Paragraph Design

Over the past year or so, I've been involved in a redesign of my church's website. About three months ago, we added a professional web designer to the design team. I know, this sounds like an obvious move that was made too late in the process.

My church has an ethos of activating the talents of those in the community, so we were working with the graphic designers, writers, and programmers that we had. All of us are good at what we do, even getting paid to do that work in other contexts, but we'd never done work quite like this site redesign before.

When the professional web designer moved to Tucson and joined our church, he acted as a catalyst. His expertise plus some deadlines on the part of our resident programmer (who is in grad school at the UofA) zoomed us along. The site is now foundationally complete, and we're taking it live this week.

One point in the design process made me think specifically about the role of the professional designer who has an eye for each element in the design and how that connects to what I do in teaching writing. It all had to do with capital letters.

The design used headers on each page in all-caps. When we received the code for the design and began implementing each piece, I suggested changing those to title casing (That Means Like This) instead. In my world, the world of words on paper, THIS LOOKS LIKE YOU ARE YELLING AT SOMEONE, and I didn't want that, so we switched THIS to This. I didn't think anything of it once we did so and went on to other updates.

When the pro jumped back into the conversation, he explained why THIS should remain as THIS and not switch to This. Basically, his argument boiled down to viewing the header as a design element: not a word in itself, but a "readable shape" that tells people where they are in the hierarchy of information without them even needing to read the word. That means, before they read THEOLOGY, they see a readable rectangle at the top of the page that orients them to be able to easily understand the info.

I know, it may not seem like a big deal, all-caps or not, but I saw the function in action. After the pro explained the purpose of uppercasing the headers, I went back to look at the site. He was right. The title casing headers blended right into the other text on the page (now that we had more text on the pages, it was easier to see). There was no direction from the design, no nail to hang the picture on, I suppose.

I told him that I understood what he meant and we switched the headers back to all-caps. I didn't elaborate on my understanding all that much because we had other work to do, but I saw his perspective, his world of elements of design. Each piece played a part in directing users to receive info in some way or another. The choices he made were not shots in the dark. He knew why they were there.

I related this perspective back to my world of words on paper, and came up with this: paragraph design. Students need to know more about this. I've had a theory for awhile that teaching students how to construct paragraphs is a tipping point* in their writing education, and now I think they may need to think more about how to design and paragraph than construct one.

The switch from construct to design is more about how they view the elements**. Instead of constructing with concrete building blocks that are difficult or nearly impossible to change after they are in place, they are working with more fluid design elements that can always be assessed terms of playing their part in communication.



In a Writing 100 class once, I played the intro from Stranger Than Fiction to show the students how the graphic interface represents how this particular man views his world. Then I showed them an academic essay with Points highlighted in pinks, Illustration highlighted in yellow, and Explanation highlighted in green to show them how their teachers view their essays. I wanted them to see that their instructors had a particular way of viewing their writing. As Harold Crick's calculations showed up in his head as he moved about his world, certain pieces of their essays stood out in certain ways when their teachers saw their essays.

This was the first foray into exploring the design of a paper, but I didn't know it was exploring the design. This is something I'm going to keep exploring. I think it's important to not only look at what we are teaching, as in certain concepts that always come up in our courses, but to look at how we are enabling students to work with those concepts. I want a student to not only know that their paragraph needs to begin with a claim***, but how to choose the words to make that first sentence an effective claim. To design that sentence to play its part in what the paragraph is communicating. When students start to do that, they will think about what needs to be in that sentence so others can understand the paragraph instead of just trying to write a good sentence that makes sense to them.

I don't know where this is going to go, but that's often where I have the most fun with ideas.

*I take this term from Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book about trends and use it in a sense that when they understand how to construct a paragraph properly and it's place within the context of an entire academic essay, they will go from being unable to write an academic essay to being able to write an academic essay. It's not quite his usage, but I mean that they tip from No to Yes.

**I also think there may be some cultural capital, some element of uplifting the student from "student writer who thinks they are terrible at writing" to a fresh role as a designer. Designers are cool. Designers get movies made about them. Writers are communicators, and the kind of writing we ask students writers to produce requires that they take on the role of the expert. Many of them don't feel like experts, so their writing reflects the shyness or weakness they are operating out of. Anything we can do as educators to change that is worth their time.

***I used Point, Illustration, and Explanation earlier, but those are often referred to as Claim, Evidence, and Explanation on my campus. Either way works for me.

It's Not Me, It's You

One of the teachers here at Desert Vista assigns a persuasive letter as her third essay in Writing 100 every semester. This semester's crop of essay topics has been the best I've seen. Instead of students trying to get the State of Arizona to completely overhaul their education system or convincing the government to change laws, these students picked accomplishable goals: Dad, stop smoking; downstairs neighbors, stop filing all those complaints; suitor, look elsewhere for romantic involvement; teacher, amend your assignments; etc.

These are manageable requests, and working with these students has generally centered on two ideas:

1. Me, Me, Me
The students know what they want. Knowing what they want is the first hurdle they overcome. And the first obstacle they face. It's what the student wants, so their rhetoric focuses on how this change will meet their needs. They pretty much stop right there. They don't realize that while the request they make originates in a need they have, the action will take place on the other side of the fence, so they need to go over there and see it from that person's perspective.

2. You, You, You
What they need to do is think about who they are persuading and what their idea involves for that person.

Instead of presenting tons of medical information to get your father to stop smoking, think about why your father smokes in the first place. What if he doesn't care so much about his health, but cares more about appearing manly because he started smoking on a ranch as a preteen because his father let him? Data about lung cancer may not hit the bullseye.

Instead of asking your neighbors one floor down to "put yourselves in my shoes," you need to slip into theirs. They complain about the noise your two-year-old makes at ten o'clock at night because they want to go to bed. If you want them to stop filing complaints, explain your situation (why is that kid up at 10:00pm?), explain what you'll do to try and be quieter, and maybe go so far as to invite them up for a meal so they will think about how wonderful you and your family are instead of curse you and call the apartment office the next time they hear stomp stomp stomp when they are trying to fall sleep.

Instead of pointing out how much of an idiot he is, lay out the differences between what you want and what the guy who keeps asking you out wants in a relationship. Be objective. Sure, he wants to be a drug dealer and you think basing your life on illegal crime is a bad idea, but he's not going to change if you tell him he's stupid. Take the emotion away for a bit and present your case rationally. You want security. Comfort. Not men with guns. Maybe he'll see that getting a real job isn't so bad, especially if he wants to date a girl.

Instead of asking your teacher to rework her entire semester's worth of assignments to exclude personal details, think about why she set it up that way (hint: you already know yourself and don't have to do research in a non-research class) and how much work would be involved in crafting an entirely new class. Then think beyond your desire to not talk about your bad memories and examine why focusing on other things might help more people learn to write. Oh, and give her some ideas about what you would be willing to write about. You don't want to appear "like [you] don't want to participate." Help her out and think about what she's trying to accomplish: getting you to write essays without sinking you into deep research.


These are interesting conversations. The students don't realize they are focusing solely on their own needs. Or they don't realize they are using broad arguments that don't necessarily apply to their audience. Bringing it up changes their papers from a general repetition of their basic premise to specific thoughts aimed at actually getting something done.

First of All,

Yesterday, a student who had no idea what she was going to write about was worried about her introduction. Today, I asked a student who needs to revise a paper what she plans to do; she said, "First of all, I need to make it longer."

No. First of all, both of them need to figure out what they are saying. It's like they are planning trips without deciding where they are going. Actually, in the second student's case, she took the trip with only a vague idea of where she was going, didn't really map out her route, and didn't remember her trip well enough to make it worth her while.

For the first student, the one who worried about her introduction: Her teacher was standing with us. I asked the student which one, her teacher or me, she could introduce better. She said her teacher. All she could do for me, since she just met me, was remember my name and my job. Not an absolute failure of an intro, but not a thorough one, either. I told her she shouldn't worry about introducing something she doesn't know well. She should figure out what she has to say (she was leaning toward arguing something about coaching methods for children, about keeping it about teamwork and the like instead of becoming a raging lunatic who only cares about winning and forgets that the kids are more interesting in the orange slices after the game) before she tries to write her intro. I told her to write her introduction last if she wanted. She seemed calmer and more willing to explore an idea instead of stressed about completing a paper.

For the second student, the one who wanted to first of all make it longer: longer about nothing is worth nothing, so first of all, we talked about her core idea. Second of all, we broke down what she meant and where she could take that idea in terms of smaller ideas (paragraphs!). Later, as she was working, I asked her about one of her statements. She spat out a general "explanation" in a tone that said You Know, Or At Least You Should Know Because I Know. We talked about her job as the writer--the expert--to give us the details, about how we don't know what she knows, and about how that is where the length of papers can come from, in the provision of clear, meaningful details that help people know what they didn't know.

And All of This Comes Down to This One Thing

"If a piece of autobiographical writing is an essay, it has already moved beyond private confession or memoir to some shareable idea, for which the personal experience works as evidence."
-Gordon Harvey, "Presence in the Essay"

This, the shareable idea, is what I think a thesis really is. I've seen a lot of students struggle with thesis (both on the idea level and the word level; it's a terribly intimidating academic word that is simply not fun to say or hear if you have not been warmly introduced to it at some early part of your life), but I think this could clear some of that confusion up.

I switched to using the word purpose during my summer session class, and that helped. I think the phrase shareable idea tacked onto purpose would be even more benefitial because it not only speaks to the thing (the idea) but it has purpose and audience embedded in its language (shareable, as in something intended to be given or taught to other people).

Also, the concept of the shareable idea makes sense to me because that is why Writing classes exist, isn't it? To help people share ideas better? I know argument is an important word, along with debate, but those seem to set up hesaidshesaid or meversusyou situations before students even get into the idea we ask them to birth and nurture and send out into the wide, wide world. The shareable idea could be a response to a poem or a story. It could be a proposal to fix potholes or stop smoking. It could relate lessons learned from prison time or landscaping jobs. It can be anything that formed in one head and grew into something transferrable to another.

Can we simply share ideas intelligently and objectively?