The Myth of Originality

We recently met a student who was struggling in her first college-level English class. The student had worked hard on her first writing assignment, and thought she’d done everything she was supposed to do. She expected to earn an A...but the essay had come back from the professor with a C.

When we looked at her paper, the problem was immediately apparent. The essay asked the student to read closely and analyze a moment in the text. The student had done a good job of summarizing the text; she had pulled out moments she thought were important. But then she had used those moments to generalize about the characters, human responses to difficult situations, and humanity overall.

So we asked our student to look more closely at the text. She found some moments that intrigued her, worked through question-asking techniques, did some dialogic journaling and free writing, and produced some interesting work. She was engaged, absorbed in her project--right up to the end of the session. Then she asked a confounding question.

“But this is all about what’s in the text,” she said. “Anybody could find this. Isn’t what I said before more original?”

How had it come to this--that a smart, interesting student thought vague generalizations about the human condition were more “original” than ideas she’d come to after reading the text closely?

And what’s so important about originality, anyway?

Originality is a word that gets bandied about a lot these days in reference to student writing. The ease of finding essays on the internet means that plagiarizing is now as easy as right-clicking.  Understandably, schools and colleges have mounted a full-on assault on cheating, often by using services like turnitin.com.

Students who submit their work to one of these tools quickly learn that any writing that reads like other writing out there in the world gets flagged as possible plagiarism. That sounds like a great idea--but in fact, for students who are trying to learn to write great essays, it’s a problem. After all, a lot of writing reads like other writing. A lot of ideas are had by more than one person (take, for example, the almost simultaneous “invention” of the light bulb by Thomas Edison and British scientist Joseph Swan.) A lot of students choose to focus on identical passages in well-known texts--not because they’re trying to pull a fast one but because those passages happen to be particularly interesting. And often, as any experienced teacher can tell you, a lot of students come to similar conclusions about what’s going on in those passages. That doesn’t mean they’re cheating--even if the plagiarism tool thinks it does.

But if a student tries out some ideas that come from reading the text closely, and a plagiarism tool flags her for cheating because some other student has also tried out those ideas in similar language….well, that student is not terribly likely to want to try that again. And she’s pretty likely to think that “originality” means saying something that’s never been said before.  

That’s what our student was arguing: if there’s evidence to back up her claims, that means other people could also find that evidence. And if that’s the case, then her ideas--the analytical work she’s done--don’t really have any value, as she understands it. Better that she come up with vague, unsupported sentiments, drawn from her own life or general ideas, which can’t be tied directly to anything at all, and thus can’t be proven or disproven.

But here’s the thing: we think originality is being misunderstood. We think that the internet has led us to a redefinition of originality in terms of student writing. Where it used to mean, more or less, “work a student has done on her own,” now it seems to mean the production of “totally new ideas no one has ever had before.” This is a very high bar: lots of people have had lots of ideas for a very, very long time. As the Bible puts it, “there’s nothing new under the sun.” And it’s not how academia works, either. Academics build on one another’s work. That’s how a field progresses, be it medicine or English.

And we think that misunderstanding is getting in the way of students doing real, meaningful work. After all, students, are usually writing about well-known texts--texts people have been talking and thinking about for decades, if not centuries. A student who believes she needs to say something that has never ever been said before about, for instance, Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” or Shakespeare’s “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” is going to have a hard time. To meet the “originality” test, she’s probably going to have to generalize, which means she’ll end up talking about something other than the text--or just making stuff up.

A student who sets out to discover something never before seen will either be paralyzed or have to revert to generalities, which is exactly what we don’t want students to do. And there’s a disconnect here between subjects. We wouldn’t expect a student in an engineering class to come to a never-before-seen way of working through a first-year lab experiment, or a math undergraduate to come up with an brand new formula to solve a problem. What we ask students to do when they work through math problems or labs, is to learn particular habits of mind, to sharpen their critical and analytical thinking skills, to get comfortable with asking questions and figuring things out. That’s also what we’re doing when we ask students to read texts closely. We want them to practice analyzing texts and ideas. We’d like them to know how to look at a book or an event or a painting (or a political speech or an advertisement) and ask questions about what they’re seeing. We don’t want them to take everything at face value. We want them to pull things apart, make use of evidence, come to reasoned conclusions. We want them to learn how to think hard.

When we ask students to write essays, we’re asking them to do all this work and then show us what they’ve discovered about the text. An essay, after all, is a record of a student’s thoughts about problems in the text. It shows her reading of those problems, and what she comes to understand about the text that she couldn’t comprehend before she did this analysis. If she’s done the work and asked useful questions and arrived at these thoughts herself, unaided by the internet (although possibly aided by class discussion, teacher and peer review, and other interactions and conversations about her work) then her ideas are original--even if other people have thought of those same ideas before, and expressed them in similar language, somewhere across time and space.

On the Five-Paragraph Essay

The five-paragraph essay is a time-honored formula for student essay writing: generations of students arrive in college with the formula under their belts. Every year, at the beginning of our first-year writing-intensive classes, we ask students whatan essay looks like, and every year, they say the same thing:

●      Thesis (which encapsulates everything the writer will say in the essay)

●      Body paragraphs (each supporting the big idea offered in the thesis)

●      Conclusion (which restates the thesis

We understand why the five-paragraph essay persists. It’s a clear, organized structure; it demonstrates that students have read the text and can find material in it to support their points; it’s easy to evaluate and it can be taught consistently from classroom to classroom, in schools and colleges. And given the exigencies of testing culture in the schools, we understand how these qualities have come to be so valued.

And, as we’ve been told by teachers, it’s often what seems possible and practical in stressed teaching situations, in overburdened high school or college classrooms where student preparation varies widely and profs have upwards of 30 students.

We understand all that—but we think that we can do better.

And the reason we need to do better is because the five-paragraph essay has some serious drawbacks.

●      It’s not a narrative. Instead of a sequence that builds from idea to idea, the five-paragraph essay involves a series of often unrelated points, stated in the thesis, then connected with “connecting words” instead of meaningful narrative links that build on one another.

●      It’s repetitive: as students tell us, you say what you’re going to say, then you say it, then you say what you said. Repetition doesn’t make an idea more convincing: the way we convince each other of things is by telling stories, in one way or another. 

●      It values product over process, answers over questions: Since you begin with a big statement, support it and restate it, there’s no space for exploring or developing ideas. You’re just writing down is what you already know.

●      It’s boring to read and boring to write. And boring is bad for students and for teachers. When students tell us that they “hate writing,” what they really mean, more often than not, is that they hate doing the kind of rote work the five-paragraph essay requires. When there’s no space to think through ideas, writing begins to feel like busywork. 

●      It leads students into obvious or general thesis statements: Students often learn to begin with the thesis and then write the essay from there, which means they start out with an assumption and then find evidence to support what they already think. That makes it hard to come up with anything besides the most general, overarching theses.

●      It makes students think there’s a right answer and that their job is to find it.  And that not only makes students anxious about finding that answer, it discourages them from taking risks in their thinking and trying out new ideas.

All of the above make the five-paragraph essay bad for students and teachers.  It’s bad for us as a society, too. After all, the skills the five-paragraph essay reinforces--rote learning, identification and repetition of information, rigid structure--are the opposite of those our young workers will need in the new economy. To prepare themselves for the entrepreneurial, constantly shifting working world they need analysis, question-asking, risk-taking. The way you show value in this economy isn’t by knowing facts but by having ideas about them.

But if the five-paragraph essay isn’t useful, what are teachers to do? Is it possible to build a model that that requires question asking, investigation and analysis--and that works for a wide range of students?

We think the answer lies in focusing on process rather than product, and in beginning with questions in order to create a narrative essay with a real argument. 

This model asks students to begin not from what they already know, but from what they don’t know. We ask them to investigate things that they don’t understand or that don’t make sense to them; to look closely at the text for evidence, float possibilities, make choices, ask more questions, test out their ideas in writing. We ask students to arrive at arguments or claims through a process of investigation, rather than beginning with the claim and then finding evidence to support what they already think.

This focus on the process of writing means that a student can’t start writing her essays by sitting down at the computer and beginning at the beginning. Instead, she starts out by doing a lot of writing activities that look nothing like the final product. Because if you’re really thinking, really investigating and asking questions, you can’t be creating a well-structured, grammatically clean product at the same time. Thinking is messy.

The essay, then, is not a display of mastery, but a narrative which, true to the original meaning of essay (to try), sets out to convince its reader of the claim that student has arrived at.  It does so by taking the reader through a cleaned-up version of the writer’s thinking process. It tells a story that moves from point to point; it foregrounds discoveries; it arrives somewhere different than it started. It works for all kinds of students, from all kinds of backgrounds, because it gives them space to think and ways and means of figuring things out. (We know this because we’ve used this process students from the best-prepared prep school graduates to developmental learners, students with significant learning disabilities and ESL learners.)

This process isn’t easy, and in the early stages it can require more hands-on work by teacher and student. But it gives students the skills they need to think hard, make choices, analyze—the skills they need in our brave new hyper-connected world. And it’s not boring for the teacher—or for the student.

Asking Questions, Taking Risks

We spend a lot of ink in Thinking on the Page on asking questions: we think it’s central to meaningful writing. And as teachers, we work hard to encourage our students to learn through enquiry. But when we ask first-year college students in our writing-intensive classes to start their essay-writing process by asking questions about a text, they get uncomfortable. Why? Probably because they’ve come to associate doing well in school with demonstrating mastery. Asking questions makes them feel like they’re showing ignorance. Students understand that asking questions is inherently scary, because it entails risk: when a student asks, “what is going on in this moment in the text?”, she’s letting everyone see that she doesn’t know the answer to the question she’s asking. What if she gets it wrong? What if she chooses something that isn’t what the professor had in mind? Better not to ask at all, students often feel. Often students are reluctant to take risks or ask questions in writing they way they might in other areas of their lives, because of the widespread (but patently false) belief that writing demonstrates how smart you are. When students believe that a “bad” paper will make them look stupid, they’re less willing to try things out.

Encouraging students to ask questions can be tricky for teachers, too. We’re often told that the teacher’s job is to serve as the authoritative voice in the classroom: to transmit information, to teach students through demonstration. When we ask students to ask questions about a text, we’re giving them the green light to undermine that authority--or so it can seem. After all, if students are asking real questions, their take on the text might not agree with ours; we can get answers we didn’t foresee. In an instant, a teacher’s carefully planned progression through the text can be completely derailed: then what?

All of this can seem too risky, too much like teaching on a high wire. But it’s worth it when students have the opportunity to think hard about a text instead of anxiously searching out right answers, and, often, feeling defeated because the answers they think are “out there” seem so far out of their reach. We keep pushing our students to ask questions, even when that makes our jobs challenging, because we know that the writing of a good paper starts with a process of meaningful exploration. When students ask questions, they engage with the text actively; they find potential points of investigation, and identify their own interests. And that gives them space to figure things out for themselves, rather than simply reiterating what they already know. We all want our students to learn to analyse, to be critical consumers of information and culture. And if we want our students to take risks with their thinking, the only way forward is out on that high wire.