A young man going to a middling-good ivy college writes a first-year composition(won't call it essay) which gets published in Time. If ever there was a sample of white male upperclass privilege, that's it. Does he really think if he was from San Diego State and his name was Marcia Krasnowski and he was IN FAVOR OF apologizing for privilege that the piece would have been picked up?
Well, yes, probably he does believe that.
I used to be a college teacher, and to me, this is a great example of a C+ paper. Maybe B-, on an indulgent day if his other work was better. Yes, I grant you "Weltanschauung." That's what adds the+. On the other hand, I always graded down for using very large words when small ones would do, and "world view" would have been just fine and padded his composition less. Not to mention that the whole first two paragraphs are about as vague and unnecessary as they need to be. and are kind of show-offy, in a high school English way. That combination of self-consciousness and showing off his vocabulary skills gets polished out of college students, at least at good schools. He'd know better if he'd been in my class, or most of the Rhetoric TA's classes at Iowa. At my undergraduate college, I had a journalism teacher who had a very large stamp --VERY large, 8.5 inches across, 11 inches down -- with one word on it: BULLSHIT. He would have stamped that kid's paper without hesitation.
But let's go on. I want to make a point about the deterioration of standards of argument. Perhaps there are other people who might learn something about what makes decent argumentative writing, or at least how to avoid doing C work, whether you happen to get national fame for it based on the scandalous content, or not. Frankly, no one should have taken that paper seriously enough to argue with it. What it needed -- what Mr. Fortgang needed to write better arguments later -- was someone taking him seriously by tearing his argument apart.
"Okay," goes my first note, near the bottom of the page. "You're establishing your claim that you're in the minority at Princeton; that somehow unspecified people here have said to you "several times" something about white skin privilege. How often? In what situation? How many? Have there been contradictory comments? What kind of people? Did they say more, or was that all they said? Anecdotes aren't evidence."
Yep, the first page would have been sufficient to get him that C+ unless it turned out that he was writing his way into his argument, which first year students often do. If he focused and provided claims and evidence by page two, he might have been forgiven by most TAs -- I was notoriously tolerant, just handing over scissors and scotchtape to certain small groups and telling them to get to work and figure out what they really wanted to say, and what needed filling in to prove their claims, and delete fluff.
Ah, and then we're getting to an interesting part -- history of his family. If that was the assignment or relevant to it, this section has the greatest potential. But all of a sudden, the adjectives he used so pointlessly in the first paragraph are abandoned, and the facts are sketchy. So I have to write:
"Concrete examples at last! great! I like the one about your grandmother and the death march. but why do you put the entire story in one sentence and throw it away? Try more sentences. Slow down exposition. Make each example still more concrete. If you know the Polish landscape at all, you could include that to illustrate your point. "My grandmother was on a death march: 1000 Jewish prisoners and X camp guards. It took X days. By the time they arrived, X # had died along the way, and ..." Numbers help us understand the magnitude of what happened.
And use that same strategy with your telling of your grandfather's story. I get the sense you think his suffering and courage speaks for itself. Never assume your audience gets that. He deserves at least two paragraphs."
The writing there would be sufficient to get him a B, despite my comments, if he could sustain it. Instead, he moves into his fundamental argument: yes, I've had kinds of privilege, but not the kind I should be ashamed of. But.. he's getting snarky. I write:
This sails perilously near sarcasm. Who's your audience? Do you want to alienate them? Straightforward argument is usually more honest than sarcasm, which works well sometimes -- but it's a skill which needs lots of practice, and definitely a longer piece than what you're writing, because you need to set up the issue more fully. You haven't given your opponent's argument enough comprehensibility to earn your sarcasm when you deconstruct it.
I would continue, praising the solid parts which occasionally emerge (family stuff, good; privilege of being in US compared to another country, good, but again, you're making far too large an argument for the space you have) and advise on what the next draft should contain. Most important: a lot of people do not think Jews have "white skin privilege" in the same way, say, people from northern Europe have white skin privilege. I'd tell him a little about the complexities, and encourage a bit of research into what people actually say about privilege and its limits, which he needs to engage if he wants to argue. Because he cannot make an argument without knowing what people on both sides of him say, and at least confronting some of it. That's the difference between high school composition and a college paper.
I also would go a bit more into "who's your audience? what are you trying to persuade them of? Is this one of those "preaching to the converted" pieces or are you actually trying to change someone's mind?" and here's where his grade would go down. Because anyone learning argument for college writing had better NOT be preaching to the converted, and that's what he appears to be. (If it were an English piece, the grade would go down for lack of creativity, but that's a different discussion.) Thus, the overall piece displays lazy thinking, with some genuine feeling in the middle.
Okay, B-. Because I've read his essay carefully now, and he has potential. I'll hope this is a deviation in usually good work, and he's struggling to articulate his position owing to the personal nature of what he has to say. And I'd also give him B- because C grades 20 years ago are B grades now.
But he better not have gotten an A for this, even at an Ivy, where grades are notoriously inflated. Because that would denigrate the kind of writer who really actually did good work, probably some in the same class with him.
The problem is, it's not doing Tai Fortgang any favors to publish an essay which can be ripped to pieces by any rhetoric TA (you don't need to be a professor to see how mediocre this writing is, even for a first year). He has a lot of potential as a writer, but until he's held accountable for how he argues, it's cruel: he's entered the world of discourse, and people like me can and should legitimately take after him for the quality of his work and its failures, whereas a college classroom is a private, safe place to struggle and sometimes fail. It's an interesting argument (goes without saying I think he's wrong, but as a teacher that's irrelevant; I like the ones who make me splutter!) but it says something about the deterioration of public discourse that people take the essay seriously.
Something very, very bad.