Essay #4: Proposal Argument

Discussion:

A frequent question people ask is whether the quality of incoming freshmen (particularly the quality of their writing) is declining. Often people will also ask if Covid made things worse. It’s tempting to say “yes” and “yes.” After all, during our Covid Zoom sessions, it was common for students to turn on the computer, log in, turn off their camera and microphone, and simply leave the room. And in every college, at least since November 2022 when ChatGPT went live, faculty have felt helpless when students who could not remember to capitalize the first letter of their own names began submitting perfectly spelled essays filled with technical jargon, courtesy of Artificial Intelligence.

All of this is a huge problem. After all, the main purpose of a university is (to quote one of my own professors) to create new knowledge, and a main goal of Ashland University is to teach students how to think, not what to think—and leaving the room while the instructor conducts a class to a dead computer doesn’t accomplish these things. Neither does mindlessly copying and pasting an essay written by ChatGPT.

Students not being focused on learning is not just a recent issue. I have a 1935 freshman English textbook that quotes a common drinking song:

We all came to college,
But we didn’t come for knowledge
So we’ll raise hell while we’re here. (McConn 3)

In “University Days,” James Thurber writes about the struggles to keep Bolenciecwcz, the OSU tackle, eligible to play in the big game on Saturday—the difficulty being that “while he was not dumber than an ox, he was not any smarter” (223). Thurber’s memories come from nearly 80 years ago, including his own strategy for cheating on a university physical education test.

Most teachers have similar stories. I remember one student who could not understand my objection to plagiarized papers. “After all, you got your paper to read!” I have had students who were astonished to learn that the first person pronoun “I” is always capitalized and others who didn’t know the difference between a comma and an apostrophe. Back in the days when students submitted printed copies of essays, nobody owned a stapler because they had never been asked to submit anything that required more than one sheet of paper. And nowadays it’s quite common for freshmen to arrive without a clue how to use word processing software—apparently all their high school written work had been Tweets and Facebook posts. (Many of my students assure me that they were never required to write a single thing in high school.)

Here is the problem:

• In many high schools, students can graduate if they can answer multiple-choice quizzes and avoid committing major felonies on school grounds. It’s not that unusual for English teachers to pass students on the Bolenciecwcz principle: give him a good grade because he loves football and needs to stay eligible. (No, I didn’t make that one up. Students have told me that’s how they passed English.)
• College English teachers are nice people and fairly idealistic. We assume that students come to us with a moderate ability to write, and that we are supposed to aim at helping them to the next level. The usual textbooks work on the same principle. They assume that students are highly motivated and skilled enough to produce a three- or four-page paper, and the next project is to help them polish up their style and rhetoric.
• On the other hand, many students arrive with no experience writing anything longer than a paragraph (if that long), and when they are asked to write a four-page paper, they panic and produce rambling personal letters. When that approach doesn’t work, they realize that their lives are on the line and failing English might mean leaving the college (or at least becoming ineligible to play on the team), so they turn to ChatGPT to crank out Artificial Intelligence papers.
• And at the other end of their careers, after these people graduate, employers complain that nobody knows how to write. Back in 1966, one chemical company executive put it this way: “If our antifreeze had the same quality as our writing, we’d rust out half the radiators in the country in 6 months” (O’Hayre 43).

Here is your task:

I have written in very general terms. You need to zero in on specifics. What do you propose to take a step—perhaps even a very small one—to improve the situation in which unprepared students hit the university, discover that they lack the skills to write, fudge their way through, and finally land in jobs which require writing that they are unable to do.

Your key ideas here are appropriate size, specific, and feasible.

• Appropriate size: Don’t propose firing all the English teachers in all the high schools in the USA and replacing them with teachers from England. Nobody would ever do that, and you can’t do a thorough job of explaining it in the space you have. Come up with a proposal that is actually a workable size.
• Specific: Do not be like politicians who often know nothing about education and give long-winded speeches about “tightening the standards” without really saying what they mean. Say something concrete. (An example of concretion is the State of Ohio requirement that a college freshman English course will assign a minimum of 20 pages of finished, edited writing per semester.)
• Feasible: I certainly doubt that you can get all high school kids to destroy their computers and phones and write everything by hand. Don’t assume some major breakthrough in brain-replacement technology; suggest something that real people in real classrooms could actually do.

The idea here is to craft a proposal which has a chance of working, with enough academically respectable research so you know what you are talking about and enough awareness of the world that you can deal with possible objections.

Danger point:

This paper is not about you! If you had a terrible experience in school, that could be—at the very most—a very minor part of the introduction. You are not writing an autobiography; you are writing a well-researched policy and action proposal to improve the quality of education.

Getting specific:

A proposal argument includes several specific steps:

1. An introduction which orients the reader to the issue you intend to discuss.
2. The introduction will include a thesis which is easily identifiable and makes an arguable claim which responds to the assignment.
3. There will be a thorough discussion of the problem you intend to solve.
4. You might wish to include other attempts to solve the problem which have so far proven to be insufficient.
5. The centerpiece of your paper will be your proposal to solve the problem. Be specific and concrete. Do not shoot from the hip—bring in expert testimony* that will help you prove the point that your idea is a good one.
6. You should make an attempt to deal with objections to your idea (costs too much, diverts students’ attention from more important things, requires too much from the teachers, etc.).
7. Your essay will end with a conclusion that wraps things up, reminds the reader what you were trying to do, and possibly suggests the next specific step needed.

*Expert testimony: Your paper will include at least four outside sources, cited MLA style. “Expert testimony” does not include your own personal experiences and feelings (or those of your roommate), comments by talk show hosts, or items from social media. I do not want to see Internet items titled “Three weird tricks to improve your writing instantly.”

Works Cited

McConn, Max. “What Is the College For?” A Preface to College Prose, edited by Charles Gott and John A. Behnke, Macmillan, 1935, pp. 3-21. Originally published as “College or Kindergarten?” in The New Republic, 1929.

O’Hayre, John. “A First Look at Gobbledygook.” 1966. 80 Readings, edited by David Munger, HarperCollins, 1992, pp. 43-48.

Thurber, James. “University Days.” The Thurber Carnival, Harper, 1945, pp. 221-28.

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by Ashland University.
Revised 12/29/23 • Page author: Curtis Allen • e-mail: callen@ashland.edu.