It's All in the Details

I was cleaning out my office at the end of the fall semester and came across a stack of final essays from my Development Writing students from a couple of years ago. We're obligated to keep graded work for at least one year after the end of a term just in case a student wants to come by and pick up work or in case there's a grade appeal and you need to supply additional evidence that the student didn't initially have access to. 

Developmental Writing essays are typically short, so I took a few minutes to read through them again before putting them in the recycling bin. The assignment was a simple one: the student had to evaluate a product or a place or some example of entertainment (a TV show, a movie, a song, etc.). As I told them on the assignment sheet, the key would be the details that they gave to support their assertions about the quality of what they chose to evaluate. Below are some examples of the details that they gave.

• "I have had many great moments there." (None of those great moments were described or mentioned.

• "My overall evaluation of this place is that it is a good park that has many cool features." (None of the park's particular features were listed or included.)

• "X is a medium sized restaurant where there are plenty of tables inside and a couple of tables outside for you to sit and eat. When you go inside they greet you by saying 'Welcome to X.' Once you order your sandwich you can see how they make it. You don’t have to get up and get your sandwich they will bring it to you." (I'm not sure that any of this is particularly unique in restaurants. Aren't these details common to lots of different restaurants?)

• "It’s mostly good." (How can I possibly not know what is meant by this assessment? It just says it all, doesn't it?)

• "There is mostly bad things about X but they are small things." (Those small things are never mentioned, just alluded to here. The writer only stuck to the good things.)

• "It’s mostly good, but there’s bad." (I did tell them that nothing is all good or all bad, and I suggested that they try to look at both the positive and the negative. I guess the student gave me what I asked for.)

• "They also have a numerous amount of drinks such as root beer, strawberry lemonade, ginger ale and peach tea just to name a few, to spice things up for the grown and sexy they have a fully equipped bar with a selection of hundreds of alcoholic beverages to choose from." (I'm dying to know what it means to be both "grown and sexy." I think I've been one or the other at times, but never both at once, so I don't think I can order from the bar in this place.)

One of the traits of developing writers that I most admire is their naivete at how others don't know what's inside their heads. They assume that most people have very similar experiences or backgrounds, so they don't explain what they think should be apparent to everyone else. It's one of the toughest jobs as a writing teacher to convince students that I and other readers don't actually know what they were thinking when they wrote down something, that I really do need more information, more details in order to understand.

It's one of the highlights for me as a teacher when students grow and improve in their use of details and examples, when they fully develop their ideas because they are truly considering that someone else is going to read what they've written. Don't take my sharing of these examples as anything more than my recognition that sometimes I do fail at achieving this goal.