A Letter to Maggie, by James Slevin

From Teaching Composition: Background Readings

This is a letter to a new teacher who is worried.

What's the difference between having a point and making a point?- abstract

Slevin ultimately comes to suggest that the essential material of a good writing course belongs to the category of "evidence"---what counts as evidence, what does the evidence mean, what points can it support?-abstract

What matters in college writing, more than any writing they have done before and perhaps more than any writing or speaking they will do later, what matters is evidence. -60

Politicians, pundits, advertisers have in common a studied commitment to assertion, often at the level of the sound bite. Neither evidence nor competing assertions make any difference, except as part of a staged drama. -60

I wish my students could distinguish between having a point (or having a thesis) and making a point (or a thesis). (It is curious that the phrase, "making a thesis," is not idiomatic, and yet it is the heart of academic work.) We all have points but don't often make them. -61

Precisely because academic culture is never like that--we are never omniscient, our work is almost never a matter of life and death, our conclusions never entirely conclusive, never closing on exactly the right answer that will effectively eliminate the need for any further work in our fields--because of all that, we found Columbo a weekly delight. -62

We talk a great deal about examining the assumptions behind a thesis, looking at the bias of the author we are reading or the work we are composing. That is an important thing to do, but it doesn't necessarily clarify what is at stake in undertaking this critique. The point is not simply to identify bias but to explain what that particular bias does with the evidence at hand--how it misinterprets or inadequately explains the evidence, occasionally even distorting it. -63

I should rephrase that and say that the heart of academic writing is the process of supporting, testing, and complicating theses, not just having them. -64