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.