Write To The Point

By David Ruenzel

In 1988, as a teacher of English, I would sometimes stand at the blackboard drawing funnels, into which my students were to pour words and ideas, like coins into the tin cones at toll-road stops. Downward the words would jiggle and jangle, chasing after one another in descending spirals, finally catching themselves and their meaning at the funnel's tapered end. This meaning, I told the students--we called it the thesis statement--should have weight, gravitational pull, its import sinking into the essay's murkiest depths.

If you're over 30 and have taken high school composition, you probably know what I'm talking about--you've seen the funnel and have poured your own words and ideas into it. Maybe you were a 9th grader assigned a topic, on pets, say, and spilled out an opening generalization such as, "Dogs make better pets than cats.'' Maybe, as your thought narrowed downward, you tumbled out something like, "Dogs, people-loving as they are, make good companions.'' Then, for your thesis statement, maybe you strung the ideas and words together into something like, "Dogs make better friends than independent-minded cats and hence make much better family pets.''

In subsequent years, you may have poured your thoughts about Hamlet or the causes of the Great Depression into the funnel, but the funnel itself never much changed, though if you liked writing and were a bit of a rebel, you may have tried turning it on its head so that it became a megaphone through which you could blare your frustrations. But by and large, you gave in, for your teacher presented the funnel as an eternal verity. Besides, you were graded upon your allegiance to it. Your teacher may have even transposed that funnel over your paper, and if your words did not fill out that shape, if your thesis statement did not settle in at the bottom, your paper was most...