We are trying to imagine an undergraduate economics student writing an essay to argue that

 the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.

Notice that an economics professor could just as easily believe this and might also write an essay on the subject. We could require both writers to confine themselves to five paragraphs. The professor might find the task easier, and might even do a better of job of it, but it’s a sensible one for both writers. It’s possible to do it well or badly. Doing it well requires the acquisition of a valuable skill.

The five-paragraph essay form demands that we come up with three arguments for our overall conclusion. In my last post, I suggested the following

• In the 1930s, the Fed followed a deliberately deflationary policy.
• As part of this policy, the Fed let the Bank of United States fail in 1931.
• The failure of the Bank of United States precipitated a general collapse of the banking sector.

I’m not entirely confident that I’m right about these three points and whatever debates economists have on this question would probably turn on them, but there can be no doubt that the line of argument is clear. If I can show that these three claims are true, I have made a case for blaming the Great Depression on the Fed’s monetary policy. There are a couple of implicit book-ends, namely, that deflation is the result of monetary policy and that the collapse of the banking sector turned a recession into a depression, and I can make these explicit in my conclusion. What I want to stress here is that each claim can be supported, elaborated or defended in at least six sentences and less than two-hundred words, and these paragraphs, in turn, can be more or less competently written. We could give a student any one of these sentences and ask them to write the corresponding paragraph. This would be a meaningful test, both of their knowledge and of their style.

Notice that the rhetorical posture of each paragraph may be different. The first paragraph may merely detail (i.e., elaborate on) the policy of the Fed, clarifying the sense in which it was deflationary. The writer may assume that it is neither hard to believe nor hard to agree with but that the reader wants to know more. The second paragraph, however, may be written with a reader who needs evidence in mind. Either it’s hard to believe that the Fed would let a bank fail at such a time, or it could be hard to believe that letting a bank fail had anything to do with a monetary policy. The third paragraph, finally, could be be written for reader who has already decided that the failure of the Bank of United States was not as pivotal as the writer thinks. Perhaps the objections to this notion are well-known. The paragraph will then engage with and counter them, perhaps only to let the disagreement stand without it affecting the overall point about the Great Depression.

In his masterful little book How to Draw Hands, Oliver Senior reminds us that “the better drawing is not the more elaborate attempt to reproduce the visual appearance of its subject, but that which is better informed.” This will also be true of these paragraphs. Competence will be revealed in the way the student selects, from the abundance of information that is available to us about the subject, those details that most efficiently establish the claim within the overall line of argument. As I’ve been saying in these posts, it puzzles me how often teachers appear not to see the point of getting students to develop and demonstrate this competence. It seems obviously worthwhile to me.

Yesterday, I promised to write two versions of an introductory paragraph for a five-paragraph essay about the Great Depression. In both cases, my task has been defined by a key sentence that can be stated as follows:

In this essay, I will argue that the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.

Notice that this sentence is not about the Great Depression but about my essay. The paragraph, then, will not defend my thesis as such. Rather, it will elaborate on what I’m going to do in the essay; it will give meaning to the act of writing–and, therefore, reading–such an essay. It will explain what I’m going to say and why I have chosen to say it. It will both outline and motivate my essay.

As I said yesterday, these tasks can be given to separate paragraphs in a longer essay, but here we are looking at a one-paragraph introduction. In the second version, I should say, we will make those tasks less explicit, indeed, leave them almost entirely implicit, and the paragraph will seem to be about the causes of the Great Depression themselves. Only I (and the very careful reader) will know that it’s really about the essay itself, that it is an introduction.

(A quick disclaimer on the content: I’m not an economist or a historian so I’m not claiming that my characterizations of Keynesians and Austrians are correct nor that my thesis is true.)

The Great Depression of the 1930s was a period of enormous economic hardship. Economists have therefore long tried to understand its causes and develop strategies to avoid similar calamities in the future. Keynesians have argued that the Great Depression was the result of failures of the markets to correct themselves, suggesting that government must take an active role in the management of the economy. Austrians, by contrast, have argued that the downturn was the result of government policies that prevented the markets from functioning properly. In this essay, I will argue that the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.  In the 1930s, I will show, the Fed followed a deliberately deflationary policy, leaving banks without means to respond to runs on their deposits. This famously led to the failure of the Bank of United States in 1931, and this, in turn, precipitated a general collapse of the banking sector. Like Milton Friedman, I conclude that the role of the state in avoiding economic depressions is to manage the money supply. It is to ensure that there is enough cash in the system to turn the wheel of circulation.

There are some who don’t like any self-referential “signposting”, and would prefer just to get to the point. This is sometimes called “classic style” and is worth trying every now and then. Notice that it leaves my opinions, arguments and beliefs out of it, presenting them instead by way of statements of fact. That I believe these things is to go without saying. And notice that, instead of presenting a debate and taking a side, it just reminds the reader of the received view and presumes that challenging generally held beliefs is worthy of an essay (it is).

It is generally believed that the Great Depression of the 1930s was the result of failures of the markets to correct themselves. To avoid similar calamities in the future, it is argued, government must take an active role in the management of the economy, stimulating demand by spending on public works. But this view is wrong. As Milton Friedman showed, the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.  In the 1930s, the Fed followed a deliberately deflationary policy, leaving banks without means to respond to runs on their deposits. This famously led to the failure of the Bank of United States in 1931, and this, in turn, precipitated a general collapse of the banking sector. The role state in avoiding economic depressions, then, is best understood as one of managing the money supply, ensuring that there is enough cash in the system to turn the wheel of circulation.

Both of these paragraphs can set up the same four paragraphs to follow, i.e., paragraphs 2-5 of the five-paragraph essay. Paragraph 2 will describe the Fed’s deflationary policy; 3 will recount the failure of the Bank of United States; and 4 will discuss the general collapse of banking. Finally, paragraph 5 will bring it all together by emphasizing the role of the state in managing the money supply.

As introductions, these are still works in progress. I should return to paragraph 1 and rewrite it when I have the rest done. We’ll see how it goes. Comments and criticisms are more than welcome, either on particular rhetorical choices or on the form of the five-paragraph essay in general, which I’m trying to defend by way of example here. Let’s not argue about Friedman, though. I’m an amateur on that score.

Suppose you are teaching a class in macroeconomics. You’ve decided you want the students to understand the differences between Keynesians and Austrians by looking at how these two schools approach the Great Depression and the 2008 Financial Crisis. Though it’s a simplification, you are trying to teach them how to make up their minds about the truth or falsity of simple propositions like this:

• The Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.
• The Financial Crisis was caused by the deregulation of the financial sector.

If you’re an economist, you can probably come up with better propositions. But notice that if these propositions are false, then the following are true:

• The Great Depression was not caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.
• The Financial Crisis was not caused by the deregulation of the financial sector.

Or you might say that it’s not as simple as that. Faced with the first two propositions, your response might be to say

• The Great Depression was not caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve alone.
• The deregulation of the financial sector was not the sole cause of the Financial Crisis.

Knowing something about economics means understanding these propositions well enough to form an opinion about their truth. This is why I say that being “knowledgeable” means having the ability to make up your mind about something. That is the ability you are trying to help your students develop. It’s an ability that you, as their economics teacher, presumably have. Indeed, I would encourage you not to teach material to students that you are not able to make up your own mind about. In whatever subject you propose to instruct them, they should be in the presence of a master.

It should be obvious that, in the scenario I’m imagining, you would assign the students readings by Keynesians and Austrians and, perhaps, some neutral or “secondary” literature that merely summarizes their disputes. No matter where you are in the syllabus, however, no matter how much reading they’ve been asked to do, you can ask them to “make up their minds”. You can, in principle, ask them to do this based on their background knowledge  on the first day of class (perhaps this is a graduate level course and you’re expecting them to know something about these topics already). And you can then tell them to write you a five paragraph essay of no more than 1000 words that states their position. The essay question might read, simply,

• “The Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.” Discuss.

Many students and teachers these days are likely to roll their eyes at this task. I understand why students don’t like to be put on the spot like this, but I don’t see why teachers can’t see the value of doing it — indeed, of doing it often. This is the most natural and ordinary sort of task to assign students of any subject: articulate a claim about which there is (or merely has been) some discussion within the discipline and ask the students to engage in that discussion, to demonstrate an awareness of what is at stake and then to state their own view on the matter. Within any discipline, after all, there are countless issues on which it is reasonable to demand that scholars take a position. (A macroeconomist who has no position on the causes of the Great Depression isn’t much of one, I would think. Or maybe the field is more specialized these days than I think?)

As I said yesterday, I want to defend not just the idea of holding ordinary opinions within a discipline but writing ordinary prose about them. My essay assignment here would require them to motivate the need to take a position and take one themselves (§1), come up with three reasons for the position they’ve taken (§§2-4), and indicate the broader consequences of the view they have defended (§5). Let me conclude this post by looking at the first of these tasks, which will correspond to writing the first paragraph of the five-paragraph essay.

Suppose the student has decided, on the advice of Milton Friedman perhaps, that the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve. I would recommend, then, that they articulate their key sentence provisionally as “I will here argue that the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.” In a longer essay, this might appear as the first sentence of the third paragraph, but in a five-paragraph essay I would recommend placing it roughly in the middle of the first paragraph. (For those who are already irritated by the “non-classical” self-referential “signposting” of “I will here argue…”, I’m going to offer an alternative at the the end.) The first half the paragraph will then lead up to it with one or two sentences about the Great Depression itself and another one or two about the search for causes by economists. The second half (after the key sentence asserts your major thesis) will detail the thesis in three smaller points (that add up to the major thesis) and perhaps indicate, in a single sentence, the importance of understanding monetary policy to be the cause. In any case, the paragraph will consist of at least six sentences (2-4 before the key sentence, and 2-4 afterwards) and at most 200 words.

If you don’t like the phrase “I will here argue” (or worse, “In this essay, I will show that…”), I sympathize. It violates what Thomas and Turner call “classic style”. I think it is acceptable in novice writing, and certainly in longer articles in the social sciences, but it’s true that doing without it often produces a better text, a stronger style. In this case, I would recommend trying to rewrite the paragraph so that the key sentence in the middle now becomes simply “But the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.” Notice how much that “but” requires of the preceding three or four sentences. They must create a space in which our assertion about the Fed can establish an interesting rhetorical tension. Tomorrow I’ll construct examples of these two ways of writing the first paragraph.

Here at Inframethodology, “writing a paragraph” has a very specific meaning, namely, spending 18 or 27 minutes composing at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words that say one thing you knew the day before. Not only should you have had the relevant knowledge, you should have known that you would be writing about it, at this very moment, the day before.  I am aware that paragraphs are sometimes brought about in other ways, but I am hesitant to describe these approaches as “paragraph writing”. On my approach, every time you write a paragraph–I mean really set out to write one–you are doing it in way that will not only produce a unit of scholarly writing but make you better at making such things. You are deliberately trying to support, elaborate or defend something you know in prose. This awareness will hone your craft.

Back in November I wrote a defense of the five-paragraph essay. This morning I want to say a little more about the value of conventional classroom assignments and structured exercises. One of the lines I want to push this year is that conventional writing instruction often better expresses the underlying values of scholarly work in general than more “progressive” attempts to “stimulate” the students. The classroom, I want to argue, can be a microcosm of the research community that maintains the knowledge that teachers impart. But in order to realize this potential we have to be less embarrassed about the ordinariness of much of what we know and less bashful about our orderliness.

Consider the simple case of giving students two texts to read that exemplify a “classic” disagreement within your discipline. They may engage on what is a standing dispute in your discipline, or over a question that has since been settled and on which most scholars now agree. The two texts you assign will of course clarify the point at issue and offer arguments for and against both sides. The authors may make direct reference to each other, challenging, perhaps, not just each other’s claims but their readings of each other’s arguments. The students can be asked to read these papers and to try make up their own minds — to take a position on the disputed question. They can be asked to discuss their views in small groups, not necessarily persuading each other, but at least generating a list of arguments and counter-arguments. They will get a sense of what the readings say by hearing what their fellow students make of them.

The important thing, of course, is not just to have this list of arguments. The important thing is for the students to form an opinion of their own, well aware that it is a temporary resolution based on the information they happen to have before them. The amount of information can be fixed, or at least indicated, by time constraints. The readings may be assigned with only a few days given to get them read. After that, they may have a week to make up their minds and write a short paper about it. This will limit the amount of reading they can reasonably do beyond the assigned readings, but students should be told of the value of tracking down some of the sources that the texts themselves make use of. What they find there might be of use to them.

Once they have done some work, alone and in groups, to develop a position on what is to you (the teacher, the scholar) a familiar issue, give them a simple declarative sentence that states a plausible, recognizable stance. Tell them they have to write a five-paragraph essay that either asserts or critiques this position. By convention, you are asking them to motivate the need to take a position (§1) and then to come up with three reasons to either adopt it or reject it (§§2-4). In their conclusion (§5), they must wrap things up by indicating the broader consequences of the view they have defended. Or you can suggest alternative ways of writing five paragraphs. The point is that you are asking them to read two papers, discuss them among themselves, and then write five coherent paragraphs on the basis of this experience.

In my next few posts, I’m going to look at the five paragraphs in turn. I want to show that this sort of conventional, “ordinary” writing displays skills that are essential to maintaining our academic literacy. By the same token, it displays the lack of these skills where they are absent. The question that teachers do well to ask themselves is this: At what level should this sort of exercise be “easy”–an ordinary exercise of the student’s competence in the relevant discipline. I’m not here just thinking about mastery of the essay form but also of the content that is specified by the assigned readings, invoking particular methods and theories. I think we are too quick to believe that straightforward exercises like this, which can be assigned and graded in correspondingly straightforward ways, are too “artificial” to impart learning to the students. I want to begin the year by showing that our boredom with the ordinariness of what we know well is the unnecessary source of disorder in our classrooms and, ultimately, our disciplines.