A Machine Made of Words

Something I tell my students when I teach writing is that they should think of an essay as a machine made of words whose purpose is to change the reader's mind. The change doesn't need to be dramatic, I tell them. Sure, a good essay can make a person completely rethink their position on a subject, but it can also make people look at the world from a new perspective.

One of the ways writers construct their machines is by scavenging words and ideas from other sources. Granted, they need to let their readers know where they got the material they scavenged, but the basic premise is that writers take a little bit of information from one place and a little from another (and another and another), use their own ideas and ingenuity to analyze the material they've gathered, and assemble it all into a coherent whole.

A benefit of approaching writing -- especially essay writing -- in this fashion is that it helps students to understand that while a thesis statement usually appears in the opening paragraph (or paragraphs) of an essay, it isn't where writing the essay begins. Rather, writing the essay begins with the scavenging of parts, or what we in the teaching business would call research. Once a writer has enough parts, then it's time to figure out how they all work together to form a particular kind of machine with a particular purpose. That purpose is the essay's thesis.

Essentially, what I'm telling my students is that they need to work backwards to form a thesis, but I'm also teaching them that one of the best ways to learn is to constantly gather information and piece it together in ways that might create new and interesting word machines -- all the while imagining a single, giant mega machine that encompasses all of the material that they've gathered over the course of a lifetime of learning. That this mega machine is constantly growing -- and, therefore, changing -- ideally suggests to students that it's okay, and perhaps natural, for them to change their minds in ways big and small about the world around them.

And that they never stop learning.