You are absolutely right about the conservative nature of essay writing at the tertiary level. The main reason is that university curriculum designers believe that good writing should follow the principles of great writers of the past. Differently stated, to present ideas, the novice writer is advised to make an imitative use of language, logic, and rhetorics. This belief is rooted in the Aristotelian Poetics and the works of Robert Louis Stevenson which have found their way into writing pedagogies of today especially in mentor text modelling. As Jiddu Krishnamurti states, " Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.” Therefore, your proposal for change is very insightful for revisiting the educational principles underlying university essay writing and modifying the related curricula .

I still have some doubts on how an essay writing can be differentiated from a text, a short story or an article. Only structure I could find on the net was intro-body1-body2-body3-conclusion, which basically the structure for any text. Is it about the academic intention of the text? In what a writing is an essay one?

Have a look at 19th century papers. They rarely reference. Freud hardly mentions anyone else, but that gives the false impression that all the knowledge he presents came solely from him/his ideas, his initiatives/which is false. Thereby, he admits himself that his essays look like short stories.Carlyle hardly ever pretends to be writing academic work, even though he effectively is, but seeks to entertain, providing literature as much as history.

I can't help but agree! Today students have to tie themselves into knots, trying to meet that boring "into-argument-contrargument-argument-conclusion" mantra in essay writing. This format doesn't allow creative geniuses to represent their ideas the way they want. Unless more innovative and diverse approach is encouraged, plagiarism and custom services like Bid4papers.com and others will flourish for students to meet the academia demand such as "no high grades - no diploma."

I tend to agree with you Lesley. And your point on Bid4 is valid, although when marking I can usually detect these things. Its not just in terms of format but content. Only certain things can be said and creativity seems to be penalised for the sake of a common standard, and excellence judged upon that common standard that often comes down to disguised replication.

It seems that surely this kind of approach produces and allows through authoritarian type personalities, which conversely means those that respond well to dogma, are obedient, unquestioningly law-abiding-obeying the rules and meeting norms?

I totally agree with you Stanley. More, I found very wicked, on the literature level, that some people consider scientific language & structure as a wall against poetry, let's say unexpected things. That's why it tends to be awfully boring and reserved to specialists readers. It's because I want knowledge universal and freely accessible to the vast majority that I refuse to use the "scientific language and structure", because it's an obvious sign of content poorness.

The quality of essay is subjective and even some of the author write it in subjective manner which is moreover fellings rather than facts . very few good quality of essay is available so facts based essay in the form of literature should be devloped independently .

Anjay, I agree. At university if I attempted to create literature, as well as keep to the conditions of the academic essay, I was penalised. The order of the day was long convoluted sentences, replete with clauses, that wound about picking up facts, in as tedious a fashion as possible, like a hoover, that is mechanically, plodding a course like a farmer, in the distant past, ploughing the ground for seeding.

(A convoluted sentence with subject clauses, verb clauses, and object clauses. A red line would have been put through the metaphors.) P.S When marking I do exactly the same.

in my creative writing university @Wesleyan, some peer reviewed a short story of mine as an "essay writing" but couldn't explain why. Thanks to Anjay, now I know: it was a short story based on real facts. Interesting.

The revival of essay writing is just around the corner.

New evaluation methods have to be tested out.

Of course, MC can be automated.

Despite the fact that, as Shakespeare said, the pen is mightier than the sword," the pen itself is not enough to make an effective writer. In fact, though we may all like to think of ourselves as the next Shakespeare, inspiration alone is not the key to effective essay writing. You see, the conventions of English essays are more formulaic than you might thin

Djaafar, Shakespeare would say that, but not the experience of millions.

Sorry, of course he meant transmission of ideas. But while I also agree with the formulaic necessity of even the best essays, when I trawl through the various online academic sites (actually less so RG) including the Lancet, the number of uninspired essays far outweighs inspired ones. Universities do not normally inspire innovative ideas.

It depends upon what you mean by conservative. Historical labels no longer wok. Conservative, liberal, etc. all mean different things today to different people. For instance, to me conservative means preserving what is best from the past so that you can use what we have learned to adjust to the present and to the future. I take liberal to mean keeping your options open. Therefore, these two ideas are not polar opposites. One can be a conservative and a liberal at the same time. The problem today is that people do not define their terms and so people assume that they mean the same thing as they define them.

A similar problem occurs with scholarship and criticism. A scholar is different than a critic although one can do both scholarship and criticism. The first deals primarily with facts, the second usually tries to develop theories, often without facts but ideal situations. For instance, Aristotle is not a scholar but a critic (at least as far as tragedy goes). His statement about what tragedy is does not fit either Aeschylos or Euripides and, as far as I'm concerned, misled people about what tragedy actually is. Aristotle's field of expertise was not drama or literature; it was biology. People forget that

You need to define your terms for your reader and establish the guidelines for your approach to whatever topic you choose. As long as your structure is coherent and you have facts that support your approach, that should be sufficient. And as I write this I realize that, if you do it as I propose, you probably will not get published. So, make sure that you know which venues will give you a chance, whatever your personal preference is.

Of course, Leonard, there are already different kinds of academic presentation. A maths paper fits an entirely different format to a history or literature paper, with the former placing emphasis on its calculations, not its writing. But with so much new means of communication now based on internet it seems the papers should be more open to including these ways of providing information, by that I don't mean utilising Wikipedia but, as recently in my case, BBC websites. Students should not be marked down for providing them-or for embedding an informative video from YouTube.

If I understand what you are saying, I do not disagree with using new means of communication for either research or expression, but you have to figure out a way to either create a new genre or cross-pollinate genres to effectively use this new material. You still need a definite structure. When I read things written today, I am astounded by how poorly organized they are. Most journalism tries to be dramatic and their stories have no logical process because they are trying to shock or surprise or create a suspense that is not really there. They have not found a genre for their new style of journalism. For the past few years I have been doing a running commentary on what has been happening politically. I wound up using the vaudeville skit form, a sort of comic but critical agitprop. It allows me to look at what is happening critically, dramatically and, even when judgmental, willing to explore what I disagree with to try to understand why such positions are taken and whether dialogue can be established. But there is a structure that allows me weave in and other of perspectives -- the dramatic form.

I have done close readings; my dissertation explored the use of schemes and tropes as organizational devices in Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature, and I encapsulated my thesis in a syllogism which took comments on invention, organization and "adornment" by classical rhetoricians to show that the ancients used schemes and tropes to organize and the practice follow past the Renaissance. But the practice was a given and rarely expressed as what people did. They wre just trained to do it by imitating older works. What I did was taken close readings as I did with my dissertation and put them into a dialogue form (think of the comic Socratic dialogues of Plato, which you have to read in the Greek in order to realize exactly how funny they are. Then I took the agitprop theatre of Blitzstein and crossed it with Aristophanes and voila, I had a new way to analyze political discourse and argumentation. But, as I say, you need to develop a form to translate your ideas into an effective perspective.

I hope this made sense.

Leonard, it did and does.

When teaching health and social care I was sent an essay with videos embedded, etc, and I gave it a very high mark as the videos gave additional information to the text. The essay through the use of these methods gave expression to further ideas and understanding. It was written by a care worker for 15 years experience.

In my most recent essay posted here, I referenced considerably BBC programmes on Ancient and Anglo-Saxon Britain as these were the outstanding sources.

This is not as ambitious as your attempts, but all grit to you!

Essay writing is more liberal than conservative, at least in American schools ,in my opinion. That is because of a socially engineered bias that has been created to counter past -isms(racism, sexism, mysognism, privilegism, humanism, theism, and all the other -isms that make for convenient excuses to sweep our differences under a rug to conceal reality and promote idealism of the biased sort.

Kenneth, I think in many ways you are right but I also feel the problems you correctly analyse are equally the symptoms of change, economic, demographic, etc, and should be allowed to happen/just keep pointing out flaws.

Following

regards

I believe that essay grading is too conservative, but not essay writing. Graders do not like to think outside of the box, are hesitant to accept writings that are not completed in the traditional format, and desire to have easy grading, in my opinion. However, some of the best writings have come from people willing to test the edges, challenge the norms, and be willing to confront lazy educators.

Trouble is, Kenneth, if you challenge them they can and will mark you down.