B. Completeness: Inherent Questions
and Broken Promises
Obviously you can never say all there is to say about a topic, even a carefully narrowed and focused one. But a good essay does not leave any essential aspects of its topic uncovered. That's one reason why it is so important to limit your topic. If your topic is too broad for the assigned length of your essay, either you will have to leave out important aspects of the topic, or you will have to develop them inadequately. All topics raise what I call inherent questions. These are the questions that are automatically raised in the mind of a reasonably thoughtful reader by the topic under discussion. Which of those inherent questions the writer must address will depend on how he has defined his approach to the topic in his purpose statement.Here are the most obvious questions raised by this topic:1. Why don't most students take time off between high school and college?2. In general, how many students do take time off?3. What is the difference between those who do and those who don't?--i.e., what kinds of factors allow (or force) some students but not others to take that time off?4. What happens to the students that take time off? a. Do they go to college eventually? b. How long do they usually take off before they start college? c. What do they do with the time they are not in school? d. How do these non-school activities affect them, both as people and as students? e. Do they tend to do better in school when they finally do go to college? f. If so, how does that time off figure into their success as students? 5. If a student takes time off, what should he do (and perhaps what should he not do) with that time? 6. What are the advantages to taking time off before college? 7. What are the disadvantages? Since Brian's thesis statement focuses his approach on the advantages of taking time off between high school and college and on some of the beneficial ways a young person could spend that time, most of these other questions are not a necessary part of his approach, though some do figure peripherally into his discussion of the issue. For example, he sets up the idea of the advantages of time off before college by pointing out first some of the disadvantages of not taking that time off.He also touches on some of the factors that influence a student's freedom to make that choice when he describes the difference between his own parents' rejection of the idea and the support his friend's parents offered when that friend decided to drop out of college for a while.He even deals to some degree with the question of whether students who don't go straight to college eventually do end up seeking a college degree, and he discusses the positive influence time out of school can have on the student's performance when he finally does decide to go to college.The other questions on the list could be dealt with in a longer essay, but given the limits established for the assignment (700-1000 words), they had to be left out because they were not close enough to the focus of his approach. On the other hand, if he were to leave out the question of what students do or can do with the time they take off from college, then there would be a serious gap in the development of the essay, since that is an obvious aspect of the idea that there are advantages to not going straight from high school to college. But we don't feel that sense of incompleteness from his having left out the question of how many students take time off before going to college. Such background detail might be interesting, but it is clearly not essential to our understanding of the aspect of the topic he has chosen to focus on.Similarly, in Sarah's essay, it is obvious that she has to define euthanasia and to distinguish between euthanasia and the way her grandfather died. To fail to do so would leave us feeling that something essential had been left out of her discussion of the topic.Sometimes the incompleteness of development in an essay is even more apparent than this. If a writer says that there are three parts of something and then deals with only two, the reader will feel that the writer has made explicit promises that he has not delivered on. An inexperienced writer, or a careless one, might not even realize that he is making promises to his reader, including the implicit promise to deal with the questions inherent in his topic and in his approach to that topic. But the way the writer phrases his introduction, especially the part that contains his purpose statement, is a sort of implied contract, saying in essence, "Read my essay and I will tell you everything essential to this topic as I have defined it." A large part of the success of an essay rests on whether the reader feels the writer has fulfilled the contract implied in his introduction.Sometimes the questions raised by the writer are of the sort that he might not even recognize as questions, because it is information that he is so familiar with himself. In fact, writers often fail to meet their readers' needs simply because they are not thinking in terms of the reader at all. A student in my English 101 class several years ago wrote about how he had tried college right out of high school but dropped out halfway through his first semester. He bummed around for awhile, and then he rented a house out in the country, where he had to learn to become self-sufficient in a way he had never been before. Then he went to work for a concrete company, where he made pretty good money and was able to save a little. And then one day at work, he suddenly realized he was ready to go back to college.The writer's style was fluent and effective. His story was interesting and fulfilled the terms of the assignment (Write about something you have learned that has significantly influenced you.). Nevertheless, the essay was seriously flawed because the writer left out the answers to questions implicitly raised by his narrative. He never told us his age at any of the key points in his personal odyssey, and he never told us how long he spent at any stage. Nor did he tell us what prompted his sudden revelation that he was ready to return to college, or whether in coming back he had a specific goal or major in mind, or was just looking for intellectual stimulation.When I asked him about these things, he admitted it had not even occurred to him that his reader might want or need that information. But after thinking about it, he acknowledged that if he were reading someone else's story, he would most certainly want that sort of information.Probably one reason why he didn't think to include that information was that he already knew it himself. A lot of writers, especially student writers, are unintentionally self-absorbed this way. They don't make the imaginative leap to put themselves into their reader's mind, so they forget that the reader doesn't have all the same information the writer has, but only the information the writer provides. It is as if the student is writing a journal entry, for his eyes only, rather than an essay to be read by strangers. Almost any writer can improve the completeness of his essay's development by improving his own audience awareness--that is, by asking himself both what his reader needs to know, and what his reader would want to know, even if he could get by without knowing it. ________________
