I’ve been
watching a lot of House, M.D. of late. An entire marathon of all 8 seasons,
actually. And one of the things that I love about the show is how integrated
everything is. Certain diseases (and yes I’m aware that not all of the medicine
is 100% accurate) that are explored on the show are not responsible for all the
symptoms a particular patient has. The disease will cause the failure of a
certain organ or system, and then that failing organ or system causes other
problems, so it’s important to know that not all of the symptoms have a single
cause.
Essays are
somewhat like this. Everything in an essay affects everything else. Very rarely
is there only one thing wrong with an essay. I have yet to encounter an essay
that has excellent support, but no claims. Nor is there one with excellent
argumentation, but bad organization. There cannot be an essay with excellent
argumentation and indecipherable grammar, either. So many components of an
essay are integrated into a whole system that if one thing fails completely,
the rest of it will fail as well. The failure of one organ affects another, and
so on.
This is one
of the difficulties with teaching essay writing. It’s all connected like the
human body, but one failure causes multiple failures. Only when all the
components are working well does the essay work.
Of course,
getting there is trickier than it seems, and there’s no one way to teach
students how to get there.
And of
course, because everything is connected, diagnosing the true problem is often
difficult. Problems in logic hide behind organization. Problems with grammar
can mask problems with argumentation. Lack of support can be caused by lack of
logic. And so on.
Unfortunately,
much like House, a lot of what I do is experiment and test until I hit upon
what a particular student’s condition is, then try and apply the correct
prescription.
It was a
lot more fun on House.