I’ve been focusing on students lately, not the craftsmanship of accomplished scholars. But it’s important to keep in mind that there is a close connection between what students are taught and what their teachers are able to do. When you give a student an assignment, even one that involves a significant amount of “independent research”, you are telling them to do something that you yourself could do. Like a conservatory teacher or an athletics coach, you need not presume that you could do it better or more easily than them. It’s reasonable for an aging master to be weaker in practice than the young apprentice. The important thing is that the teacher already knows what is possible, and is therefore able to evaluate the result, while students are only just beginning to discover what they are capable of. “The Great Learning,” said Confucius, “is rooted in watching with affection the way people grow.” Learning is always implicit in scholarship, and the student, therefore, is always implicated in the work of the scholar.

With this in mind, I want to suggest some assignments that can train and test the skills that scholars apply to their own learning. By means of these assignments, the skills can be passed on to their students and a culture of learning can thereby be conserved. These are high-minded ideals, but the assignments themselves are altogether practical and grounded.

Assignment #1

Give the students two short texts by writers on opposite sides of a debate that is, or was once, central to your discipline. Let them be around 3000 words long, which implies that they can be read–once–in about fifteen minutes. Make sure that they either are or represent “classic” positions. That is, make sure that the students are exposed to the ideas of two major figures in your field.

Give them a week to read the texts and, on that basis alone, make up their own minds about the issue. What is the debate about? Which arguments do they find most compelling? Who is right and who is wrong? Is there a middle ground that seems more reasonable to them than either of the two positions that are being defended?

Have them write a five-paragraph essay of no more than 1000 words to present their position on the question. Have them read and grade each other’s essays. (You can give each student a number of essays to grade. But in a smaller class of, say, 20 students, you can also tell them to spend 10 minutes on each paper and have them grade them all. That’s 200 minutes of, I hope you will agree, very instructive work. I would recommend having them distribute the grades on a normal curve.)

Assignment #2

Send the students to the library to inform themselves about the history of the issue you exposed them to in assignment #1. Have them locate the texts you assigned and the most interesting (to the student) sources they cited. Have them study the “impact” of the papers you assigned (or the authors who wrote them, or the classics they represented) on the discourse of your discipline by finding papers that cite them.

Give them a week to see what they can come up with. How important is this question today? What is the consensus among scholars? What sort of research has been done to test the relevant theories? What research is being done to extend and develop them? Encourage them to seek out work that disagrees with the position they took in assignment #1.

Have them write a five-paragraph essay of no more than 1000 words to present their results. Demand that they use a particular citation style. Again, have them read and grade each other’s essays.

Assignment #3

Have them reread their solution to assignment #1. In light of their work in the library, what do they think now? Have them rewrite essay #1 to take stock of this research, either defending their position in a more sophisticated way, or taking a new position in light of the better arguments they have encountered.

This time, you give them the grade.

Assignment #4

While you are grading assignment #3, have them grade each other too. This time, however, their job isn’t to evaluate it according to their own standards, but to try to predict the grade that you will give them. This is easiest to do if you grade on a curve, since the students will now have to distribute each other’s papers on a normal distribution. Their grade on this exercise will be based on how well they match the grades you give. If you don’t distribute the whole class set of essays to everyone (perhaps the class is too big), their job will simply be to rank-order them. You will then also have to rank each essay relative to the others.

I’ll let this stand without comment and offer some reflections on why I think this is a great way to spend a few weeks of your student’s time (and yours!) in subsequent posts. Do please offer your thoughts below in the meantime.

I have suggested that the key sentence of the first paragraph of a five-paragraph essay is, either implicitly or explicitly, self-referential. It does not assert the thesis statement of the essay; it asserts that this essay will demonstrate its truth. It refers, not to the world of fact that makes it true, but to the text before us that will show us how true it is. That gives it the task of justifying the writing of the essay by situating it in a practical and theoretical context, outlining the argument, and indicating the consequences for practice or theory or both. I will now suggest that the last paragraph will actually assert the thesis and present (not merely indicate) the consequences.

If the key sentence of paragraph 1 was

In this essay, I will argue that the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve,

then the key sentence of paragraph 5 will be simply

The Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.

They do not have to be this obviously similar, but the content should be. Notice that there is no reference to the essay in the latter, no “I have here argued…” or “I have tried to show…” Also, I should say that this is actually best understood as a way of mirroring paragraph 3 of a longer essay with paragraph 39 (out of 40). In a five paragraph essay, the first and last paragraph will do a bit more work than their key sentences make explicit. (You might want to plan this work so that paragraph 1 actually has three key sentences and paragraph five has two, but do remember to maintain a focus.)

Think of paragraph five as having the task of asserting both the thesis and its importance. To begin with, after having written the key sentence, you can just write a version of the key sentence of paragraphs 2-4. You now have four sentences written. Then add three sentences that suggest the consequences of realizing that the Fed’s monetary policy was to blame, whether for scholars or bankers or both (but be clear about who you’re talking about). Presumably, this gives us some guidance about how to avoid similar crises in the future. Tell us what the right policy would have been, perhaps. And what policy we should adopt today.

You have all the material in place. Now work on the paragraph until it feels like a conclusion of your argument. Remember it has three distinct parts or moments: (1) the thesis statement of your essay, (2) a summary of the argument, (3) an assessment of the consequences. It has to make these three moves as though they are one coherent gesture that asserts your overall meaning. One last thing: I’ve given you the steps of a dance or the chords to a song. Please grant that merely following these steps or playing these chords will not necessarily produce a good essay. You have to practice until you can do it well. And you have to have something to say.

We are trying to imagine an undergraduate economics student writing an essay to argue that

 the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.

Notice that an economics professor could just as easily believe this and might also write an essay on the subject. We could require both writers to confine themselves to five paragraphs. The professor might find the task easier, and might even do a better of job of it, but it’s a sensible one for both writers. It’s possible to do it well or badly. Doing it well requires the acquisition of a valuable skill.

The five-paragraph essay form demands that we come up with three arguments for our overall conclusion. In my last post, I suggested the following

• In the 1930s, the Fed followed a deliberately deflationary policy.
• As part of this policy, the Fed let the Bank of United States fail in 1931.
• The failure of the Bank of United States precipitated a general collapse of the banking sector.

I’m not entirely confident that I’m right about these three points and whatever debates economists have on this question would probably turn on them, but there can be no doubt that the line of argument is clear. If I can show that these three claims are true, I have made a case for blaming the Great Depression on the Fed’s monetary policy. There are a couple of implicit book-ends, namely, that deflation is the result of monetary policy and that the collapse of the banking sector turned a recession into a depression, and I can make these explicit in my conclusion. What I want to stress here is that each claim can be supported, elaborated or defended in at least six sentences and less than two-hundred words, and these paragraphs, in turn, can be more or less competently written. We could give a student any one of these sentences and ask them to write the corresponding paragraph. This would be a meaningful test, both of their knowledge and of their style.

Notice that the rhetorical posture of each paragraph may be different. The first paragraph may merely detail (i.e., elaborate on) the policy of the Fed, clarifying the sense in which it was deflationary. The writer may assume that it is neither hard to believe nor hard to agree with but that the reader wants to know more. The second paragraph, however, may be written with a reader who needs evidence in mind. Either it’s hard to believe that the Fed would let a bank fail at such a time, or it could be hard to believe that letting a bank fail had anything to do with a monetary policy. The third paragraph, finally, could be be written for reader who has already decided that the failure of the Bank of United States was not as pivotal as the writer thinks. Perhaps the objections to this notion are well-known. The paragraph will then engage with and counter them, perhaps only to let the disagreement stand without it affecting the overall point about the Great Depression.

In his masterful little book How to Draw Hands, Oliver Senior reminds us that “the better drawing is not the more elaborate attempt to reproduce the visual appearance of its subject, but that which is better informed.” This will also be true of these paragraphs. Competence will be revealed in the way the student selects, from the abundance of information that is available to us about the subject, those details that most efficiently establish the claim within the overall line of argument. As I’ve been saying in these posts, it puzzles me how often teachers appear not to see the point of getting students to develop and demonstrate this competence. It seems obviously worthwhile to me.

Yesterday, I promised to write two versions of an introductory paragraph for a five-paragraph essay about the Great Depression. In both cases, my task has been defined by a key sentence that can be stated as follows:

In this essay, I will argue that the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.

Notice that this sentence is not about the Great Depression but about my essay. The paragraph, then, will not defend my thesis as such. Rather, it will elaborate on what I’m going to do in the essay; it will give meaning to the act of writing–and, therefore, reading–such an essay. It will explain what I’m going to say and why I have chosen to say it. It will both outline and motivate my essay.

As I said yesterday, these tasks can be given to separate paragraphs in a longer essay, but here we are looking at a one-paragraph introduction. In the second version, I should say, we will make those tasks less explicit, indeed, leave them almost entirely implicit, and the paragraph will seem to be about the causes of the Great Depression themselves. Only I (and the very careful reader) will know that it’s really about the essay itself, that it is an introduction.

(A quick disclaimer on the content: I’m not an economist or a historian so I’m not claiming that my characterizations of Keynesians and Austrians are correct nor that my thesis is true.)

The Great Depression of the 1930s was a period of enormous economic hardship. Economists have therefore long tried to understand its causes and develop strategies to avoid similar calamities in the future. Keynesians have argued that the Great Depression was the result of failures of the markets to correct themselves, suggesting that government must take an active role in the management of the economy. Austrians, by contrast, have argued that the downturn was the result of government policies that prevented the markets from functioning properly. In this essay, I will argue that the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.  In the 1930s, I will show, the Fed followed a deliberately deflationary policy, leaving banks without means to respond to runs on their deposits. This famously led to the failure of the Bank of United States in 1931, and this, in turn, precipitated a general collapse of the banking sector. Like Milton Friedman, I conclude that the role of the state in avoiding economic depressions is to manage the money supply. It is to ensure that there is enough cash in the system to turn the wheel of circulation.

There are some who don’t like any self-referential “signposting”, and would prefer just to get to the point. This is sometimes called “classic style” and is worth trying every now and then. Notice that it leaves my opinions, arguments and beliefs out of it, presenting them instead by way of statements of fact. That I believe these things is to go without saying. And notice that, instead of presenting a debate and taking a side, it just reminds the reader of the received view and presumes that challenging generally held beliefs is worthy of an essay (it is).

It is generally believed that the Great Depression of the 1930s was the result of failures of the markets to correct themselves. To avoid similar calamities in the future, it is argued, government must take an active role in the management of the economy, stimulating demand by spending on public works. But this view is wrong. As Milton Friedman showed, the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.  In the 1930s, the Fed followed a deliberately deflationary policy, leaving banks without means to respond to runs on their deposits. This famously led to the failure of the Bank of United States in 1931, and this, in turn, precipitated a general collapse of the banking sector. The role state in avoiding economic depressions, then, is best understood as one of managing the money supply, ensuring that there is enough cash in the system to turn the wheel of circulation.

Both of these paragraphs can set up the same four paragraphs to follow, i.e., paragraphs 2-5 of the five-paragraph essay. Paragraph 2 will describe the Fed’s deflationary policy; 3 will recount the failure of the Bank of United States; and 4 will discuss the general collapse of banking. Finally, paragraph 5 will bring it all together by emphasizing the role of the state in managing the money supply.

As introductions, these are still works in progress. I should return to paragraph 1 and rewrite it when I have the rest done. We’ll see how it goes. Comments and criticisms are more than welcome, either on particular rhetorical choices or on the form of the five-paragraph essay in general, which I’m trying to defend by way of example here. Let’s not argue about Friedman, though. I’m an amateur on that score.

Suppose you are teaching a class in macroeconomics. You’ve decided you want the students to understand the differences between Keynesians and Austrians by looking at how these two schools approach the Great Depression and the 2008 Financial Crisis. Though it’s a simplification, you are trying to teach them how to make up their minds about the truth or falsity of simple propositions like this:

• The Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.
• The Financial Crisis was caused by the deregulation of the financial sector.

If you’re an economist, you can probably come up with better propositions. But notice that if these propositions are false, then the following are true:

• The Great Depression was not caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.
• The Financial Crisis was not caused by the deregulation of the financial sector.

Or you might say that it’s not as simple as that. Faced with the first two propositions, your response might be to say

• The Great Depression was not caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve alone.
• The deregulation of the financial sector was not the sole cause of the Financial Crisis.

Knowing something about economics means understanding these propositions well enough to form an opinion about their truth. This is why I say that being “knowledgeable” means having the ability to make up your mind about something. That is the ability you are trying to help your students develop. It’s an ability that you, as their economics teacher, presumably have. Indeed, I would encourage you not to teach material to students that you are not able to make up your own mind about. In whatever subject you propose to instruct them, they should be in the presence of a master.

It should be obvious that, in the scenario I’m imagining, you would assign the students readings by Keynesians and Austrians and, perhaps, some neutral or “secondary” literature that merely summarizes their disputes. No matter where you are in the syllabus, however, no matter how much reading they’ve been asked to do, you can ask them to “make up their minds”. You can, in principle, ask them to do this based on their background knowledge  on the first day of class (perhaps this is a graduate level course and you’re expecting them to know something about these topics already). And you can then tell them to write you a five paragraph essay of no more than 1000 words that states their position. The essay question might read, simply,

• “The Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.” Discuss.

Many students and teachers these days are likely to roll their eyes at this task. I understand why students don’t like to be put on the spot like this, but I don’t see why teachers can’t see the value of doing it — indeed, of doing it often. This is the most natural and ordinary sort of task to assign students of any subject: articulate a claim about which there is (or merely has been) some discussion within the discipline and ask the students to engage in that discussion, to demonstrate an awareness of what is at stake and then to state their own view on the matter. Within any discipline, after all, there are countless issues on which it is reasonable to demand that scholars take a position. (A macroeconomist who has no position on the causes of the Great Depression isn’t much of one, I would think. Or maybe the field is more specialized these days than I think?)

As I said yesterday, I want to defend not just the idea of holding ordinary opinions within a discipline but writing ordinary prose about them. My essay assignment here would require them to motivate the need to take a position and take one themselves (§1), come up with three reasons for the position they’ve taken (§§2-4), and indicate the broader consequences of the view they have defended (§5). Let me conclude this post by looking at the first of these tasks, which will correspond to writing the first paragraph of the five-paragraph essay.

Suppose the student has decided, on the advice of Milton Friedman perhaps, that the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve. I would recommend, then, that they articulate their key sentence provisionally as “I will here argue that the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.” In a longer essay, this might appear as the first sentence of the third paragraph, but in a five-paragraph essay I would recommend placing it roughly in the middle of the first paragraph. (For those who are already irritated by the “non-classical” self-referential “signposting” of “I will here argue…”, I’m going to offer an alternative at the the end.) The first half the paragraph will then lead up to it with one or two sentences about the Great Depression itself and another one or two about the search for causes by economists. The second half (after the key sentence asserts your major thesis) will detail the thesis in three smaller points (that add up to the major thesis) and perhaps indicate, in a single sentence, the importance of understanding monetary policy to be the cause. In any case, the paragraph will consist of at least six sentences (2-4 before the key sentence, and 2-4 afterwards) and at most 200 words.

If you don’t like the phrase “I will here argue” (or worse, “In this essay, I will show that…”), I sympathize. It violates what Thomas and Turner call “classic style”. I think it is acceptable in novice writing, and certainly in longer articles in the social sciences, but it’s true that doing without it often produces a better text, a stronger style. In this case, I would recommend trying to rewrite the paragraph so that the key sentence in the middle now becomes simply “But the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.” Notice how much that “but” requires of the preceding three or four sentences. They must create a space in which our assertion about the Fed can establish an interesting rhetorical tension. Tomorrow I’ll construct examples of these two ways of writing the first paragraph.