The Imaginative Argument: A Practical Manifesto for Writers

Chapter 1
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WRITING OF ESSAYS
So much writing surrounds us that the textual environment has emerged as a complex and supremely detailed subuniverse. We as readers inhabit it as we take it in. All over the place--on billboards, bottle caps, cereal boxes, the Internet; in magazines, newspapers, books--the written word proliferates. Yet the writing of short essays, "themes," or "term papers" seems to be an activity confined to students. Poor, beleaguered students. Louis Menand, an essayist and literary historian, claims that term-paper composition is "one of those skills in life that people are obliged to master in order to be excused from ever practicing them again" (92). One naturally wonders what other skills Menand has in mind, but his point stands. Outside the college classroom, there is little direct use for writing of the kind done therein. The short, exploratory, focused, argumentative essay has only one secure home: academia.
But that's OK. I argue that the academic argument, the subject of this text, forms the central and most important kind of nonfiction writing that you should master, even if you don't get a chance to use it after graduating from college. It's important not only because it draws on elements of all the other forms of nonfiction writing and hence will allow you to move to any of those forms relatively easily. It also replicates the method by which ideas are created. It teaches you to think.
That's my belief, anyway. Mastering the type of writing I outline here will help not just students who want to become professional writers or professors but also those of you who work in any position that requires honest, sustained appraisal or scrutiny of issues, ideas, people, texts, or situations. It's a kind of writing that replicates the kind of thought needed to uncover, as much as possible, The Truth. Such essays look not only for confirmatory evidence (that is, evidence to support a given position) but for disconfirmatory evidence as well, and they end up using both kinds of evidence to develop their ideas. They aim not merely to persuade but to give as fair and honest and complete an analysis as possible. For it is only such a fair and honest analysis, only such a careful appraisal of alternative and competing positions, only such a scrupulous but dispassionate scrutiny, that will serve the highest goal: the advancement of knowledge.
While this kind of essay attempts to advance human knowledge, writing it will also help you increase and clarify your own thoughts and insights, even about things that you thought you were already quite sure of. Sometimes, for example, you will have feelings and insights about an issue or a book or a film, but won't exactly know what they are--what they stem from, on what assumptions they might be based, or how they might connect with those of others. But writing the argumentative essay requires both that you articulate thoughts about an issue or text, and that you organize your inchoate feelings and insights into a form accessible to others and yourself. Moreover, writing this kind of essay allows you to understand argumentation, a form of discourse that will be useful in any situation that requires analysis.
But let's first take a look at more immediately recognizable and familiar kinds of writing. It seems to me that there are at least three discrete and historically established types of nonfiction writing, all of which differ from the kind of essay I describe here. The first might be called "essay as literature." Some universities offer a "creative nonfiction" course, in which you write personal essays or opinion pieces--these might resemble essays from magazines such as Harper's or the Atlantic, or from journals such as the American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, or Raritan. This literary genre of nonfiction, sometimes called "belles lettres," forms part of our Literary Tradition. It might include the works of Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, Addison and Steele, Margaret Fuller, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Matthew Arnold, Annie Dillard, and many others. The essay as work of art--the essay as creative work--memoirs, autobiographies, and other kinds of "creative nonfiction" might fall under this rubric. Courses examining (and requiring) such writing are often offered by English departments or in creative writing programs.
Other university courses are widely available (often called "Technical Writing") on the second major type of nonfiction writing, namely, "informative writing," a type of writing used in industry. Such writing intends primarily to convey information, not necessarily in a literary or artful manner, and often of relatively trivial or quotidian varieties--instruction manuals for our gadgets and appliances, software documentation so that we know how to use computer programs, statutes, warning labels, that sort of thing.