Re: Essays should be about the quality and clarity of ideas
Looking at Alene Parr’s successful presentation of her grievances, it is worth noting that she did so by following the rules and structure which govern letters to the editor. It speaks to what she has been learning at university.
As a teaching assistant for PSCI 2300, a mandatory course for all political science students, I’ve had to justify the purpose of the course numerous times. In the class, we read the major texts of the Western cannon and grapple with how those thinkers understood the political world around them. The relevance is sometimes hard to see.
We recently finished Plato’s “Gorgias,” a dialogue that presents the challenges of debating opinions. Near the beginning of the work, the character Socrates insists on a set of rules to govern their subsequent discussion. As soon as everyone agrees, however, the rules are immediately broken by the youth present.
My discussion groups spent hours figuring out why this was important.
The groups concluded that rules are necessary for politics and, by extension, all human affairs. Without rules, debating opinions is fruitless. This was something the youth of the dialogue did not understand.
A bibliography is merely another expression of rules meant to govern the presentation of ideas and opinions. It was established according to the needs of an academic community and could have taken any number of shapes. In this regard, our author was correct in suggesting that it is wholly arbitrary.
But, the point of learning an academic citation style and fulfilling the requirements of a paper has little to do with a student’s ability to replicate it after graduating.
The purpose of the exercise is to learn how to conform to a system of rules that govern the presentation of ideas, not the particular guidelines themselves.
Going through the motions of mastering one style, it is hoped, will prepare the student to master new ones. Once outside university, former students will have to contend with any number of new systems. Robert’s Rules of Order, Canadian copyright law, and briefing notes are just three such examples.
Students may never use the set of particular academic rules again but they will certainly rely on the skills developed by learning them—be it sitting in meetings, arguing with friends, or, quite possibly, writing letters to the editor. In this regard, it appears our author is already ahead of the curve, whether she realizes it or not.
