I’ve noticed that I’ve recently been reprimanding a number of students for selective and partisan use of evidence. I’ve been finding myself writing a lot of comments like:
Academic writing bears a special burden for dealing honestly and explicitly with critics - we’re not allowed to disregard evidence because it’s inconvenient for the conclusions we would like to draw.
Or, more extensively:
Academic writing is a very specific kind of persuasive writing, which involves a strong burden of (1) demonstrating that you are capable of evaluating opposing positions in a sober and balanced way, and (2) making very clear and explicit distinctions between what you believe, and what you can prove. The authors you review do not all believe [x] - and, even if you were to cherry pick authors who did believe [x], the broader literature would not agree. You will have more credibility, in an academic context, if you begin with a more neutral description of the state of play - introduce a question or a debate in the literature that demonstrates that you are making a serious effort to understand all sides. You can then, of course, try to make the strongest case you can make in favour of your preferred position. In an academic context, however, your strongest case must be based on evidence and reason, not emotional appeals…
Like so many problems that manifest in student assessment, this one is at least partially iatrogenic. Earlier in the term, I kept receiving essays with conclusions divorced from whatever argument might take place in the body of the essay. A student would, for example, write some description of the literature on a topic, followed by a conclusion that broke with this description to say something like: “Personally, I never thought that [x] was a good idea.” No explanation. No evidence. No culmination of the previous analysis. It was as though many students believed that there was some sort of strange performative requirement, unrelated to the other, equally strange, requirements for an academic essay: somewhere toward the end, I must declare where I personally stand…
I tend to tackle this problem by drawing a strong distinction between what, for classroom purposes, I call a “stance” - a declaration of what the student personally believes, disconnected from the evidence and analysis used in their essay - and an “argument” - which, for classroom purposes, is an attempt to persuade the reader to draw a particular conclusion. Academic essays require arguments, not stances. Students must ensure that there is some intrinsic and transparent logical connection between the argument they make, and the structure of evidence and analysis in the essay as a whole.
The sudden proliferation of evidentiary sleight-of-hand in student essays is, I suspect, a byproduct of this strategy: students are beginning to understand that they are supposed to persuade the reader to draw a specific conclusion, but haven’t quite grasped that not all is fair in the academic version of love and war…
So now the task is to get students to cultivate a critical agnosticism toward their academic work - to persuade them to engage empathically and seriously with evidence critical of their preliminary conclusions, and to be honest about the weaknesses and uncertainties within their own position. This task is made somewhat more difficult by the low level of exposure students have to academic writing that functions this way: formal, rigorous academic writing is often perceived as too difficult for the early years of university training, and the most common models of academic writing and speech that are purpose-designed for entering students (textbooks, lectures, “public intellectual” texts, etc.) are not usually the best models for this kind of critical agnosticism, even in the best circumstances.
My personal preference, to be honest, is to assign more difficult readings that are representative of the style of thinking and writing we want students to learn, and then to work with the students to get their reading skills to the level that they can manage these pieces - I think, on balance, it makes the instructional task easier, and doesn’t cause the students to wonder why they are being held to standards that are not modelled by many of their source texts… Since I haven’t designed the courses I’m teaching into this term (and, even when I do have full control over my courses, often don’t have sufficient advance warning to change the reading lists substantially), I fall back instead on modelling what I can during classroom interactions, and writing missives like the ones above…
