The High-School Essay Problem

There’s a problem that crops up for the argumentative writer which I call “the high-school essay problem.”

In high school, you’re taught—I was, at least—to stake out, early in your essay, a clear thesis. A claim you’ll go to bat for, a hill you’ll die on. All the subsequent paragraphs should support the thesis with corroborating evidence like columns supporting a roof. If you do it right, your argument is tight and well-constructed, and your teacher gives you an A.

But, if you have any brains at all, you know that, as a high-school student, you’re hardly in a position to definitively pronounce upon the thematic import of “Romeo and Juliet” or the imagery of The Great Gatsby. So, you learn to lie.

Overfond attachment to nuance is the enemy of clear readable prose and clear readable structure. This realization separates A-students from B-students.

B-students let their lack of confidence leak into their writing. Peppering their prose full of I-thinks and it-feels-likes, devising horrible passive-voice constructions so they can cram the word seems into every declarative sentence. But A-students strike hard with pithy pronouncements. X is Y. They’re not afraid to say so. Even if X isn’t. A-students know not to let silly things like truth hurt their grades.

This is the high-school essay problem. Punchiness, structure, readability—all of these are served by one-hundred percent certainty. But you’ll notice that accuracy is not on that list. Because the truth is that things are complicated and that one-hundred percent certainty is wrong ninety percent of the time.

The problem doesn’t go away when you graduate high-school. It’s just as pervasive in college, graduate school, and scholarly journals—at least in the humanities. You see it in letters to the editor and film criticism. Blogs aren’t immune, this blog least of all. Anywhere that someone wants to express an opinion, and to write and communicate ably, the temptation and necessity of oversimplifying the issues is there.

What’s a writer to do?

One common solution is the concessionary paragraph. The paragraph that starts, “Granted, this isn’t always the case…” or “Of course, some people have had different experiences…” A paragraph that contains the damage. You get out all your hand-wringing in one place and can leap confidently for the rest of your article. Done poorly, it reads like a disclosure written to avoid legal trouble.

Another solution is to reach after new modes of writing, modes less shackled to high-school essay structure. Narrative nonfiction is one notable example of this. Narrative writing is supremely well-equipped to capture ambiguity. But it does this so well that it’s not always going to convey your didactic point or your call to action as cleanly as you’d like. Tradeoffs.

But, oftentimes, the writer isn’t trying to overcome the high-school essay problem. See, they don’t always have your best interests at heart. They may love writing more than they love you. In fact, if they’re worth reading, I guarantee it. So what if a couple of people walk away with a bent understanding of the world? The words sparkled.

Even more dangerous is the writer who actually comes to believe their own propaganda. You see this in academia all the time. Students or scholars start out with a provocative thesis merely to win attention, they write confidently merely to write well. And, when you talk with them in the early stages of their project, they’ll admit their claims are extreme and their presentation unnuanced. But circle back with them after their paper is graded or published, and, far too often, they’ll have won themselves over with their own arguments.

There’s a bit of Cold War mythology about American soldiers in communist POW camps, who could win additional food or cigarettes by writing the essays about the comparative values of communism and capitalism as economic systems. The winners would read their essays over the camp’s loudspeaker. The story goes that, even after their safe return to the United States, the soldiers who had said favorable things about communism over the loudspeaker continued to espouse those things. And sympathizing with communism wasn’t exactly a safe thing to do at the time. The moral is that the psychological pressure to conform yourself to the ideas you’ve put forward publicly is immense.

It’s an apt image for the high-school essay problem, and it reminds us that you, dear reader, are just as much affected as I am. Just as the needs of my prose train me to overstate my arguments, the needs of an algorithm train you to overstate yours. If you’ve ever spouted off on your socials, if you’ve ever felt tiny blips of gladness when likes and hearts rolled in, if you’ve ever made a letterboxed review nastier to make it pithier, you too are victim of the high-school essay problem. You’ve seen first-hand that the needs of communication and the needs of truth are orthogonal. And, like the grad students or the prisoners of war, you run the risk of convincing yourself to become the ever-certain, never-curious persona you play on the internet.

When Ralph Waldo Emerson famously called a foolish consistency the hobgoblin of little minds, this was the hobgoblin he had in mind. The pressure to conform ourselves to our words is strong. But it isn’t irresistible.

If I’ve made it through grad school unscathed, unconverted to parodic positions I churned out to turn in, it is only because I saw from the start that the emperor has no clothes. Reality as it appears in an essay and reality as it is are two different things. They look similar, yes, and that’s exactly where the danger lies. But remembering that they are different, bearing in mind that they are different, offers some inoculation.

The same is true for you. You are not defined be your twitter spats or your Goodreads ratings. You can admit that, even if there wasn’t a good place for the concessionary paragraph in your Discord message, you’d still be willing to make those concessions. You don’t have to go to bat for each of your opinions, and you don’t have to die on every hill. You’re free to be thoughtful, flexible, and fun.

It’s worth trying to remember, anyway. That’s the only way the high-school essay problem doesn’t eat us all alive.