C. Balance and Proportion

          If you think about it, the principles of balance and
proportion are self-evident: Points of approximately equal importance should receive approximately equal development; important points should be developed at greater length than less important points.

          But since student writing is so often an act of desperation undertaken at the last minute, such obvious principles often get overlooked.  I have read essays where the student will get distracted and go on for several paragraphs about a peripheral detail that should have been tossed off in one sentence, or papers that spend several pages on one point, and then mention a point of equal significance only in one short paragraph at the end of the essay, because the student has run out of space (and usually out of time).  I am reminded of the sight gag



      
     
          Of course, the relative "importance" of a point is defined by the essay's purpose.  Take, for example, this entire article on development.  How did I decide that this section on balance and proportion should be developed so much less (504 words) than the section on discovery (2,287 words), and that the section on completeness (1,347 words) needed more development than balance and proportion, but much less than discovery?

          Well, my article's purpose is to explain things that my reader probably does not already know.  When I explain what is meant by balance and proportion, almost everyone understands the point immediately, and I don't really need to do much else to clarify it. 

          But the points I am making in the section on discovery are far less familiar to most readers, so they had to be explained more carefully, and I needed to offer illustrative examples.  The idea of completeness is more familiar and easier to grasp than that of discovery, but less so than that of balance and proportion.  The different lengths of these three sections reflect their relative difficulty for the reader, and in an explanatory article like this, relative difficulty is a large part of what determines a point's "importance" to the article's purpose.

          Student writing sometimes neglects the principles of balance and proportion simply because many students are reluctant to go back and reread their paper once they have finally gotten to the last page.  They don't want anything more to do with the darned thing.  Above all, they are reluctant to make any changes, for fear of being stuck in a quagmire and never getting free. 

          But if they actually read their essays and thought about what might be needed to improve them, most students would immediately recognize any serious lapses in balance and proportion, because such lapses are so glaringly obvious.

          One of the things I am always trying to do when teaching essay-writing techniques is to bring the process and its product to the level of consciousness for my students.  Almost every semester in English 101, students tell me that the principles of balance and proportion make such good sense that they don't understand why these concepts have never occurred to them before.
















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Grading Standard:  In general, the development of an essay should have these attributes.  It should be
concrete, specific, and detailed.  It should also be "complete," in the sense that an intelligent reader will come away from the essay feeling that the topic has been adequately developed, that none of the essential aspects of the topic have been ignored and none of the implied questions raised by the author have gone unanswered.  The development of the essay should also have balance and proportion.  Lapses in any of these aspects of development should have an effect on the grade an essay earns.
PLAN AHEAD