Why Teach Analytical Writing?

Welcome back for the final installment of my series on teaching analytical writing. If you’re new to the series, you can check out my series introduction, which provides some context, and the next three posts in which I explained how I break down the essay writing process to teach analytical paragraphs, thesis statements and topic sentences, and introductions and conclusions. Now I want to wrap up by considering why analytical writing is important to teach and learn.

When my seventh grade students started to work on their essays this winter, a student raised his hand and asked, “Why are we doing this?”

One of his classmates spoke up, reminding him that the essay was important because I’d said it was worth 100 points and that was more than most of the writing assignments they worked on.

Another chimed in, too. “And she said we’ll have to write lots of essays in high school, so we need to learn how to do them now.”

“Yeah, I get that,” the first student said. “But why? Why is it worth so much, and why will we write so many in high school?”

The question of why the assignment was worth so much had a simple answer: we were going to work on it for a long time, and I tend to determine how much an assignment is worth based on how long we spend on it. But I had to stop and think for a while before I could answer the rest of his question. I ended up telling him that each discipline at school teaches critical thinking in some way, and in English class, students learn to think critically by analyzing passages, recognizing patterns and symbols, and seeing what they can notice by breaking down sentences and focusing on the effects of individual words and sounds. I explained that essays ask students to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate, and these are sophisticated skills that will help them with other complex tasks and problems throughout their lives. I pointed out that writing an analytical essay forces students to slow down and look very closely at small chunks of text, and in a world of overstimulation and constant rushing, it’s valuable to learn to slow down. And I said that it’s important to know the basic rules of a genre of writing so that you can use them when they work for you and break them when they don’t.

The student seemed satisfied by my response (I even asked him to paraphrase what I’d said a few classes later and he remembered the gist of my answer) but the truth is, I’m not sure that I’m completely satisfied with it. I know that academic discourse isn’t without problems. When I studied Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English in graduate school, I read a lot of articles about how academic discourse tends to privilege those who come from positions of power–students whose parents went to college before them, students who get to attend elementary and secondary schools that have lots of resources, and students who speak English at home. I learned about the code-switching that has to happen when students use one kind of language at home and have to learn to use another, more authoritative and definite, academic language at school. And the bottom line is, even with all of my methodical, color-coded handouts, there are kids who still really struggle to grasp the accepted conventions of analyzing texts.

The best compromise I can come up with is to be as transparent as possible as I break down the essay writing process, to share lots and lots of examples, to allow students to push the boundaries of the form when they want to, and to give students other, more informal and creative ways to respond to texts as well, whether in writing or in conversation.

And in the future, I’m going to pose the question that one seventh grader posed this year; I’m going to ask students why they think they need to do this kind of writing, and what they think they learn from it. I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on the reasons for writing analytical essays, as well, and I hope you’ve found this series helpful! Tune in later this week when I’ll post an exciting new student-author interview!