Key Concept: What's a Detail? (Exercises)

Much schooling is aimed at encouraging us to develop generalizations that accurately encapsulate a body of facts or a set of experiences.  Our claims in an argument are generalizations based on evidence.  Teachers may be familiar with Bloom’s taxonomy (organization into a hierarchy) of intellectual skills which prizes your ability to abstract from your experience or data to summarize and draw conclusions from that specific information.

However, you will often find that writing which emphasizes the concrete experience, the fact over the statistic, the individual character over the type, is not only more interesting but more compelling in the arguments it makes.

The refrain heard from many writing teachers is “Details!  I want details!” 

The question is, What’s a detail?  It’s not such a simple question to answer, because it depends on what your purpose is.  The concept of a detail relates to the notion of “abstraction,” which is on the opposite end of a continuum from a concrete detail:

Blue………………………………………………Color

Live

Animal

Bird

Chicken

Rhode Island Red

Rooster

Roger

Color is a category, a level above the specific color “blue” in order of abstraction.  The writer S.I. Hayakawa developed the notion of a “Ladder of Abstraction” to give a pictorial understanding of the different layers of specificity or abstraction possible in the English language. 

To the right is a sample Ladder of Abstraction, in which a specific 

rooster, Roger, is topped by ever broader categories which contain,

but also become ever further removed from, the experience of

the actual rooster—Roger.

In your writing, as in any professional’s, you will find a need to

operate at different levels of the Ladder, but never lose sight

of Roger.  Many of the exercises in Copia will push you to get very “concrete”:  

to find words that name or describe at the Roger level of the Ladder.

You’ll find that it’s often not as easy as it seems it should be,

probably because you have been trained much of your life to generalize. 

So get ready to wrestle with details—things in themselves.

 Discerning the General and the Specific

 You have been introduced to the Abstraction Ladder, which shows the relationship between the specific item itself (or, at least, the word that signifies that thing) and the various abstract categories that the individual item might belong to.

This has a great deal of usefulness in reading accurately and arranging your sentences in your writing.  Writers often proceed from general statements to more specific ones or vice versa, the specifics providing instances or examples or reasons for their claims.

Exercise

Read the paragraph below, taken from Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire.  Rewrite each sentence, assigning it a number from 1 to 3, one being the general, 3 being specific, and 2 coming in between.

Sweetness is a desire that starts on the tongue with the sense of taste, but it doesn’t end there.  Or at least it didn’t end there, back when the experience of sweetness was so special that the word served as a metaphor for a certain kind of perfection.  When writers like Jonathan Swift and Matthew Arnold used the expression “sweetness and light” to name their highest ideal (Swift called the “two noblest of things”; Arnold, the ultimate aim of civilization), they were drawing on a sentences of the word sweetness going back to classical times, a sentences that has largely been lost to us.  The best land was said to be sweet; so were the most pleasing sounds, the most persuasive talk, the loveliest views, the most refined people, and the choicest part of any whole, as when Shakespeare calls spring the “sweet o’ the year.” Lent by the tongue to all other sense organs, “sweet,” in the somewhat archaic definition of the Oxford English Dictionary, is that which “affords enjoyment or gratifies desire.”  Like a shimmering equal sign, the word sweetness, denoted a reality commensurate with human desire:  it stood for fulfillment. 

Exercise

Below is an excerpt from British historian J. H. Plumb’s essay, “The Noble Houses.”   

As you read it, outline the “thesis,” concrete (Roger-level) evidence, and the intermediate claims and summary evidence.  In other words, in your outline, recognize four rungs on the abstraction ladder for this excerpt.  You should be able to categorize sentences into four levels of abstraction.

Land equaled power:  that simple equation was quickly grasped and men set about deliberately extending their acres.  They looked for heiresses of wide lands; they stopped providing estates for their younger sons, turning them out into the professions (law, Church, army, navy, or, if need be, commerce); they devised strict legal settlements so that the heir to great territories became merely the tenant for life—for they hoped by these strict entails that their agglomerations of wealth and power might be protected from the dissolute, the incompetent, the mad.  Naturally, the well-endowed succeeded at the expense of the lesser gentry.  They had the resources or the credit to buy up what became available; they could make better bids for heiresses; they could afford more specialized advice, legal or practical, take risks and win profits from more experimental farming or indulge their fancy in more industrial enterprises.  Coral-like, their wealth grew.  Sometimes the disasters of life—lack of heirs, civil war, insanity not in one but several generations—pulled a great family down, but when it did it usually enriched the few that remained, or scattered opportunities to the lesser gentry.  Furthermore, the greater the family and the wider its local social and political power, the more certain it could be of playing an important and lucrative part in national life; and from this came titles, honours, sinecures, pensions, the great offices of Church or State.

In 1711, young Thomas Pelham-Holles, aged eighteen, succeeded his relative the Duke of Newcastle in estates (although not in title) and became the possessor of thousands of acres in a dozen counties of England, enjoying a rent-roll of more than £30,000 a year (multiply by 12 for modern pounds; by 36 for dollars).  At twenty-one he was made Viscount and Earl and Lord Lieutenant for two counties, a year later Marquess and Duke, two years later Lord Chamberlain and Privy Councillor, and a year after that Knight of the Garter, and so on and so forth.  He could personally influence the election of a dozen members of Parliament.  Nottinghamshire and Sussex knew him as their master.  The great houses that he built or adorned—Nottingham Castle, completely remodeled, high on its cliff above the town; Haughton, his hunting lodge in The Dukeries; Claremont, his uncle’s vast new Vanbrugh palace for which he redesigned the landscape; the old family mansions of his father, Halland and Bishopstone, both gutted and re-created—these were the necessary symbols of his territorial greatness.  Like the gold plate that loaded his table and the hordes of servants that attended him on every journey, they were the necessities of his social status.  Vast palaces, extravagant living, profusion in every act of life were compulsive in a world that equated wealth with power.

Nor was the Duke of Newcastle exceptional.  The Dukes of Bedford enjoyed an income equally large from the vast estates of their…

Plumb, J. H. “The Noble Houses of 18^th Century England.”  Men and Centuries.  Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 1963.  72, 73. Print.

Details! Give Me Details!

One of the casualties, it seems to me as a writing teacher, of our focus on Bloom’s categories of higher level thinking, is that not only is memorization passé, but noticing as well.  English teachers (and anyone else who is concerned with “critical thinking”) want details in their students’ writing.  Details are facts, observations of specific characteristics of our surroundings, including people.  It’s amazing, though, how hard it is to get them.  Some of it is the constant issue of “prior knowledge.”  Much of it is the language we teachers use—“details” can have various levels of concreteness, and I offer a way to deal with that in my next post. 

Still, students don’t notice their environment.  They have a hard time describing what their street looks like from out of their window.  They’ll miss colors, objects.  Event when they see the trees for the forest, they can’t name them.  Even when they hear common birds, they can’t identify them.  They often can’t describe the face of their best friend.  It’s not necessarily their fault, if adults in their lives (including teachers) don’t teach them to pay attention. 

What we do ask of students is to think conceptually.  One of the dangers of direct instruction is that the concepts we teach can be disconnected from their evidential foundation.  One of the dangers of “active learning” is that, once students arrive at inductive conclusions, they forget all about the data.

Such a focus on the forest means that students’ defense of claims is often vague or irrelevant.  Actions or procedures lack continuity, because the steps between the beginning and end were invisible, as though the video stream freezes, then jumps ahead to the end.

Some folks lay the blame on the observation that students, when better alternatives are absent, have their noses stuck to their smart phones.  It’s hard to notice our surroundings when always looking down.

True enough, but we’ve been trained to train our students to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate from the time they’re in grade school, and it continues into graduate school.  We’ve lost the balance, though, and since we abhor “drill and kill” and mock learning “names and dates,” we have forgotten the need for lower level knowledge, even though it is the basis for Bloom’s entire structure.  

I can’t help but think that this handicaps inquiry (we read only for the “main idea”) as well as argument.  How can students “evaluate” the adequacy of their generalizations if they don’t know the details that lead to them?  We instead facilitate and reinforce “biased assimilation,” our preference for evidence (which may only be insubstantial concepts—liberty serves that purpose for many, for example) confirming our stands despite contradictory facts.

Add to that, of course, popular academic doubts or outright denial of the notion of “fact,” which leaves our students without a crucial intellectual tool.  It’s tough to teach “critical thinking” or get critical writing without some credible process of justification, in which details are often the measure of an hypothesis’ success.

Orwell, in “Politics and the English Language,” complains, “The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness” (111) I don’t know if that can be defended today as well as in 1946, but it certainly describes the writing of many of my students.  In an essay assignment where they are to write a claim and defend it with a plethora of specific examples in one of the paragraphs, these sentences lead the list:  “In the morning we wash and wear specific clothing in order to present ourselves the way we want to. We make sure to look polite and friendly when approaching others, especially when we approach people we wish to befriend. We make sure to look professional in school or on a job.”  This from an otherwise capable student who is actively engaged in the class.  Putting names to things is very difficult for him and others, largely because we haven’t done a good job of teaching him. 

And there are lots of ways to name things.  Much of our figurative lexicon is all about that:  metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, allusion, analogy all offer resources for naming that offer the economy “plain English” can’t match.  Try finding introductions and practice exercises in standard composition textbooks.  Their absence prompted me to assemble Copia, a sentence-level rhetoric.

When students read and write, they struggle to understand, let alone control, the hierarchical organization of claims, concepts, and information.  They can generally identify facts when they read, but in writing mode the distinctions seem to disappear.  Generalizations are what they’re used to hearing, and reading critically is not part of their routine.  Hence, generalizations are what they produce.  Moreover, distinguishing between levels of abstraction is tough for many of them.

My next post is a proposal for using the hierarchical nature of meaning, modeled by S. I. Hayakawa, to help students understand what we mean when we ask for details.  But we need to value low level knowledge as well, reinforcing it in our teaching, if we hope to get it from them.  Especially since most of the content of an essay comes from other fields.

Knowledge-based writing assignments, easier for other domains, might be one partial answer to the problem—making students look out their front door and describe the details they see.  Assigning them a portfolio of essays, articles, and reports on a specific topic to give them domain-relevant information from which to create a case and refute objections.  Self-referential narrative, while it evens the field as far as prior knowledge is concerned, may also give a misleading message about what college-level writing requires. 

References

Hayakawa, S. I. and Alan R. Hayakawa. Language in Thought and Action. New York:  Harcourt, 1990.

Orwell, George.  “Politics and the English Language.”  Why I Write.  New York:  Penguin, 1984. 102-120.

Reading in Composition: The Importance of Prior Knowledge

On the recommendation of a member of a listserv I subscribe to, I recently read Ellen C. Carillo’s Securing a Place for Reading in Composition.  Having spent my early teaching career at the high school level, and then taking a twenty-three year hiatus in the private sector, I missed all the development of composition pedagogy she describes, so it was an interesting backgrounder. 

Her descriptions of various kinds of “reading” teachers have their students engage in were interesting, in part confirmation of my own practice of using reading to supply models for student writing.  Her prescription for “mindful” reading was on point, but somewhat vague, much like that term is when used by New Age quasi-Buddhists.  I prefer the more prosaic “attentive,” but I think we refer to the same type of engagement.  

Interesting as all that was, Carillo assumes that all we have to do to meet the challenge of students’ difficulties with reading is to figure out the right process and all will be well.  She quotes Ann Bertoff to the effect that the heart of reading is interpretation.  This is puzzling to me.  Bertoff might have a point if her readers are literate and experienced.  But my students struggle with reading because their “prior knowledge” is not sufficient to help them.  They can’t follow the syntax, don’t know the vocabulary or literary or historical references, concepts from politics or sociology or psychology or physical science.  Hence, they are mystified by similes (“I admire the natural, and I hate the miscalled improvements that spread like impetigo into the hills.” Stegner), the significance of dates (1946, the date of Orwell’s “Some Thoughts on a Common Toad”), and allusions (“But within the company, he and others who felt that way were the Chicken Littles.” McLean & Nocera).

Presumably, we give students names and examples of rhetorical practices (á la Aristotle or Richard Lanham) before we ask them to read “rhetorically,” but if we are asking them to respond to an essay’s arguments without the knowledge the writer expects them to have, students can only fall back on prejudice and vague concepts.

That ESOL students would have problems with these things is not surprising, but the students who grew up here are no better off.  Our pedagogy deplores memorization, but how do we help students make the connections we have already made if they don’t remember the stories and concepts and, yes, names, places, and dates that they encounter in the classroom?  How could they understand movies like Trumbo and The Bridge of Spies, for example, and the lessons we need to learn from them?  We spend a lot of time talking about context in English classes, but our students often do not have sufficient knowledge to supply it themselves.  It is a curious predicament to have put our students in through our emphasis on active learning.

One of our difficulties as composition instructors is that rhetoric, as Aristotle pointed out a long time ago, does not aim at itself, though it certainly has conceptual and factual content.  It is much like mathematics in that it is a tool for doing things, informing and persuading and delighting others, to take Cicero’s formula.  We leave it to other domains to supply the prior knowledge students bring to their rhetorical tasks.

Absent that prior knowledge, we resort to assigning students self-referential personal essays.  The research paper is a way to have students build a knowledge base from which to write, but in a Comp I class that would blur course distinctions for those of us who also teach a research paper focused composition class as well (Comp II), which has unpleasant practical and political consequences.

An approach I have adopted is to have students write a quasi-research paper, for which I assemble readings about selected contemporary topics, from Edward Snowden (soon to be Apple Computer) to racial profiling to drones to community college retention.  It’s a platform for argument analysis and rebuttal, MLA documentation, and critical reading all in one.  Students are still tempted to supply their own ill-informed arguments instead of adapting arguments they encounter in their research.  They have apparently been trained to disdain reliance on “authorities,” with the consequent lack of facts or conceptual coherence.  But it at least gives them an opportunity to develop some expertise on a particular issue and apply that to their analysis and argument.  That, of course, depends on their having the requisite knowledge to understand the readings I assign.

I have alternatively had the class examine a single topic together, typically citizenship.  Westheimer and Kahne have developed a model for describing three approaches to citizenship that we use as a point of departure.  We then read accounts that typify the models.  It’s a fun assignment in an election year, and has wakened some students to greater civic engagement.

The knowledge issue is difficult for any college instructor to crack.  We do what we can.  What we should never do, however, is discount its importance in what we do, whether we are talking of writing or reading.   Students are better readers and writers when they bring greater, not lesser, knowledge to bear on those activities.  Process is not a substitute.

References

Carillo, Ellen C. Securing a Place for Reading in Composition.  Boulder:  Colorado UP, 2015.

Lanham, Richard A.  Analyzing Prose.  2^nd Edition. New York:  Continuum, 2003.

McLean, Bethany, Joe Nocera.  All the Devils are Here:  The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis. New York:  Penguin, 2010.

Orwell, George.  “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad.” The Orwell Prize. http://theorwellprize.co.uk/george-orwell/by-orwell/essays-and-other-works/some-thoughts-on-the-common-toad/. Web.

Stegner, Wallace.  All the Little Live Things.  New York: Viking, 1967.

Westheimer Joel, Joseph Kahne.  “Citizenship:  Three Models.” American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Summer, 2004),  American Educational Research. JSTOR. 24 Feb 2011. Web.