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I’ve found that this is an important question to get pupils to understand. It’s important for students to be able to accurately identify exactly what their difficulties and weaknesses are, so they can be effective in improving them.
“I wish I fucking knew,” he says, his exasperation evident. “This last essay I turned in, I thought I did good. I thought I made a good argument, good points. Then it’s a fucking sixty-two percent when I got it back!”
“Do you have the essay with you?” I ask.
“Yeah, it’s right here.” His book bag sits in between our two chairs, and when he angles his body to reach down and unzip it, his knee brushes against mine.
At the tiny contact, sparks erupt and dance up my leg, settling between my thighs where they awaken a warm, buzzing feeling. My core goes taut. I take a deep, steadying breath through my nose, trying not to let my thighs clench.
“Here it is,” he says, pulling out his essay. He lays it on the desk in front of us. “And look at how helpful my professor’s comments are.”
He points at the red ink underneath the grade of sixty-two sitting at the top of the front page: Totally disorganized, is all it says.
I’m not surprised by that when I look at the heading Tuck typed to the upper-right and see that his professor is Martinello.
“Yeah,” I sigh. “That’s definitely some Martinello-style feedback.” Some college professors want to do all they can to help their students succeed; some think that college is supposed to be a more independent experience than that and take a sink-or-swim approach to their students. Martinello falls squarely in the latter category.
“Let me skim through it,” I say. I’m not doing a deep reading, trying to look for every possible stylistic error or minor weakness in any of his arguments. First, I just want to get a sense of the general outline and organization of the essay.
Once I’ve skimmed through it, I can only come to one conclusion. “Okay. Martinello’s comment wasn’t helpful, but it wasn’t wrong, either.”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“This essay is all over the place. Look, you first bring up this point in the second paragraph,” I point to it, “then you totally forget about it and ramble about three different ideas for the next two paragraphs. Then you finally come back to your first point later in the essay, before coming back to, like, half the points you made between then and now and fleshing them out more.”
“But the arguments were good, right?” he asks.
“Actually, they are,” I say, a bit caught off guard by the realization as I flip between pages. “But you need to make one point at a time. And you don’t really have a conclusion … actually, your conclusion seems to be in the third to last paragraph. Your last two paragraphs are just elaborating on other minor points you made earlier in the essay.”
“But isn’t it the argument that counts? The logic? If I make a relevant point and defend it well, isn’t that what’s important?”
“That is important, but it’s not everything. Without proper organization, it can be hard or even impossible to follow what you’re trying to say. It’s like, imagine you’re writing a letter to someone, but your handwriting is so bad literally no one can read it. It doesn’t really matter what the letter says, does it? How you present your ideas is important, too.”
“Hmm,” Tuck hums, actually sounding thoughtful.
“What did you do before you started to actually write this essay?” I ask.
Tuck turns to me with a quizzical look. “You mean, what did I do that day? Well, I went to the gym. Beat Lane in a bench press competition,” at that, he throws up both his arms and flexes them, making his dense, round biceps bulge. I feel like Tuck really enjoys flexing. “Then we went to the bar and …”
“I don’t mean that,” I say, rolling my eyes at Tuck narrating an entire day of his life. “I mean what did you do to prepare for the essay? Did you make an outline?”
“Outline?” The word falls from his lips like he doesn’t even know the meaning.
“Did you do any planning at all? Or did you just open up a Word document and start typing away?”
Tuck nods his head slowly. “Yeah. The last one.”
I click my tongue. “That would be your problem, then.”
“So you’re telling me when I write an essay, not only do I have to write the essay itself, I have to write, like … a pre-essay?”
“It’s not that onerous to …”
“Onerous,” Tuck repeats the word, his brow leaping sarcastically. “That’s a word of the day for you.”
“It’s not that difficult to make an outline,” I rephrase with a slight bite to my words. I run down some basic outlining strategies with Tuck, and then give him an assignment: I want him to read through the essay he just scored a sixty-two on, identify all the specific points and arguments he made, and then create an outline for how he should have organized them to be more coherent.
He ruffles through his book bag. “Shit. You have a pencil or something?” he asks.
