An easy writer's guide to High School essays

My daughter was upset about how she was doing on an in-class written essay, and it reminded me of all the pain and suffering I went through in high school writing essays.

I really have a problem with English teachers in general because the topic they claim to know is for a lot of kids a very hard level of thinking. It's all too easy for English teachers to take a strident attitude towards what is really an exercise in conditioned reasoning.  It looks so easy and teachers can do it, so what is so hard about it?

Well, for one thing, kids are used to formulaic presentations, by the teachers themselves, so they often lack a lot of depth in the subjects they are expected to write on. What this means is that whereas an older person that has done it before and been criticized many times for poor writing can survive, early writers as I will call them suffer from a double whammy of lack of experience and lack of knowledge. It is hard enough when you don't have practice with long drawn out formats, but then to expect what is really advanced reasoning is silly. Oh, but the teacher points out that these are very easy subjects, and they are given ample flexibility to create points and make proper sentences. Well, yes, but you can't remember how confused you were back 20 years ago, either. And as English teachers get older, their viewpoints and their empathy both suffer from myopia.

Unlike math, English is very subjective and quite frankly most English teachers are failed writers themselves. Let me repeat that, English teachers washed out writing on their own, and they supposedly teach BY EXAMPLE, and mark students as if they were experts in the craft.  Can you see wherein lies the problem?

Now, do I think kids are coddled, yes.  Do I think kids that don't put in any effort should be punished? Yes. But unlike subjects where kids have a chance to get a right answer, they can be marked badly for stupid stuff like punctuation and spelling, whereas they are really just practising with the idea formation and format. They get poorly done, or incredibly polished examples that are not realistic and told, voila, reproduce it!  Except remember English teachers can't for their own skin reproduce the same level of work on new stuff now not what they've copied out for 20 years.  Exactly how is that fair?

What nonsense.

Now, if you have gotten to here and can still follow my train of thought, it's not because I did well in High School English. It's because I'm better at it that they are. It's because I'm 44 and I've written for nigh on 25 years.  That is the biggest reason why; practice, practice, practice.  I've probably written more than most English teachers have, and I'm not so strident to have all the answers. I have been forced to practice, and make mistakes and learn. 

Here's one secret; I write first and then edit later in soft copy. I can, because I'm not stuck in 1970's teaching methods.

Add insult to injury, the question formulation, "Relay the points under consideration" or "..." are really ham-fisted and unclear requests to ask you to write about a topic but made to look articulate. Garbage!  Ask kids in SIMPLE English to write because you want to see SIMPLE English back.You are not judging their internal thesaurus, you are inspecting their ability to make an argument; in English!

So here is a simple guide to English essay writing for those that don't have the experience:

1. Find out what the question is asking for in your essay; read through the essay question and parse it - take it apart into pieces that make sense - and come up with about 3 to 4 ideas that they are asking for (You see how I presented a step and then explained it all in one sentence, that is experience).

2. Jot down in point form the list of ideas you need to write on.

3.  Make a thesis that ties all of those points together in some way. A thesis is a central idea or topic or theme. What ties all those pieces together? So look at it and remember the story and try to come up with a common idea, common theme that fits the essay question you just parsed.

4. Leave a space for the introduction of about 5 lines. Below, write out bullet points for 3 body paragraphs, one for each of the ideas from 1.

5. Erase the bullet points. Write out each body paragraph. That is the best way to make each point and make it make sense as a collective is to do them all sequentially.

6. Based on 5, write a concluding paragraph.

7. Go back to the open space above the body paragraphs, and write an introduction based on all the work you have written.


There is an essay, not fancy but complete, that covers all the bases, gives you time to correct and format, and that will allow you to pass and destress in English class.

The invasion of English marches on...

L'invasion d' Anglais marche toujours incessant... Google translates into French.

It used to be "bonnes faites de semaine".  I was taught traditional French and it's all out of date.

English as an idea is communicating simpler, faster, clearer, and open source. There is no conspiracy, just a relentless march towards a uni-lingual world.

The Invasion of English into Europe

 English is becoming more pervasive into the European cultures, this is in Poland. This is another data point on a trend line that documents how people are choosing to incorporate English.

Now in this sign there is one English word that must be a very good simplification to force people to think it's better than the Polish version. 

 Language purists would get upset at someone using the improper words.  But memory of proper words lasts about as long as a lifetime.

Centrum is a Latin word, so should it be here in this Polish sign?

Use Strunk & White English

Any engineer that writes flowery, decorated, run-on sentence English should be struck about the neck and shoulders with a bag of excess words from his/her work.

Use Strunk & White's English from The Elements of Style instead. 

Here is one of the rules from The Elements of Style :

Omit unnecessary words.

That's it.  Three words with clear intent and clear scope. Unambiguous.


That's how all writing should be.

It takes more money in effort to debug flowery run-on English.  If I was a business man, I would buy a $10 copy of The Elements of Style for every employee and save $1000's in engineer time. 

The invasion of English into Europe.

I travel to Europe periodically. Not very often sometimes every year and sometimes slower. My travel rate is approximately the same as glacier recession. Slow and steady. When I return I visit new parts and go through familiar ones like Germany and England.

Speaking of German and English

This is a sign outside the Vienna International Flughaven. Or should I say airport.

English, the language not the people, is ever marching into every corner of Europe. I have written about this phenomenon before. And this slow pace experiment - the observation of English into other cultures - is a demonstration of the hypothesis.

Not to worry, English and England are not the same thing. The English lost control of English language when they taught the language to the empire.

The hypothesis why all cultures are adopting English is simple: it is easier to learn, more people speak it, it is open source and modular, it is the language of law banking and science, and can change to meet any need instantly. No large character sets. No complex rules.  No college de la langue francaise (no governing body).



Meanwhile, the discussion about England divesting of Europe or the other way around goes on in political circles.  The fact is, once your citizens have adopted ESL - English as a Second Language - you have really changed your culture in any case. English has a beach head in Europe without Britons.  Borders are symbolic names as placeholders. 

English  is the original open source language.