ACE Series Part II: Asserting ACE Arguments One Paragraph at a Time

Part I of Richard’s “ACE” Series can be read here.

The assertion is an endangered species. With stunning regularity, I read student papers where paragraphs are flush with facts but lacking in authorial opinion. And if my conclaves with other teachers are any indication, you’ve noticed this too.

I hear ya’. What can possibly be confusing about the assertion? You take a topic. You take a stance on it. Bada bing, bada boom, you’ve written a assertion.

Nothing to it, right? But if you want students to bulk up their anemic arguments, then it’s worth looking at why many struggle with assertions. And in sitting down with students and teachers alike, I’ve encountered some profound reasons behind why they find it easier said than done.

The Personal Reflection Paper

For all their differences, primary, secondary, and higher educators love to entice their students with the personal reflection paper. The assumption is that students are more likely to write about what interests them, and nothing interests students more than themselves. But even if your essay prompt inspires a class of memoirists, they are in for a rude awakening when their reflections are subjected to scrutiny. Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, contends that overreliance on this assignment deters the development of analytical thinking.

Does this produce more reflective, thoughtful, informed graduates, the pedagogy of subjective response cultivating solid skills of critical thinking? Or does it encourage narcissism, the belief that “YOU are the measure of all things,” suppressing that all-important adult capacity of suspending personal feelings in order to assess and debate objectively?

Don’t get me wrong. Self-awareness is good. Reflexivity is great. And encouraging introspection is in our job description. But as Bauerlein suggests, we should not be surprised if students find writing good assertions like working against muscle memory.

There’s No “I” in “Writing.”

Ironically, overcompensating for the aforementioned can lead to the same results. A lot of teachers shun the first-person pronoun from the presence of any writing that claims the category “critical.” There’s a sense that ego and objectivity are mutually exclusive. And there’s the fear that the gatekeepers of our hallowed academic halls –standardized test graders, journal editors, and the other powers that be— hate nothing more than papers with personality.

You know what happens when you assume…

Nothing puts the assertion in perspective like the increasingly global classroom. It’s easy to forget that our favorite style manuals and writing models are social constructions and not ontological truths. This becomes especially clear when teaching the rising number of East Asian students in Western Anglophone institutions.

Educational researcher Mayumi Fujioka has found that although these students may be acquainted with the use of topic sentences and supporting detail, they often lack the more advanced academic reading and writing skills necessary to synthesize information. In terms of the ACE model, students struggle to assert their understanding of how the evidence and commentary work together to present a key idea. But given their cultural context there is good reason why this skill lay dormant. As Education scholar Weijie Chen explains, the Confucian value of collectivism, and not the ego-centered thinking of the Western approach, guides Asian writing conventions.

As a result, it is not an easy job for Chinese people to express their inner feelings. To some extent, they think presenting the self too obviously will give a bad impression of imposing one’s opinion to others and ignoring readers’ feelings. So in China, I is always subordinated to we. Chinese people find it safer and confident to express ideas in a voice of a community.

So in regards to some international and even domestic populations, we should be especially sensitive to the paradigm shift required to learn the role of assertions, for there’s nothing convenient about internalizing another culture’s conventions.

Acing the Assertion

When I’m helping students with assertions, I’m usually in the position of trying to break someone’s years’ old intellectual habits in under 50 minutes. Below are a few tricks I’ve picked up that you can use in office hours’ appointments or, better yet, have students do when peer editing.

1.  Ask “Who’s the Boss” of this sentence. You need not be familiar with Tony Danza’s magnum opus to apply this technique. Have students go to the beginning of each paragraph and ask the question of the sentences there. If the paragraph leans more toward another author’s voice, then they should interject a statement to remind readers who is the boss.
2. Get a spot with the first person. I grew up learning not to use the first person, but it all changed after watching some Olympic gymnastics. Have you noticed how coaches will sometimes spot their athletes under the rings and bars and then run out of the way? Students can use the first person the same way to prepare their assertions. Have them write “I think, believe, etc.” and the sentence. Then have them erase the phrase. Often the sentence will work just fine, but sometimes students just need a little peace of mind.
3. Little by little, just like ants. This is a Honduran proverb that sounds much better in Spanish. Sometimes students think a big body paragraph is a strong body paragraph. But big body paragraphs have a habit of carrying too much weight for their own good. I tell students to write like ants, use multiple smaller paragraphs to get your point across. When students do this with their drafts, they often discover for themselves that they have multiple assertions per paragraph anyway.

If you have any good ideas on helping students with assertions, I hope you’ll share them in the comments section. Next time we’ll discuss helping your students pass the BS test by providing ACE evidence. So I’ll see you back here on Seminarium.

 

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