How a Fixation on Teaching Formulas Undermines Student Writing

When teaching educators are often torn between emphasizing deeper instruction that will go a longer way to building skills, and emphasizing what is easily communicated, easily learned, easily tested for, rather than what is actually likely to prove really useful but which is less susceptible to quick and easy conveyance and testing. (This is all the more the case insofar as the instructor must deal with students who are working below the level they are supposed to be, the students have little or no interest in the course the instructor teaches, and the instructor and students must face the prevailing cult of punitive standardized testing gone mad.)

One result is an attraction to formulas, which are relatively easy to communicate, and memorize, and in some ways check for--but the successful application of which is a trickier matter that tends to get neglected in the fixation on formula, with particularly pointed consequences in a class like English composition, where the development of a skill is everything.

Consider the famous writing formula, the "three-prong thesis statement," in which one presents a thesis (the claim, analytical in nature, which their paper exists to argue for) with three supporting arguments in a single sentence, as shown in the following (admittedly banal) example:

Getting a college education is important because it helps you get a better job, find better employment, and have a brighter future.

The central analytical claim--about the importance of a college education--certainly has three supporting claims backing it up. And on that level this sentence may seem to fulfill the expectation of a three prong thesis statement.

However, when we look at the substance of the supporting claims we see that it is not really satisfying a three prong thesis statement. Rather we have one "prong" repeated three times in slightly different language, giving the impression that there are actually three different supporting claims when there is only one such claim.

A college education helps us get a better job. Very well. But then we are told that it helps us "find better employment." What do they mean by "better employment?" Well, they mean that you get a better job--so it is really the same thing over again.

Now the claim about having a "brighter future" may look different. But in what way does the college education lead to such a brighter future? While some will wax rhapsodic about the enlargement of the mind by education, etc., it is the benefits of the "better job" that they are most apt to have in mind. Thus, if less blatantly, the writer has repeated themselves again.

The result is that if they have superficially fulfilled the requirement of providing three supporting arguments for their position at that deeper level they have failed to do so--producing the appearance of three supporting arguments, rather than actually giving us three arguments.

Indeed, in their rigid, if superficial, adherence to the three prong formula they have produced a piece of writing which is worse than if they had cast the formula aside to give us one argument. Why? Because more important than any formula is what the formulas are supposed to do for those who know and use them--enable them to present an argument with economy and clarity, which is exactly what does not happen here.

A writer who does this violates the principle of "economy of expression" with their words when they give us the same argument three times over. They should say something once, as concisely as possible, and then move on.

Additionally, they make their writing confusing by promising us three supporting arguments, and then giving us the same thing over and over again in slightly different words. The whole reason for presenting a thesis statement early on in the fashion described above is to tell us in advance what we are getting. This has us expecting one thing--but they present something else. After all, where we expected a second, different, argument, or a third, we find ourselves with no more than we had before. Approaching their paper in good faith we may think that we missed something, so that we might pause and try to puzzle it out, or go back and reread it--taking up more of our time, and distracting us from the overall argument.

Frankly, it would have been far better if they wrote a thesis statement with just one prong ("Getting a college education is important because it helps you get a better job."), as that would at least have afforded greater focus and clarity. And I would tell my classes that in so many words. However, many students went on writing those "three-prong statements" anyway, the importance of the form having been drilled into them until it seemed more important than the actual content the structure was supposed to organize.

In pointing this out I am not denying the usefulness of formulas, just the insistence on teaching the formula without teaching skill in applying them to specific situations by forming a judgment for which no learnable quantity of heuristics can plausibly substitute, and in fact can only be used correctly by people who already have that judgment. In its absence the formulas just make their writing a worse mess than it would otherwise be for lack of that judgment to which the training should have accorded much more attention.