Heavy Petting

My job is to teach college students how to write essays better. You may have taken a course that offered a similar goal in different words. Most likely it was a required course.

An good essay is an exercise in persuasion, not necessarily an exercise in rational inquiry or reasoning. (Teaching logic is perfunctory in most essay writing classes, as far as I know.) A peculiarity of learning how to write essays is that students are taught with the same methods of persuasion that they learn to repeat.

You should understand that there is no set of verifiable principles that guides this course; in other words, it's not a scientific course. Instead, the people who will teach this course start by training for several years, writing their own essays, to gain consent from an established group of so-called expert essay writers who say "you've written enough essays; now go teach the practice."

Here's an example: in Sandro's class, Sandro persuades his students to believe that certain essay-writing practices are the most--if not the only--effective essay writing practices. Where did Sandro learn those practices? Not from some set of standardized, reproducible practices, but by his own instructors who persuaded him; who in turn were persuaded.

When one tries to trace back the origin of the so-called knowledge that has floated down the river of persuasion, it's impossible to find that knowledge's origin in fact, if there even is one. The knowledge doesn't originate in fact; it just originates from the desires to persuade students certain things. These desires can be considered almost universal, and they change very slowly over time, but they're still desires, not science.

To say that science (if the complicated set of practices can be given that simple one-word name) is the opposite of persuasion is not as solid of an analogy as one might think. After all, humans created science, and despite the very "nature" of its infallibility built into its very functioning, science could be considered just another effective device of persuasion.

* * *

I put on a documentary about advertising for my students. One of the main messages from the movie, and this past unit, that I stressed is that advertising is duplicitous in that it promises the reward of a life of pleasure in exchange for the purchase of a product. The truth is that there is no pleasure. A person buys the product, experiences a narrow fraction of that pleasure, and learns only to buy more products in an even greater search for pleasure. Consuming the message of advertising just leads to more consumption; or, "advertising advertises advertising," as McLuhan said.

Couldn't one say the same of essay writing? Isn't it just an endless cycle of persuasion by just creating more situations that need persuasion? More nit-picky little moments that one can single out and write about because he or she needs to pass the class?

I need to better appreciate my fellow advertisers.