In Defense of the Essay

As an English major, I am still a fan of the academic paper. I don't agree with everything Mark L. Sample says in his article, "What's Wrong with Writing Essays," but I think he makes the case for changing pedagogy to engage students more effectively. Personally, I think the process of research and synthesizing ideas into an academic format is useful to students across all majors. However, I can see where tinkering could come into play in the literary field in a way that benefits all students.

Jentery Sayers talks about the incorporation of tinkering in her essay, "Tinker-Centric Pedagogy in Literature and Language Classrooms." I think the most important point she makes is the space for test-and-failure that tinkering creates in a classroom. In the university setting, there are hundreds of thousands of students whose lives revolve around evaluation and GPAs. Perhaps if teachers change the way students are evaluated to center around the process instead of a formulaic end goal, then students will be able to more actively engage in the classroom and through their assignments.

However, how do teachers approach this new kind of pedagogy without completely removing the importance of the end product? Students should still want to produce original products that showcase critical thinking and an impressive synthesis of ideas. I think the key here is, as Sayers says, "...having students document what changes from experiment to experiment" (285). I would argue that you could translate this process to a paper-writing process. By changing the pedagogy to be tinker-centric, it might be possible to remove the inherently problematic issues with essays that Sample talks about.

I think that blogs are a useful way to approach paper-writing, because I think they serve as a type of change log that Sayers talks about. Teachers could use blogs as a way for students to document the change in their writing and ideas over the course of a class, and then have them use that documented change in a final product that addresses all of the skills they've acquired throughout the semester: coding, digital production, and synthesize of literary ideas.

It seems like blogging is becoming seen as what should be the "standard" instead of the "exception;" at least, according to this article by Michael Drennan of The Guardian. He makes the case for incorporating blogs, without discrediting the experience of writing, by saying, "Asking all students to write blogs as learning unfold and interlinks, empowers the teacher to be more supportive because they're less tied to the bureaucracy; it raises challenge levels; it enables IT-skilling; it lets students see their own progress...it means more productive and accelerating learning-talk over rote-writing" (Drennan).

Additionally, I think Drennan's article makes another important point: adopting a digital method that can be adapted to the tinker-centric pedagogy is good for teachers as well as students. By freeing teachers from confining rubrics and traditional molds, digital/tinker-centric assignments can help teachers interact with students on a deeper level in order to foster a supportive relationship that isn't evaluation-centric.

Sample complains that the traditional essay eliminates critical thinking by following a formulaic model that doesn't allow for productive deviation. However, it might be worthwhile for the digital humanities to consider a true collaboration between the digital and the traditional academic paper in order to combine the values of the paper with the innovation of the digital.

Works Cited:

Drennan, Michael. "Blogging in the Classroom: Why Your Students Should Write Online." The Guardian. N.p., 17 July 2012. Web. 8 Oct 2014

Sample, Mark L. What's Wrong with Writing Essays. Debates in the Digital Humanities. Web. 8 Oct. 2014.

Sayers, Jentery. Tinker-Centric Pedagogy in Literature and Language Classrooms (n.d.): n. pag. Utah State University Press. Web. 8 Oct. 2014.