I was glad that so many liked my last post about one way I’m striving to say the quieter parts out loud when it comes to essays, so I thought I would share another lesson from that unit this week. Also, on that note, I want to share that I’m finally doing something that people have asked me about for years, which is making some of my favorite units available on my site this spring, and the first will be my essay unit. More coming on that soon, but let’s get to the post today:

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This weekend I got a call from my cousin. Her son was writing his first essay ever, and it was not going well, so she was hoping I could talk with him.  

When he got on the phone, he sounded completely daunted, and so I asked him to send me any materials the teacher provided. My suspicion was that maybe he didn’t have enough guidance, and thus I was very surprised when a clear and clearly formatted assignment sheet with over two pages of thoughtfully curated suggestions and sentence stems/frames for each part of the essay landed in my inbox. 

As we discussed the suggestions and stems, it quickly became clear though that as straightforward as they seemed to me, the suggestions and stems were deeply vexing to my cousin’s son. We worked our way through them eventually, but the whole experience brought to mind a study I read many years ago that found that 51% of undergraduate students surveyed did not accurately understand what their teacher meant by the word “analysis”—a word likely used by their college composition instructors without a second thought about whether students would or would not understand it. 

The issue at the core of that study and likely at the core of my cousin’s son’s struggles was the Curse of Knowledge, or the idea that once you know something, it is really, really difficult to remember what it is like to not know that thing and to explain it to others. 

Now, I certainly don’t want to imply that the teacher somehow wasn’t doing her job or even doing it well. Her materials were thorough and thoughtful, and I know that I fall into the Curse of Knowledge every single day, if not every hour. Few things are harder than explaining something to someone who is new when you are decades removed from being new yourself. 

And the Curse of Knowledge is particularly problematic when it comes to essay instruction because essays have so many moving parts, are quite difficult to describe, and the individual student gaps concerning essay writing tend to be scattershot and often quite surprising.

These issues with the essay and the Curse of Knowledge are why I have fallen in love in recent years with teaching the essay through something called Expansive Framing. If you haven’t heard of Expansive Framing before, you have most assuredly engaged in it numerous times. The idea behind it is that you give students a frame—or a specific approach—but then you examine the wider context of that frame: where it came from, why it matters, its applications, etc. The counterpoint to Expansive Framing is Bounded Framing, which is where the learning in class is connected to the service of a specific task, test, or class, without a robust discussion of what that learning can help with beyond that one task/test/class.  

When it comes to essays, Bounded Framing is often the norm. We tell students to add a counter argument or start the conclusion by restating their thesis, and then we leave it at that, potentially because we are worried about overwhelming them. I believe our reliance on Bounded Framing is a large part of why there is so much fierce debate around whether essay formulas—like the infamous five paragraph essay—or sentence stems/frames help students (by training them in literary moves they otherwise might miss) or hurt them (by teaching them that essays are essentially nothing more than a boring type of madlib).

I believe that Expansive Framing is a sort of middle ground between these two camps that often brings the best of both. By giving students concrete structures, suggestions, and examples, we leave nothing up to chance or osmosis and provide structure that students like my cousin’s son really need. And by pairing these structures, suggestions, and examples with a look at where they came from and where they can go beyond the current essay, we can help students understand the paths and opportunities once they are ready to cast off their formulaic training wheels. 

To help with understanding what expansive looks like in practice, here is what I do to teach conclusions, which can be really challenging for students to understand and do well: 

1. I begin by introducing students to the Recency Effect, which is a fancy name for a pretty basic idea. We tend to best remember the most recent things we’ve encountered. This matters with writing because the conclusion, as the last thing read, is often what we remember best. 
2. I then introduce a Maya Angelou quote: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
3. I then ask students what these two things have in common and use that discussion to make a case: Conclusions, while often overlooked, matter a great deal in everything we do and write. 
4. Then I introduce three specific writing moves that authors often use when crafting conclusions. Here are my examples from this year of those moves:

The Call to Action Conclusion

“Our children are not data sets waiting to be quantified, tracked, and sold. Our intellectual output is not a mere training manual for the AI that will be used to mimic and plagiarize us. Our lives are meant not to be optimized through a screen, but to be lived—in all of our messy, tree-climbing, night-swimming, adventuresome glory…

No more “build it because we can.” No more algorithmic feedbags. No more infrastructure designed to make the people less powerful and the powerful more controlling. Every day we vote with our attention; it is precious, and desperately wanted by those who will use it against us for their own profit and political goals. Don’t let them.” — “The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism.”

In it the writer recaps the main ideas from the essay while making a case for what needs to change based on them.

The Introduction Explained Conclusion

“In the 1990s, the classic Disney fantasy of individual escapism might still, just barely, have made sense. But here in our agitated new century, it’s hard to imagine a single voice rising above the fray. Climb to the peak of a mountain, singing at the top of your lungs, and you’ll most likely find a crowd already there, arguing. We can, at most, hope to be one small voice in the chorus, doing our best not to be drowned out, discussing the discussion of the discussion. And “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is our great, noisy, troubled anthem.” –Sam Anderson

This is from “Eventually We All Talk About Bruno” by Sam Anderson. It makes more sense if you read the original article, but here he takes his introduction about 1990s Disney songs and offers a second part to that thought that shows the secret message that was hidden in the introduction all along.

The Getting-You-to-Think Conclusion

“So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.” –Brian Doyle

This Getting-You-to-Think conclusion is from Brian Doyles “Joyas Valadoras,” and it—as opposed to trying to elicit a specific change—just gets us thinking about bigger, essential things.

5. For each example, we discuss why an author might choose that approach and break each into clearly defined steps on the board. In these discussions, we also compare and contrast the different approaches to find both essential elements of a good conclusion and places where different approaches can diverge.
6. Then I have students select a potential type for their essay and write it. If we have time, I sometimes have them write a conclusion using all three styles before choosing one. 

What makes this expansive is it looks at the reasons why conclusions matter (we remember them best and often associate our feeling at the end with the whole piece) and it explores and digs into specific approaches, when they might be useful, and the pros and cons of each. This also isn’t the end of the conversation; it is ideally the start of a conversation that will expand over the year and hopefully beyond about why conclusions—far from being an afterthought—should be treated as a part of the essay that is as essential as any great hook or topic sentence.

Yours in teaching,

Matt

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