I have to head off to class, and there's little chance that I'll be able to do any serious blogging today. Before I take off though, I just want to revisit the discussion of the five-paragraph essay from a couple days ago. Brian (from Bubblegum Aesthetics) has some fascinating comments to throw into the mix (and I'm not just saying that because of the flattering things he says about me...):
Yes, I absolutely have noticed the tendency, and so have a lot of my friends who teach both here and at other institutions of various sizes and structures (which makes me think that standardized testing, "teaching for the test," etc., plays at least some role in the process--it seems to cut across region, school mission, and so on).
Brian also offers a way forward:
also try to craft assignments that require other kinds of structures (like blogs, multimedia projects, short and long papers that explicitly forbid central thesis/five paragraph forms), because I do think that the new modes of writing/technology that you cite are something to explore rather than worry about or avoid (my friend Jeff speaks to this with far greater knowledge and passion than I could). And I also make jokes about it in class, because I think if I can let them know that avoiding the five-paragraph model is actually a good thing--if, in other words, their anxiety comes from "how will I be graded if I don't do this?"--then (I hope) it lets them know that other kinds of writing are not only ok, but preferred.
I might chime in and point out that one of the advantages of incorporating new technologies into assignments is that it uses a form with which my generation is familiar, while at the same time forcing it into the realm of more analytic thinking. One of the great strengths of new writing technologies is their malleability; that is, it melds the immediacy and agency of oral forms of knowledge-gathering with the more iterative and non-conservative (in Walter Ong's, orality is about conserving, not creating, knowledge) attributes of writing.
Plato has Socrates saying to Phaedurs that
writing is unfortunately like painting, for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should replay, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have to parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.
Now, I think Plato's critique is mostly wrong in that texts ought to be treated as living things, but he does have a point in that writing is often less of a discussion that speaking.
It seems that the best way to ameliorate the problem that Plato sees here is not to give up on writing (as Plato was advocating), but rather to come up with a technology of writing that allows for the back and forth dialogue of speech.
In this, the sort of assignments for which Brian advocates seem to make the most sense, both because they free students from the well-meaning but often crippling stricture of the five-paragraph essay, and also because they allow for the best of both the oral and written worlds.
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