Reading Satirical Scholarship To Encourage Students’ Agency And Confidence
I am an associate professor of English, specializing in composition and rhetoric and teacher education, at California State University, Dominguez Hills, located in the South Bay region of Los Angeles. My students are predominantly Chicanx/Latinx and Black/African American and the vast majority receive some sort of financial aid. I teach both undergraduate students of writing and graduate students in the Masters program in literature, rhetoric and composition.
Whether I am teaching First Year Composition or the Teaching of Writing, I almost invariably share with students at some point in the semester composition scholar Edward M. White’s “My Five-Paragraph-Theme Theme.” Instead of giving students the full version of the essay, which includes White’s commentary, I give them only what he calls the “jeu d’esprit” with which he opens. For those unfamiliar with the essay, the satirical opener, credited to “Ed White,” is composed of five short, vague paragraphs true to the form of the five-paragraph essay that is the subject of the satire. Without citing existing scholarship or crafting an overt critique, White makes readily apparent the shortcomings of formulaic writing instruction and assignments by writing a five-paragraph essay lauding the five-paragraph essay form with faint praise like it “keeps you from thinking too much, which is a great time saver, especially on an essay test.”
With my undergraduates, I often using this piece in a unit on Myths about Writing, alongside pieces of writing about the use of the first person (“I”) in academic writing, the erroneous and arguably racist ideology of standard English, and other commonplaces teachers keep teaching despite scholarship and best practices to the contrary. With graduate students, many of whom are or will be teachers themselves, I use the essay early in the semester to begin to disabuse them of the notion that writing can or should be taught as a formula. Generally, I invite them to write what Sheridan Blau has called a “commentary” on the piece. I rely on those commentaries as our in-class participation in asynchronous online courses. Then, we discuss the essay when we next meet.
What usually happens is this: Some students say they agree with the points “Ed White” has made. Others say they see his points but think the essay could use some fleshing out; in other words, they see the limitations of the five-paragraph theme. Others say the piece seems, well, strange. When we discuss it in an in-person class, a few students look around the room as their peers share with little smirks on their faces, or an eyebrow raised in my direction; maybe they open their mouths to speak then change their minds. Eventually, someone asks: “Is he… joking?” A graduate student may explicitly say: “This is like a parody or satire.”
Generally, I’ll turn the question back on them: “What makes you think that?” I listen as, together, students explore the piece’s tone and the disconnect between the characteristics of the five-paragraph-theme White praises and the realities of learning and writing. When I finally say “Yes, it’s satire,” or tell them that Ed White is really renowned composition scholar Edward M. White, or give them the full version of the piece, including White’s commentary, a handful of students sigh, some with surprise, some knowingly: “Ohhhhhh.” Invariably, one student exclaims: “I knew it!”
So, why do I withhold the full version? What is the purpose of this little trick I play on students? Well, after they’ve realized the piece is satire, I ask students why they didn’t say so in the first place. Here’s what I’ve learned:
Reading the piece, they may have a nagging suspicion about the tone they’ve picked up on, but they aren’t sure, so, in class they stay quiet. They don’t want to be wrong. They know something is strange, off, doesn’t feel right. Yet they assume that the text is what it purports to be, and that academic writing means what it says. They assume that scholarship and other nonfiction writing aren’t humorous, sarcastic, or satirical. They’ve been taught the five-paragraph-theme so many times they think it actually is a best practice, despite decades of composition scholarship that says otherwise. They may have even been taught to teach it in their own classrooms or to students they tutor. And even if they disagree with the praise awarded to the five-paragraph format, they assume that I, their professor, would not give them a text I didn’t agree with.
They make all of these assumptions against their better judgment. In some ways, this is because they trust my authority, as they have been taught to trust their professors. The flip side of that is that they don’t fully trust themselves, even when their instincts tell them something is amiss. Thus, following this activity, we discuss the importance of critical reading and metacognition. We talk about how we know what we know, and how what seems like instinct in reading is really the rhetorical awareness they’ve already developed. Ultimately, this activity encourages students to identify and, more importantly, trust their own reading practices and rhetorical awareness.