give higher grades to students who receive this type of “help” than to those who don’t? What superior learning experience did the former camp of students receive over the latter group? If anything, a certain amount of deception was employed by the “helped” students, so that if anything they should receive a lower grade. What’s the takeaway from all this? If you receive “help,” make sure you actually learn how to identify the grammar mistakes you’ve made.
The second scenario is even worse: A tutor, a friend, or family member “rewrites” your essay, or in a spirit of grand generosity says “the hell with it” and just writes “your” essay from scratch so that it has an elevated prose style superior to that of a college English professor’s writing and worse the essay bears no resemblance to your in-class essays, which are larded with basic verb, grammar, predication, and diction errors. We call this type of “help,” whether it is a major rewrite or an outright manufacturing of an entirely new essay, Plagiarism Code 10. These essays must receive an F grade.
Top Seven Complaints I Hear from College English Instructors About Their Students
One. Students show up to class without reading the assigned material. Teaching a class of 30 students in which fewer than 10 percent of the students did the reading, instructors say they can feel the energy get sucked out of the room, and they feel like they’re talking to themselves, an exhausting, depressing exercise that kills instructors’ spirits piece by piece. Pop quizzes help, but not enough. More often than not, hordes of students, unwilling to be tested on the reading, drop the class. Administration doesn’t like it when a class that started with 30 students is reduced to 10.
Two. Students are too connected to their smartphones, neuro-chemically bonded to them in a scary way, so that they cannot connect with anything that’s going on in the classroom.
Three. Students lack basic competence in critical thinking, reading, writing, grammar, and diction that so it is nearly impossible for them to meet the state-mandated benchmarks required to pass the composition class.
Four. Students procrastinate, not doing the reading and waiting until the day before the due date to start on an essay, and then assign blame and sometimes outright hostility to their instructors because the students are suffering the anxiety of failing, an anxiety that they induced.
Five. Students arrive to class sleep deprived and too often on an empty stomach so that they are more primed for sleeping than learning. Too often their snores cause uproarious laughter so that this classroom distraction launches a torpedo in the day’s lecture.
Six. Students have the erroneous notion that education is a consumer experience, that they just sit in their chairs and absorb the instructors’ intelligence when in fact they must embrace the idea that writing is a process that requires pre-writing, brainstorming, clustering, rewriting—all the methods used by successful people in advertising, marketing, Hollywood entertainment, and others who make their living with writing.
Seven. Students misspell author’s names and essay and story titles in their essay. Sometimes they’ll even use the wrong gender pronoun, referring to male characters as a “she,” and vice versa. More evidence of slapdash essays includes misspelling the instructor’s name, stapling the pages in the wrong order, stapling some of the pages upside down, and leaving food particles, grease, and fat marks on the pages.
Example of Analysis (explains, defines, and breaks down the causes, and sometimes effects, of the thing you're analyzing)
If Your Boyfriend Is Jealous, He's Probably Cheating on You by Jeff McMahon
At first glance, the jealous boyfriend appears to have an obsessive preoccupation with fidelity—but sadly he’s not interested in his own fidelity or faithfulness but rather, asserting a double standard, his interest is only in his girlfriend’s. In fact, contrary to the idea that jealousy is the byproduct of someone who values faithfulness, jealousy is born from one’s own proclivity to be a cheater. Taking a page from the psychology lexicon, we can call this type of behavior projection—assuming other people act and think the way we do. Thus the jealous boyfriend says to himself, “Since I’m a dog who will cheat on my girlfriend at the drop of a hat, she must be the same. I must therefore keep her under lock and key.”
That the jealous boyfriend lacks the honesty and courage to see the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy of his jealousy attests to his arrested development. He is not mature enough for a relationship and in worse cases he is dangerous because his obsession with control too often results in some form of mental or physical abuse. Therefore, if your boyfriend is jealous, do not see his jealousy as romantic or symptomatic of his strong passion. Rather, see his jealousy as a warning flag and consider leaving him sooner than later.
All writing is analytical, but some types of writing lean toward more argumentation as we see below:
Arguing that we should give as much money to the poor as we possibly can, Peter Singer's persuasive essay strips us bare of our selfish wants as he equates our tendency to accumulate all the stuff we don’t need with ignoring the plight of drowning children and as such being responsible for the death of those children. We are, Singer convincingly argues, products of our fortunate “social capital”; therefore, we have an obligation to those who do not have a social capital.
Furthermore, because we patronize and live in a state of interdependence on international corporations for our goods and services, we are obliged to help the poor in developing countries. For after all, these countries, led by despots and other unsavory characters, make deals with international corporations, selling raw materials for a higher price than they would by keeping their resources in their own countries. The result is that people living in developing countries starve as their resources are leeched by international corporations.
Now if we follow Singer’s logical moral imperative to its ultimate conclusion, then we are forced to accept that we must renounce our worldly desires and achieve a spiritual condition that is so disdainful of personal comforts and luxuries that we must live only on bare necessities while giving all else to the poor. Anything short of this ideal would be, to use Singer’s analogy, equivalent to being responsible for the deaths of drowning children.
While part of me would like to embrace Singer’s moral imperative and spread Singer’s gospel of uncompromising charity throughout the world, the skeptical part of me questions just how realistic Singer’s ideal is. For what Singer is arguing for is nothing short than a form of spiritual socialism, that is a condition in which human beings renounce their selfish desires for the “finer things in life” in order that they distribute their wealth as evenly as possible. This is a noble, saintly ideal indeed, but it contradicts our reptilian hard-wiring.
I’m sad to say this, but without selfish motivation, most of us will not be creative or innovative. A world in which we all share our things in a communal potluck and don’t aspire to materialistic excellence is a banal and dreary and colorless world without creativity and innovation. Only when we are enticed by technological razzle-dazzle and model dream homes and exquisite clothing glorified by the silky-tongued fashionistas do we find the reptilian sparks in our brains’ creative nerve centers exploding in glorious paroxysms and it is in these nerve explosions that we create and innovate. Sad as it is, my friends, selfishness is high-octane rocket fuel for creativity.
I’m not arguing that we should be selfish pigs in order to encourage our creativity and aspiration. What I am arguing for is a balance. It was Aristotle who wrote about finding the golden mean. If we error too much in selfishness, we’re thoughtless imbeciles, moral gnats, and reptilian subhumans. On the other hand, if we strive to become spiritual socialists, we will become drab, stagnant and bovine. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.
To read critically, we have to do the following:
One. Comprehend the author's purpose and meaning, which is expressed in the claim or thesis. Rewrite the author's thesis in your own words.
Two. Examine the evidence, if any, that is used
Three. Find emotional appeals, if any, that are used
Four. Identify analogies and comparisons and analyze their legitimacy
Five. Look at the topic sentences to see how the author is building his or her claim
Six. Look for the appeals the author uses be they logic (logos), emotions (pathos), or authority (ethos).
I’ve observed these Failure Factors from nearly 30 years of teaching at the college level.
You hate college—the entire experience, driving to campus, finding a parking space, sitting in class, studying, gathering the necessary materials—but you attend college to please parents, a girlfriend, or to get financial aid or whatever. You have to have the hunger for achievement within yourself to succeed. Otherwise, you’re doomed to flounder in a haze of apathy, laziness, and despair. No one on Planet Earth is responsible for you having this fire. You’re responsible. As some Americans like to say, “Get in the game.”
You have unnecessary drama in your life. You’re in a destructive, addictive relationship that consumes all your thoughts and energy. You find yourself always fighting and making-up with your Other. Or you hang out with knuckle-head buddies, immature troglodytes, who are always getting you into trouble.
You engage in the Hot and Cold, studying like a maniac for a few days and then retreating into intractable laziness. In other words, you lack consistency and you don’t pace yourself.
You feel sorry for yourself for whatever reason and use your self-pity as an excuse to fail. The Psychology Department calls this loathsome condition Learned Helplessness.
You’ve got money problems. No matter what the reason, justified or not, responsible living or not, money problems usually result in you working more hours at work or taking on more jobs and the more you work the more you compromise school performance.
You’re addicted to BS. BS includes chatting on the Internet, text-messaging, gossiping on your cell, watching crap on TV, etc. All these addictions take your focus off college. The Psychology Department calls this behavior Motivational Priority Inversion in which lame addictions take priority over more important matters such as excelling in school. According to Dr. Drew on his Loveline radio show, addiction is all about the addiction taking priority over everything else.
You have no social skills (you’re too shy, you’ve got low-self-esteem, you’ve got an inferiority complex, you’re still licking your wounds from your last breakup, you’re still grieving over some family tragedy, etc.) so you don’t communicate with your instructors and other students resulting in an ability to clarify important issues that will help you succeed in college. Social skills also help you to build alliances and to network, skills that are essential to succeeding in the real world.
You eat crap and you eat sporadically. I’ve got students who come to class who haven’t eaten for 8 hours and they’re in my class noshing on a bag of Funyuns and gulping a fruit drink made of high-fructose corn syrup. If you don’t feed your brain nutrients, you’re brain-dead, which means you’ll absorb less than 1% of what the instructor is saying.
Sleep deprivation. Simple math: If you don’t get enough sleep, you’re worthless—to yourself and to society. Period.
You exaggerate the difficulty of college so that you convince yourself you can’t succeed at it. The Psychology Department puts this under the category of Learned Helplessness.
If you have 3 or more of these Failure Factors, then you are at a high risk for failure. Identifying these risk factors is not pleasant, but it’s the beginning of you doing the number one thing you were put on Planet Earth for: TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE.