Sphinx

How do we teach our students to argue, in an appropriate academic manner? At least one of the key elements is to help them to recognise, and criticise, different sorts of arguments in the secondary literature – and then to encourage them to turn this critical sense on their own work, to question every statement that they make and probe every possible weakness. But this needs to be critical criticism, so to speak; criticism that’s tempered by a sense of realism, of what is actually possible in historical studies – and by an awareness that there is rarely a single straightforward answer to anything, or a single correct approach. For example, identifying every source, ancient and modern, as ‘biased’ may be true, and better than total credulousness, but it’s generally unhelpful; at best it’s a first step rather than a conclusion, given the impossibility of finding a source that doesn’t have its own perspective, concealed or unconscious or otherwise. And if I thought it would help, I’d spend a lot of time citing Matthew 7.1-5…

Edmund Stewart at Nottingham has written a blog post, ‘How to write a bad essay’, listing some of “the top mistakes that are certain to irritate even the most serene of supervisors”. I’m not entirely sure how far this was written for fellow academics, to elicit nods and chuckles of recognition, and how far it’s actually intended to be helpful guidance for students about what to avoid. If the former, well, I suppose that’s understandable at this time of year, and at least it’s framed in general terms rather than the student-shaming ‘howlers’ that still get circulated in exam season.

If the latter, however, I have certain issues with some of it; not just that it’s too late to be helpful to those currently finishing their dissertations (one sincerely hopes that no student with a deadline less than a week away sees this and panics…), but also that some of the alleged mistakes are arguable or tendentious – or, more often, they do identify a problematic argument, but in a way that seems almost designed to push students towards an equally problematic alternative; the falsity of “all cats are black” leading to a dogmatic assertion that therefore all cats are white. Below, I’ve given Edmund’s original bullet points with my own commentary; see the post for his elaboration of them, to which I’m responding.

1. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence 

This would be so much better with the addition of a “necessarily”. No, we cannot be certain in every case that the absence of evidence for X means X definitely didn’t exist, and we need to spend some time discussion the likelihood that X could have existed but all evidence of its existence was then lost or erased. But the corollary of this being a top mistake might appear to be that arguing a case for X without any actual evidence is absolutely fine, given that we have so little evidence for anything in antiquity, and that’s a road that tends to lead towards aliens building the pyramids. Sometimes that’s okay too, if we have other reasons for believing in X, but the absence of evidence for X is always going to be an issue, if not necessarily a knock-down argument against it.

2. Add an evolutionary theory or historical moment

But, says the student, proper historians do this sort of thing all the time! And actually I think Edmund’s set of Top Mistakes would be much stronger with the acknowledgement that these are by no stretch of the imagination confined to students; I’m not sure that students would be so convinced that e.g. the reign of Augustus marked a turning point in everything, not just Rome’s political system, if they weren’t being presented with such claims in half the books they read. The crucial point is not that any attempt at making sense of history in terms of change, development, evolution, crisis etc. is automatically wrong and so must always be avoided; it’s that all of these are human attempts at making sense of the world, not intrinsic to the reality of the past itself, and therefore always in need of justification, analysis and defence – always a matter of argument.

3. Apply a theory

Yes, Edmund, each and every use of a ‘theory’ from any other discipline is automatically anachronistic and invalid, involving the distortion of the ‘facts’ to fit it, and deployed solely for the sake of spurious originality. Proper classics contains no theories, only truth. One might make a more valid point about how one goes about using and evaluating theories, about the tensions between generalisation and detail, about the relationship between humanistic and social-scientific approaches, but no, all theory is condemned as being half-baked and lukewarm.

4. Develop an unconscious confirmation bias

Actually this is one I can agree with.

5. Keep your logic circular

The problem of trying to interpret a text in relation to its context when the text is itself evidence for that context is of course one reason why one might want to resort to theory… There’s no dispute that circular arguments are problematic – but I can imagine students wondering how they’re supposed to talk about certain topics at all.

6. It’s all Propaganda

Agreed, rarely helpful (see also: “biased”). Actually the problem is surely not just the reading of a text like the Aeneid in terms of “propaganda”, but any sort of reductionist, one-sided reading that flattens out complexity, of which “propaganda” is just one example.

7. Historicize

But what, asks the student, is the alternative? Never pay any attention to context? Discount any possibility that texts might be influenced by external events? Interpret texts solely on the basis of my own instincts and responses? The obvious response to being told that “Historicization is a Top Mistake” will be, one suspects, not a measured, critical engagement with the relationship between text and contexts but a new Top Mistake, that for some reason isn’t listed here, of Ahistoricism.

8. And most importantly . . . never define your terms

Here we’re in total agreement. Everyone knows what theory means, for example, and why it’s intrinsically bad…

It is of course perfectly possible that I’ve fallen into Edmund’s trap by taking this all at face value, whereas clearly it’s designed to provoke students into a more critical stance by presenting a series of statements that are obviously problematic. It would be easier, for more naive readers like me, if this could be made a little more obvious; by supplementing the mistake of ‘Historicize’ with the mistake of ‘Total ahistoricism’, and the mistake of ‘Apply a theory’ with the mistake of ‘Imagine that objective, untheoretical study of the past is possible’.

And actually I would rather read an essay that included any or all of these ‘mistakes’, than one which didn’t offer any sort of argument at all…