Essay Engineering for Humanities is a new secondary school and university curriculum for textual analysis and essay composition – it teaches evidence-based thinking and rigorous argumentation; it imparts foundational knowledge of the Western literary canon.
What are students saying about Essay Engineering?
“Before I studied literature with the Essay Engineering method, I didn’t understand anything about literature! Now I realize this is the only way to make sense of English literature.” (Linda, New York City)
“Now, when I look at the essays that my friends have written, I can see the obvious mistakes they make, and how they just don’t understand the essential meaning of what happens in a chapter that they are writing about. It’s obvious to me that I can only do a good job with my homework assignments with what I learned with Essay Engineering.” (Eric, New York City)
What are the major elements of the Essay Engineering curriculum?
Essay Engineering is a dual-purpose curriculum. First, it teaches knowledge of the Western literary canon, through representative works from all major epochs from Classical Antiquity to Literary Modernism; the works are carefully selected to be both accessible and challenging, and to allow students to gradually work their way up to the most sophisticated, complex works of the canon. Secondly it provides a systematic and rigorous framework for analysis by teaching students how to understand the determinate meaning of the literary work, at the level of sentence, paragraph, chapter, and analysis of the complete work; students learn an evidence- and process-based methodology which is derived from the academic discipline of intellectual history (or history of ideas), which studies literary works, but otherwise has little in common with standard literary studies curricula & methodologies.
i) The Western canon is the intellectual foundation of both the Western world tout court and the traditional, non-ideological liberal arts education defined by its impartial pursuit of historical knowledge.
Through careful study of the original literary work and meticulous attention to its semantic content (i.e. the meaning expressed by language), students learn how to develop an independent understanding of the primary source. Students see with their own eyes the historical significance of major literary works as monuments in three millennia of European thought.
Proportionate weight is given to Greek antiquity and each of the major European periods – from Middle Ages and Renaissance, through Enlightenment & Counter-Enlightenment, and up to Literary Modernism of the early 20th century. Literary works do not engage in the speculative thought of philosophy; they are rather works of imaginative literature that convey an intellectual position through a representation of reality. For various reasons, it is not the convention in secondary schools to teach students works dating prior to the 19th century. (With the sometime exception of a very limited selection of works from Ancient Greece.) One reason is the belief that works from the middle ages and classical antiquity are too difficult for secondary school students. As a result and as a rule, it is major 20th century novels that dominate secondary school syllabi. But these works are typically the most challenging of the Western literary canon because of the allusive and obscure quality of the narrative prose style in the 20th century. By contrast – and contrary to conventional wisdom – certain genres and works from earlier, major periods (parable and prose of Greek Antiquity, epic poetry of the Middle Ages, Renaissance prose works, Enlightenment plays) are far more accessible to the beginner and intermediate student, even accounting for the challenge presented by historically distant works.
– Essay Engineering is a non-politicized humanities curriculum concerned solely with impartial knowledge in the standard liberal arts tradition of the 20th century.
The curriculum of Essay Engineering for Humanities is a strictly knowledge-oriented curriculum. We believe that the classroom and all instruction must be 100% free of ideology and political agenda. There is no need at all to engage with contemporary society and debates of the day. There is no need to discuss election results, for political analysis is not the business of the humanities. The purpose of the literary studies curriculum is to study major literary works as historical artifacts and cultural phenomena – the study of a work being a purely descriptive phenomenon, which must have nothing to do with the normative quality of a political agenda that seeks to create some change in society. For example, it is entirely within the purview of historical research to investigate the reasons why European painting was for many centuries dominated by males, such as social conditions and the status of women in society. But to agitate for more women painters in the present – this is nothing to do with scholarship or academic study; this is not historical research but a political agenda. Likewise, it is bona fide historical research to investigate the intellectual currents of the peculiarly Russian concept of the intelligentsia and its role in the Russian Revolution of 1917. (This is purely descriptive.) But to call for a “revolution” that seeks “transformation and liberation”, to pursue “social, economic, and political change” – any such political agenda has no place in the classroom. (This is a normative undertaking and is nothing to do with either scholarship or knowledge.) The student who wishes to study Marxism takes this up as a study of economic history and empirical reality, not the posturing of ideology that disdains empirical reality.
It is not the scholar’s prerogative to say whether a certain historical event was desirable or not. (Though this might be tacit in the mass murder of citizens or the many casualties of war, in a man-made famine or economic collapse and human hardship. Oddly enough, there is a tendency in certain quarters to misrepresent empirical reality.) The primary purpose of the historian – whether of literature or philosophy; of politics, economics, religion, society, or the arts – is analysis, which is ultimately and only descriptive in nature; albeit requiring & constituting a description of great sophistication. The study of history by its very nature cannot and must not be normative – it cannot consist in saying “what should be” and “what should not be”. Such normative questions and their answers are the prerogative of the private citizen who votes by secret ballot. These normative questions are the business of the statesman, politician, and tyrant – but not the scholar who is true to the pursuit of knowledge, which arises only from the impartial, unbiased study of some sphere of reality.
ii) This knowledge is facilitated by the Essay Engineering approach to literary studies – a novel, evidence- and process-based methodology that provides a systematic approach to grasping the determinate meaning of the literary work, at the level of sentence, paragraph, chapter, and analysis. This methodology is derived from the framework of intellectual history (or history of ideas), which studies literary works, but otherwise has little in common with standard literary studies methodologies.
Students are taught to seek the most accurate, impartial analysis possible by reconstructing the represented reality and its tacit conceptual framework. Students learn the complete set of the discrete skills that constitute evidence-based thinking and rigorous argumentation. This “EE Toolbox” provides a step-by-step framework for essay composition that is applicable to all literary works of quality.
The conventional wisdom at even the most esteemed and most selective schools holds that reading and writing are adequately taught. But with the Essay Engineering curriculum, students understand that “reading” in fact consists of meaning reconstruction, and “writing” in fact consists of structuring principle and conceptual framework. These radical reconceptions require discarding altogether conventional notions of reading and writing – and make evident the major deficiencies of the standard curriculum. The standard curriculum effectively incapacitates student cognitive faculties and does not permit accurate and comprehensive meaning comprehension, whether at the level of sentence, paragraph, chapter, or entire work.
This weakness of the standard humanities curriculum is evident in the actual student experience. Namely, a common reaction of secondary school and university students to essay-writing assignments for English literature and history classes – even the brightest, most capable and motivated students – is, “What am I supposed to do?” Essay Engineering teaches students what they are supposed to do at each and every step, through a series of “bottoms-up” Modules. (These avoid the problem of the highly speculative thesis and analysis that is ungrounded in and contradicted by the actual evidence.)
Each EE Module teaches the way to grasp meaning and and generate a “work output” on a different level: at sentence level, paragraph & chapter level, outline level, and analysis level. In the Sentence-Level Module (Micro First-Order Thinking), students reconstruct the meaning of each individual sentence . This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of Essay Engineering to grasp because the denoted meaning of a sentence is thought to be self-evident and already understood. (Beyond the direct meaning of the sentence, the indirect meaning is an entirely additional, unrecognized challenge. Beyond the massive complexity of literary works of the first rank.) Reading comprehension is thought to be self-evident and arising spontaneously from rudimentary literacy. (For discussion of mechanical literacy vs. semantic literacy, see below on this page; see also the “Primary School” page.) But the actual evidence indicates otherwise. When tested on a specific sentence, and asked to explain in their own words the meaning of a sentence – most every student can provide at best an incomplete and partially correct answer. It is not at all unusual for a student or provide an answer that is entirely incorrect or no answer at all. The evidence demonstrates that students have a seriously deficient understanding of single-sentence meaning. The greatest human challenge is the deficiency one cannot see; what one thinks one understands, but does not; what one thinks is done correctly, but is done entirely incorrectly.
The Sentence-Level Module (Micro First-Order Thinking) results in a series of meaning points which are disconnected fragments of meaning which are incoherent as actual reality. To see the reality, students must synthesize multiple meaning points to create a whole from parts. In the Paragraph- and Chapter-Level Module (Macro First-Order Thinking), students identify and synthesize the major sentence-level meaning points, to create a meaning pattern that is centered on a structuring principle . Only with the meaning pattern and structuring principle does the student understand the actual reality that the literary work describes and represents. In the Outline-Level Module (Idea Generation), students engage in a focused, directed brainstorming that examines these major elements to extrapolate and identify the higher signifying plane. In the Analysis-Level Module (Second-Order Thinking), students create a conceptual framework that connects disparate structuring principles (or formal qualities) for which the linkages are hidden and non-obvious, thus creating a constellation that constitutes a parallel reality. Both meaning pattern and conceptual framework require the Sequence of Points Module, (Function of Paragraph) which organizes the content in a logically coherent concatenation (a chain of points, or a line of thought) and in a linguistically fluid manner. Logic and language are intertwined, and contribute to the high signal-to-noise ratio that is necessary for an analysis to be both highly intelligible and trenchantly insightful.
These are not merely theoretical constructs – each and every Module has been painstakingly developed in the course of student instruction, and each Module is judged by its effectiveness in helping students achieve superior academic results. Once a student commits to learning the EE Methods of meaning reconstruction and conceptual frameworks, the student makes massive progress in her or his ability to understand the essential formal qualities (i.e. themes) of the literary work. After one or two semesters of EE study, the student can independently work through the EE Modules and write a complete essay of excellent quality. (Typically two or three semesters of full-time coursework are required for students to begin to understand the highly sophisticated, highly complex literary works of the advanced level.) The key to student success is advancing beyond the standard humanities curriculum, which fails to teach the essential nature of reading and writing.
Why a new humanities curriculum? Why a literary studies textbook?
There are two major shortcomings in the existing curriculum for literary studies, which directly affect student academic success in essay composition. The practical purpose of Essay Engineering is to remedy these two shortcomings, which are:
i) the typical student’s Reading Comprehension is incomplete and inaccurate – students in grades nine to twelve generally have a low level of reading comprehension of the literary work; it is usually 20 to 60%, even at the best private schools in the United States. Secondary schools simply do not teach the advanced literacy skills necessary to understand the literary work.
The standard literary studies curriculum presupposes that the meaning of language is self-evident. For this reason, there is little to no time spent on the work of transforming language to meaning.
Essay Engineering teaches the methods for 100% reading comprehension. It teaches students to have a complete and correct understanding of the meaning of each and every sentence in a book. The Independent Reconstruction of sentence meaning is the indispensable basis for all evidence-based textual study and literary analysis. This is grounded in the heuristic-iterative method that teaches students to identify deficiencies in their meaning reconstruction and the required self-correction steps for improving accuracy; resulting in continual self-improvement of reading comprehension and true understanding of the literary work. The methodical identification of indirect meaning is an essential component. Students otherwise grasp the hidden, concealed meaning of sentences only infrequently by happenstance – without knowing what they are doing, without knowing that this is fundamental to reading comprehension and must be practiced continually. Finally, the passage-level and chapter-level analysis grasps the overarching sense of the literary work.
Literacy, as conceived in the existing primary & secondary school curriculum, is limited to the mechanical literacy that identifies the spoken words that correspond to a written word. It teaches the mechanical process of recognizing a group of letters and identifying the word thus signified – but it is not at all concerned with the meaning of each individual word, and the resulting, aggregate meaning of the sentence! This mechanical literacy is adequate for reading books in grades one or two, where the meaning of words and sentences is entirely self-evident (as in everyday human speech). The meaning of words and sentences (i.e. the semantic sense or propositional content) are obvious in primary school. But an altogether different type of literacy – the semantic literacy taught by EE – is required for the literary work that contains an immensely complex representation of reality, and where the meaning of sentences is far from obvious. Quite the opposite, the meaning of sentences in literary works is at best complex, and more often entirely obscure. Already in grade four books contain, at the very least, a modicum of sophisticated and indirect meaning (e.g. Wind in the Willows, Chronicles of Narnia). And in the literary works undertaken in grade nine and above (e.g. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby), the complexity is enough to present a significant challenge to even graduate students at top universities, never mind high school students. Semantic literacy results in 100% accurate comprehension of propositional content – this is the essential content contained in a book. An understanding of this propositional content is the basis for the literary analysis, which in turn is the content of the essay.
It is possible to study mathematics by counting on one’s fingers. But it is a far more effective endeavor with instruction in multiplication and division, geometry and algebra, and calculus. This methodical, skill-based approach is the standard curriculum for secondary school mathematics. Essay Engineering aims to provide an equivalent standardized curriculum for literary studies.
ii) the skills required for Essay Composition are simply not taught – the vaunted five-paragraph format tells students what the answer to an essay question should look like – but not the steps and skills that are necessary to create such an answer. There is no conception of the actual method and process of essay composition.
Essay Engineering teaches a pragmatic, process-oriented method for essay composition. It consists of a Module sequence and the innovative, effective, and intuitive skills. The Synthesis of multiple passages (linear and non-linear) allows for identification of the Structuring Principle (or proto-thesis) and generates a corresponding Conceptual Framework (or formal pattern), this being the essential content in the Analysis of a literary work. In parallel, the Sequence of Points is the fundamental form of the Paragraph. It consists of a concatenation of points, or the line of thought that expresses rigorous argumentation. Whereby each point is connected logically & linguistically to previous and subsequent point. The points express the set of subtle variations and sub-definitions which explicate and expand thesis, and which as a whole constitute the definition of the formal quality, the conceptual account of underlying forces that determine cause and effect in reality. The Sequence of Points organizes the content with a Basic Idea (or Thesis), which is then investigated, explicated, and defined in a series of Subtle Variations, or Explanatory Points defined by their propositional content. (Constructing this propositional content rests on the foundation of the semantic literacy.)
A practical, everyday example of First-Order Thinking and Second-Order Thinking – from the academic field of Economics, in the study of employment trends in the United States.
A recent tweet from a think-tank policy researcher (link here) consists of a critique – “It's very weird to me that the ‘Great Resignation’ is portrayed as ‘young people rethinking work’ when drops in labor participation are entirely driven by people who are 55+.” – as commentary on the following two screenshots. The screen shot on the left is the 2OT Thesis. The screen shot on the right is the 1OT Evidence.
2OT Thesis 1OT Evidence
The screenshot on the left is a news article headline, which makes the following Second-Order claim: “From the Great Resignation to Lying Flat, Workers are Opting Out: in China, the U.S., Japan, and Germany, younger generations are rethinking the pursuit of wealth”. This 2OT Thesis consists of the two-part thesis that i) individuals are choosing not to seek employment because they are rejecting a life that is centered on earning money; and ii) these workers are those in the early stage of their career, thus the workers of the “younger generation”.
The screenshot on the right (First-Order Evidence) provides the actual data and thus the evidence that will either corroborate or disprove the 2OT Thesis. Namely, the chart shows the change in employment from December 2018 to November 2021, as categorized by age group. If the 2OT Thesis presented above is correct, we should see a significant decline in this figure. But in fact we see only a very modest decline of ca. 0.5% for the age groups 25-34 years old and 35 to 44 years old. And we see the very opposite of what the 2OT Thesis claims: for age groups 16-19 years old and 20 to 24 years old, there is in fact a 2% increase in employment.
Based on the 1OT Evidence, we must reject the 2OT Thesis presented in the screen shot on the left.
While the actual thesis, the Revised 2OT Thesis that is supported by 1OT Evidence is in fact the opposite of what the newspaper headline presents. This Revised 2OT Thesis has two parts, one describing the younger generation and the other describing the older generation – namely, “The Great Resignation is driven primarily by retirees and early-retirees, in the 55 years and older age group. While for the youngest workers between age 16 and 24, the data show an increased desire to have a job and work.”
This is what the person who wrote the tweet means when he says: “It's very weird to me that the ‘Great Resignation’ is portrayed as ‘young people rethinking work’ when drops in labor participation are entirely driven by people who are 55+.”
Now, to be careful about the nature of the 1OT Evidence – this debunking of the thesis applies only to the United States; for the “Employment Population Ratio” chart is presumably for the United States. (The chart is not marked, and the careful student would track down the source to confirm that the data is for the United States.) Thus it is entirely possible that the original 2OT Thesis (of the left screenshot above) holds still for some or all of the other nations of China, Japan, and Germany. The interested student could search for similar data on China, Japan, and Germany. The careful student would also wish to check other measures of employment for the data from both the United States and other countries – preferably both other sources of the same measure, and also other measures of employment. The careful student would also consider the possibility that this data is for only three years, between 2018-2021. It is possible that over a longer time-series, that covers one decade or even several decades, the evidence would support a different thesis.
As an entirely separate topic – we could examine data on the relative size of different birth cohorts; and combine this with data from the above chart (screen shot on right, 1OT Evidence) for different age. This might show that an overall decline in the Employment Population Ratio is caused by two factors: i) the magnitude of change is greatest in the “55 years and older” cohort; and ii) the size of the birth cohorts for the “55 years and older” group is greater than all the others, and significantly greater at that; namely, the demographic factor of the Baby Boom is seen in its effect on overall employment levels.
Why are the EE skills of Literary Studies relevant to Economics? Because both fields pertain to human existence, and not the natural sciences. In all instances of human existence, 1OT Evidence is treated in much similar fashion.
Is there a historical precedent for this kind of critique of humanities instruction?
Two and a half thousand years ago, Socrates criticized the written word and outlined its essential flaw: that reading a book does not unto itself allow a person to understand the thoughts presented in the book. (The tacit comparison is to the oral culture where knowledge was transmitted always and only through discussion and speech, including oral exams; there was no such thing as either books or essay-writing.) Socrates’ critique of the written word is that it creates only the appearance of understanding, while lacking the essential quality of knowledge. For knowledge inheres first, foremost, and only in the active creation of thought (as indicated by his reference to memory) and not in the written record of a thought (i.e. a book).
“And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. That which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” (Plato. Phaedrus.)
σύ, πατὴρ ὢν γραμμάτων, δι᾽ εὔνοιαν τοὐναντίον εἶπες ἢ δύναται. τοῦτο γὰρ τῶν μαθόντων λήθην μὲν ἐν ψυχαῖς παρέξει μνήμης ἀμελετησίᾳ, ἅτε διὰ πίστιν γραφῆς ἔξωθεν ὑπ᾽ ἀλλοτρίων τύπων, οὐκ ἔνδοθεν αὐτοὺς ὑφ᾽ αὑτῶν ἀναμιμνῃσκομένους: οὔκουν μνήμης ἀλλὰ ὑπομνήσεως φάρμακον ηὗρες. σοφίας δὲ τοῖς μαθηταῖς δόξαν, οὐκ ἀλήθειαν πορίζεις: πολυήκοοι γάρ σοι γενόμενοι ἄνευ διδαχῆς πολυγνώμονες εἶναι δόξουσιν, ἀγνώμονες ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πλῆθος ὄντες, καὶ χαλεποὶ συνεῖναι, δοξόσοφοι γεγονότες ἀντὶ σοφῶν.’ (Φαῖδρος τοῦ Πλάτωνος. 275α.)
Socrates’ criticism is that the student who learns from books will learn very little. As a result, the student has neither a thorough nor rigorous understanding of the question at hand; the student can offer only a reminiscence of the subject. Just ask any high school or college student to explain what they understand about the book they last read. A common reply is “I don’t remember”. Essay Engineering is based entirely in the present-day textual culture, but it uses the written word to produce active thought – first in grasping meaning (via independent reconstruction); then in creating a representation of events (via a reconstituted reality); finally in transforming this reality into a conceptual version (via the formal quality). The weakness of the written word is its tendency to be facile and careless.
A similar observation is found also in twentieth-century philosophy: “No one can think a thought for me, as no one but myself can put on a hat” [“Niemand kann einen Gedanken für mich denken, wie mir niemand als ich den Hut aufsetzen kann.” (1929. Vermischte Bemerkungen 452)]
First- and Second-Order Thinking
The Independent Reconstruction of the literary work’s propositional content – at sentence level, paragraph level, and story level – constitutes the first half of humanistic study, and is known collectively as First-Order Thinking (1OT) of Essay Engineering.
The Second-Order Analysis itself is determined by content, and more specifically, the propositional content of a conceptual framework, that presents a description of reality in purely abstracted terms; it is a formal pattern of the non-material forces which underpin and determine all physical reality – while its expression takes the form of a Sequence of Points; the basic idea of the thesis is the departure point, and all subsequent points provide subtle distinctions that explicate and elaborate this basic point; incorporating also the empirical evidence that corroborates the conceptual contentions. The form and content are always intertwined in practice, but for effective learning they are taught as separate, distinct skills. Together, these skills constitute the Second-Order Thinking (2OT) of Essay Engineering.
Broadly speaking, First- and Second-Order Thinking provide instruction in evidence-based thinking and rigorous argumentation. First- and Second-Order Thinking are the fundamental skills of incisive and accurate analysis. They are the foundational skills of academic success. And they are moreover the foundation of professional competence in the post-academic knowledge work of professional careers – whether in law or banking, technology or consulting, sales or marketing.
The methods of First- and Second-Order Thinking are supplemented by two Thought Structures which are common to most every literary work: Human Vector Causality and Perspective Variance.
the Essay Engineering Mini-Textbook – the “EE Crash Course”
The Essay Engineering method is taught as four sequential, linked modules: Micro 1OT (sentence-level), Macro 1OT (passage analysis), Sequence of Points (for Macro 1OT), and 2OT (conceptual framework). (Where “1OT” is First-Order Thinking, and “2OT” is Second-Order Thinking.) Micro 1OT transforms linguistic symbols of the textual layer into the independent meaning reconstruction. Macro 1OT synthesizes meaning points to create the meaning pattern of a reconstituted reality. Sequence of Points is the essential skill for constructing a line of thought, which is the essential purpose of the paragraph. 2OT transforms the reconstituted reality (meaning pattern) into a conceptual version (a formal pattern, of various formal qualities).
The “EE Crash Course” is a Mini-Textbook that consists of two parts. Part One presents a brief overview of the four Modules. Part Two provides several examples of the Work Flow – a demonstration of all four EE modules, as the process that results in a completed five-paragraph essay. The EE Work Flow is demonstrated with short analyses of various works including Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, Boccaccio’s “Nathan and Mithridanes” (from The Decameron), Sophocles’ Antigone, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. These demonstrations make clear the complete practice of the Essay Engineering method. The four modules together constitute the EE process that results in a full five-paragraph essay.
The Essay Engineering Mini-Textbook will be available for purchase as e-book and print book. Check back here, or subscribe to the free Essay Engineering newsletter. (See below to subscribe to the EE newsletter.)
Why is the existing humanities curriculum taught the way it is?
The standard humanities and literary studies curriculum of today’s secondary schools is derived from the approaches developed by university English departments since mid-twentieth century. A handful of twentieth century trends in academic literary studies have been most influential. The New Criticism (I.A. Richards, Warren Brooks) teaches that the meaning of a literary work was immediately accessible to the reader; this notion is antithetical to semantic literacy. The notion of Aesthetic Autonomy (Peter Bürger) posits aesthetic objects (and thus literary works) as belonging to a transcendental realm apart from everyday human existence; this concept is antithetical to conceiving of a literary work in terms of mimesis, or the representation of reality. The Post-Structuralism trend (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida) rejects the notion that a literary work contains a fixed meaning, and instead imagines the essence of the literary work to contain only unstable and ultimately indeterminate meaning – thus leading to an infinite regress where all interpretations are equally valid; where the critic engages in interminable exegesis of questionable result; where the notion of accuracy has neither relevance nor purchase; and where the notion of meaning has lost both signification and function; these post-structuralist theories are antithetical to the notion of propositional content.
These tendencies are preceded by the so-called Copernican Revolution of Immanuel Kant. The Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 2d ed 1787) rejected the possibility of objective knowledge of reality. According to Kant’s positing of human cognitive faculties, the object-in-itself (the noumenon) cannot be known; we can only know the phenomenon, or the object as conditioned by and contingent upon the subjective distortions unavoidable in every act of human perception. Thus, Kant denies the possibility of an objective understanding of empirical reality.
Essay Engineering does not purport to allow absolute and indubitable truths. But it does posit the study of literature where impartiality and careful attention to language can identify the better interpretation, which allows for a quasi-objective grasp of reality. It is of course still contingent upon the subjective tendencies of the individual. But Kant’s Copernican Revolution has been given way to the aforementioned 20th century literary theories and an extreme, unquestioned thesis of radical scepticism and epistemological nihilism – this thesis is commonplace and dominant in America and Europe, in unquestioned truisms that “every opinion is important, every opinion is equally good”, “no interpretation is better than any other”, “you cannot be objective in journalistic reportage”. These truisms insist on what cannot be done, thus making a tacit admission of defeat, thus insisting that knowledge is hopelessly deformed by subjective distortions, thus discarding the very notion of accuracy. Every human being indeed has the right to an opinion – but this does not mean that an opinion is necessarily sound and well-founded.
Essay Engineering rejects these truisms and seeks rather what better knowledge we can find. Essay Engineering proposes instead that impartial scrutiny and its careful attention to the meaning of language can lead to the better interpretation, as adjudicated by the evidence of empirical reality (or a representation of this in the literary work). There are, consistent with this proposition, other approaches to literary studies – such as Aristotle’s notion that literature teaches universals, while history teaches particulars – which are little discussed in literary studies departments.
What is the intellectual lineage of Essay Engineering?
Essay Engineering continues the tradition of European intellectual history as practiced in the twentieth century by Arthur O. Lovejoy (Johns Hopkins), Isaiah Berlin (Oxford), and Donald H. Fleming (Harvard). A defining attribute of this methodology is the emphasis on rigorous textual analysis that grounds an interpretive thesis in the impartial and careful analysis of evidence, and results in rigorously tested argumentation. In this tradition, the task of the scholar and student is plainly described by famed German historian Leopold von Ranke: "he merely wants to show what actually was." ("er will blos zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen.") But the work of the historian is never simplistic or reductive – rigorous thought must convey all intricacies, subtleties, and complexities with the maximum possible clarity, precision, and concision. Essay Engineering builds on the premise that textual meaning is evidence-based and yields determinate propositions.
“How do you write an essay?”
Many students – in secondary school and in college alike – ask this question when working on English and History assignments.
Students ask this question because they find existing learning tools to be unsatisfactory and insufficient, e.g. five-paragraph format, point-quotation-explanation. Students want a better, effective way to write essays.
Essay Engineering is an innovative humanities curriculum – for primary & secondary school, for university – grounded in the practical, real-life skills of evidence-based thinking and rigorous argumentation. Essay Engineering is a process-oriented method that conceives of reading as the study of a textual layer to effect meaning reconstruction, and conceives of writing as the construction of meaning patterns for second-order thinking.
The sophisticated terminology applies to the advanced literacy skills which are mastered in grades 9-12. Young students can begin to develop these skills in middle school (grade 5-8), and the foundational building blocks for these skills are taught in primary school (grades 2-4). See the “Curriculum” page on the menu bar above for more information.
EE provides a process oriented method of step-by-step thought structures.
An intuitive & efficient process-oriented method – developed during studies at Harvard College and Stanford University
In the course of undergraduate studies at Harvard College and graduate studies at Stanford University, I came to understand that writing comes second – first one must think with clarity, precision, and insight. Essay Engineering is a new approach to essay composition and reading comprehension for Literature and History (for primary & secondary school, and university level). It redefines the essay in terms of the “toolbox” of skills that define evidence-based thinking and reading analysis – it teaches students a better way to write essays. The natural and intuitive Essay Engineering method is process-oriented and teaches the essential pre-writing thought structures beginning with the true textual analysis that results in 100% reading comprehension – progressing to synopsis, category identification, category development, and the final and developed line of thought.
100% reading comprehension is the foundation of evidence-based thinking. But students at secondary school level are not taught and tested on their sentence-level and paragraph-level comprehension, which is the indispensable basis of chapter-level analysis. Essential plot developments or thematic expression is often very subtly expressed in a single sentence – and if the student fails to understand any such single sentence, an accurate analysis of the text is impossible.
The result of Essay Engineering is an essay in the five-paragraph format – but the Essay Engineering method and process is grounded in the innovation of two fundamental principles: i) reading comprehension is redefined as meaning reconstruction; ii) essay composition is redefined as meaning patterns for conceptual frameworks. A series of learning modules teaches the fundamental skills by providing provide discrete 'tools', which are combined in a comprehensive, step-by-step process. Essay Engineering gives students the “toolbox” of skills they need at every step of the way.
Essay Engineering empowers students with “thinking tools”, and addresses fundamental student needs – see the “Curriculum” page for a detailed description of the Three Modules, the evidence-based thinking “toolbox” that teaches students how to write an essay.
“The goal of teaching should not be to help the students learn how to memorize and spit out information under academic pressure. The purpose of teaching is to inspire the desire for learning in them and make them able to think, understand, and question.” (Richard Feynman.)
Shortcomings of the Five-Paragraph Format – the Solution of Essay Engineering
The Five-Paragraph Format does not teach the process & Thought Structures that result in the correct answer.
Students are given the problem of an essay question (“Discuss the theme of love in Romeo and Juliet and what role love plays in the death of the two lovers.”) – and asked to provide an answer in a complete essay.
The five-paragraph format consists of: introductory paragraph (including thesis), three body paragraphs, conclusion. This is the main teaching method for essay-writing instruction – but it is simply a restatement of the most general, superficial form that the answer takes. The five paragraph format describes what the correct answer looks like. But it fails to teach students the thought structures required to produce a correct answer.
The Five-Paragraph Format sets out what the answer should look like, i.e. what “form” the essay should take – but it does nothing to help students understand how they come up with an answer. It shows the end result of an analysis and its completed work – but it has nothing do with the underlying thought structures and the work of analysis.
The most important student questions are not addressed by the five-paragraph format: How does a student know which parts of the book to quote as evidence in the body paragraph? How does a student decide which topics should be discussed in the body paragraphs? How does a student decide what is the best “topic sentence” for each body paragraph? How does a student come up with a thesis? These questions are answered by the Essay Engineering method.
The Essay Engineering teaching process is centered on Thought Structures – demonstrated with an example from mathematics.
In mathematics, Students are taught the specific skills that transform the problem into a solution, aka thought structures. The mathematics curriculum is like a set of building blocks that develop skills incrementally. Students first learn arithmetic, and then they learn polynomial equations.
The polynomial equation is taught as a process that consists of skills – take the example “2x + 10 = 14”. Students are taught to: i) subtract ten from both sides, which results in the new formula “2x = 4”. ii) divide both sides by 2, which gives the result x=2.
But before solving a polynomial equation, students have spent several years practicing addition and subtraction, multiplication and division – including for single-digit and multiple digit (e.g. long division).
The five-paragraph format fails to teach students the process and skills which result in the correct solution. The five-paragraph format is the equivalent of showing students the solution in a sample problem and saying “okay, now solve these equations for homework”.
The Five Paragraph Format is equivalent to giving students the problem “2x + 10 = 14”, and explaining the way to solve it is to use the format “x= a constant”.
Essay Engineering addresses the shortcomings of the five-paragraph format by providing students the “toolbox” of skills they need at every step of the way. Essay Engineering curriculum is the humanities equivalent of the structured and rigorous math curriculum.
Essay Engineering provides the process to ‘solve for x’ – the Three EE Modules
Module A. Meaning Reconstruction, micro input – analysis of ‘textual layer’ of language (sentence-level).
Module B. Meaning Reconstruction, macro input – creation of ‘first order’ knowledge (paragraph-, passage-, chapter-level analysis) .
Module C. Meaning Pattern, macro output – creation of 'second order' knowledge. (flows naturally from first-order)
See the “Curriculum” page (menu bar above) for a detailed discussion of the three modules.
The “Module” Framework is guided by the “Mastery Learning” concept of Benjamin Bloom.
The concept of “mastery learning” was introduced by Benjamin Bloom in the 1960s, and means simply that the student must master the skills at a given level before advancing to the next level. According to this pedagogy, the student must master reading comprehension before beginning to write essays. The student must be able to read a text with 90 to 100% accurate and complete comprehension before moving on to essay-writing.
This concept differentiates between the outcomes of traditional “uniform” instruction (which do not require mastery at each level) and the “optimal” instruction of “mastery learning”. In traditional instruction, the student’s academic achievement is highly correlated to innate aptitude. With mastery learning, the student is able to surpass the limits of aptitude and achieve superior academic results.
While innate aptitude is an inevitable limitation, mastery learning minimizes the role played by innate aptitude.
How does Essay Engineering work in practice?
Video Lesson One introduces the three ‘meaning types’ with a Second-Order Thinking analysis of a passage from Wind in the Willows.
Jump to 7:45 for discussion of meaning types and meaning reconstruction, a new way to do reading comprehension.
Wind in the Willows is well-suited for demonstrating the EE Methodology because the complexity and sophistication of the text is often unrecognized.
For definition & discussion of Second-Order Thinking see the “Currriculum” tab on the menu bar above.
Lesson four introduces the Three Modules of EE, and gives an in-depth demonstration of Module A (‘meaning reconstruction’ at the ‘textual layer’).
Module A addresses the greatest challenge students face in composing essays: developing and mastering the fundamental grasp of the language of the text.
Intuitive and Natural, Sophisticated and Rigorous
The Essay Engineering Method (EE) is an intuitive and sophisticated, natural and rigorous way to learn both the formal structure of the humanities and the skill of analytical thinking.
EE is a comprehensive, step-by-step process which teaches students the comprehensive set of skills – once students have learned these skills, they possess the complete toolbox for essay composition and analytical thinking.
The method is intuitive and accessible; it is a detailed codification of the natural ways of thinking with language.
Working as a private tutor for humanities & writing, I developed learning tools and modules to help high school and college students become proficient in Essay Engineering.
The Essay Engineering approach to 'evidence-based thinking' is the skill-based practice of Analytic Intelligence (AQ):
EE offers a new approach to 'evidence-based thinking', with its two fundamental principles: "meaning reconstruction" and "meaning patterns for conceptual frameworks"
These skills are the practice of Linguistic-Inductive Intelligence (AQ) – as distinct from Spatial-Computational Intelligence (IQ).
The fundamental skill of AQ is known also as 'evidence-based thinking', ‘reasoning’, or ‘logical thought’.
“How do I write an essay using EE evidence-based thinking?”
– and, “How do I get the best ESL English Language and SAT Test Prep results?”
ESL & Test Prep – Essay Engineering is also a superior learning method for English Language study (ESL) and Test Prep for SAT and ACT. See the pages for "ESL" and "SAT" in the menu above.
The book is forthcoming – for The Essay Engineering Manual, see the menu bar above.
Private tutor, worldwide – I work with clients in the United States, Europe, Asia. See the "Student Testimony" page for details.
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