My Opinion on High School Opinion Essays

Ask a high school student today for an opinion on some current event – the lack of media coverage of the Tennessee floods, the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf, the Zucking in of personal information from Facebook so it can own the internet – and you’re sure to get an earful of impassioned argument. Ask them to write their opinion, and all of a sudden they turn shy, retreat into the safety of the five paragraph essay, and muster all the grammatical correctness they can find into that perfectly packaged middle school format.

What gives? Are they afraid to offend? Do they lack confidence in themselves? Or are they simply lazy? The answers: No. No. No. The truth is, they don’t know how to find the right voice, the way of knowing that gives them a way of seeing the issue. They don’t realize that all the tools of writing they learn over the course of the year – antithesis, parallelism, varied sentence structure – are the very tools that make opinion writing the provocative thing it’s supposed to be.

Just check out the opening paragraphs here: the repetition of “Ask” to unify the first two sentences, and the opposites in those two sentences that provide the antithesis readers love so well. Look at the application of the rhetorical rule of threes (don’t believe there’s such a thing? Google it.) in both sentences to give them balance and momentum. Then check out the rhetorical questions, used as a means of setting up the pins so I can knock them down. Golly, how I wish just once a writer had set me up; instead it’s all earnestness and straight-ahead writing. It’s almost as if the pieces were written by students instead of writers, and I think they know the distinction.

Yeah, yeah, you think it’s a Mr. McAteer thing. He likes sarcasm. He likes irony. He likes being a word bully. Nothing could be farther from the truth (at least for the last one; the first two…um, yeah). But it’s not just me. Check out our pal Thomas Friedman, writing in the Times on the day we handed in our drafts. And don’t just read it; mark it up so you can identify all the literary devices employed and the jobs they do.

There is only one meaningful response to the horrific oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and that is for America to stop messing around when it comes to designing its energy and environmental future. The only meaningful response to this man-made disaster is a man-made energy bill that would finally put in place an American clean-energy infrastructure that would set our country on a real, long-term path to ending our addiction to oil.

That is so obviously the right thing for our environment, the right thing for our national security, the right thing for our economic security and the right thing to promote innovation. But it means that we have to stop messing around with idiotic “drill, baby, drill” nostrums, feel-good Earth Day concerts and the paralyzing notion that the American people are not prepared to do anything serious to change our energy mix.

This oil spill is to the environment what the subprime mortgage mess was to the markets — both a wake-up call and an opportunity to galvanize a constituency for radical change that overcomes the powerful lobbies and vested interests that want to keep us addicted to oil.

If President Obama wants to seize this moment, it is there for the taking. We have one of the worst environmental disasters in American history on our hands. We have a public deeply troubled by what they’ve seen already — and they’ve probably seen only the first reel of this gulf horror show. And we have a bipartisan climate/energy/jobs bill ready to be introduced in the Senate — produced by Senators John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham — that would set a price on carbon and begin to shift us to a system of cleaner fuels, greater energy efficiency and unlock an avalanche of private capital to the clean energy market.

If you wrote repetition in the only-only, man-made man-made paragraph, give yourself five points. If you wrote anaphora, repetition, parallelism and/or artful breaking of the rhetorical rule of threes next to “the right thing” sentence, forty points. If you wrote allusion (don’t get mad, Kelly) and the rhetorical rule of threes, seventy points. If you wrote analogy, then you’ve started studying for the 1990’s version of the SATs, but you were spot on in recognizing the comparison of oil-to-environment and mortgage-to-markets. Give yourself 12,583 points. Add seventeen if you circled wake-up call and opportunity as an example of antithesis. Proceed to the next paragraph. “We have,” “We have,” “And we have.” Need I say more?

I hope not. Because after I wrote that sentence, I went to find a few references to rhetorical devices on literary or writing websites, got distracted by an ad for Rosetta Stone, invested $500 in the opportunity to converse more easily with the guy at Dunkin’ Donuts, and finally got back to this.

The point of my little diatribe: you know your stuff, now set your reader up to make her see why your issue is relevant to her life, why any opinion that isn’t yours sounds suspiciously like a clanging gong in the desert, and why agreeing with you is a way of life. Go forth and prosper.

Oh, and write shorter paragraphs. And use more of your research, especially the quotes. And the anecdotes.

And stop feeding your vegetables to the dogs. And floss. That’s pretty much it.