Essay: In the how-much-screen-time debate, all parents are just trying to figure it out

"Is it true that Silicon Valley tech executives don't let their kids use screens?" I was on the East Coast speaking with parents and once again was asked the question I can't seem to escape.

I've observed with curiosity the ongoing buzz about how Silicon Valley parents -- particularly those who are technology executives and investors -- keep their children off screens. These stories tend to create low-grade anxiety as well as a parent-shaming aimed at those who let their kids use screens.

Over the past 15 years, I've worked as an educational consultant focused on executive-functioning issues with tweens and teens in an office about five miles from Google's, Facebook's and Apple's main campuses. More than a thousand middle school and high school students have walked into my office over the years -- including those whose parents are technology CEOs, executives, venture capitalists and other investors -- to discuss their work habits, distractions and the effects of everyday technology in their lives.

It's no secret that social media and technology use have become a hot topic nationwide -- especially because there has been little research into the relationship between teens' technology and social media use and long-term brain development and mental wellness. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently announced the launch of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, which will track more than 11,000 teens to investigate factors that influence young people, including the impact of screen use on brain development. Research has linked digital media use to poorer sleep quality and duration, which, as sleep researcher Matthew Walker notes in his book "Why We Sleep," can easily affect focus, concentration, mood and mental well-being.

After spending the past year traveling to more than 35 cities across the country consulting with schools on social media, technology and student wellness issues, as well as visiting many of the schools in Silicon Valley, I've found it's a fallacy that most parents working in technology want their kids to live completely screen-free lives. It certainly may be easier to keep younger children from using screens, but all the Silicon Valley parents I interviewed agreed it isn't realistic once children are school-aged. Instead, they are focused on finding ways to make sure their kids have healthy experiences online and in real life -- and in some ways are further along than other parents in doing so.

Take, for example, Loren Cheng, director of product management for Facebook Messenger Kids and father of a preschooler, a second-grader and a fifth-grader. He lets his children use technology to promote creation, collaboration or communication. His second-grader loves Minecraft and recently used online video tutorials to build an elaborate castle with underground traps. His fifth-grader messages him in the afternoon when he is still at work, conversations he's not sure they would have otherwise.

These activities point to an important and often overlooked distinction in how and when technology is used. For instance, a child passively staring at a screen is different from one who is actively communicating with a grandparent via FaceTime or using online tools to develop creative projects, say, to create animation or to edit videos.

For younger kids, strict guidelines can be critical. But as children get older, it's important for parents to have conversations with them and to establish times for them to be offline. Monitoring apps such as Bark or OurPact work best in concert with conversations around use, not in lieu of them. Of course, what works for one family might not work for another. But as a rule, it is often more effective to put rules in place proactively rather than to try to cut back on screen time once a child has already developed screen habits. Another good option is to provide natural steps for incremental usage -- say, starting with a flip phone and then moving to a smartphone, or creating an environment in which access to a smartphone or screen is the exception rather than the default.

"The only thing that works [for us] is very rigid rules," says Mike Popek, who worked at Google for nearly 14 years in different management roles -- and went to junior high and high school with me. He and his wife have three children, ages 9, 7 and 3, and live in Palo Alto.

His older children are each allowed an hour of screen time per night at the computer in the living room -- but only after homework is done and dinner has been served. The family makes no distinction between educational videos and interactive experiences and scrolling through information online during that hour. So even though his kids use screens on a regular basis, he admits that "we're probably stricter than most."

"There's no way you can just say no to screens. It's not possible," says Popek. "They'll be at a huge disadvantage in their lives if they have no experience with this type of technology." Some area parents may disagree with him, such as those whose children attend the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, which is often cited as the screen-free zone where technology executives send their kids. The Waldorf community is tiny, though, serving fewer than 400 kids in an area with more than 15,000 students. And even Waldorf uses computers as teaching tools in high school classrooms.

Melanie Wendt, a school therapist at a public middle school in Silicon Valley, deals with these issues both at work and at home. The students she sees -- some of whom have parents in tech -- spend much of their time on their phones and playing video games. She and her husband established boundaries for their own boys, ages 8 and 10. Her older son has an iPad, which he uses one to two hours a week, and the boys have an Xbox. But they are not allowed to play shooting video games, instead spending time on FIFA and other sports games.

She feels the single most important strategy to promote healthy online and real-life experiences is to be consistent.

Wendt has found that her sons are more aware of their own screen use and the use of others. They'll notice when they are out eating dinner and everyone at a table near them is engrossed in their phones. "I feel like I've raised awareness," she says. She thinks it doesn't make sense to take a draconian approach to limiting technology use. "By cutting something out of their life, it makes it more interesting. That's why we decided not to completely take it away."

Dan Zigmond, director of analytics at Instagram, has two daughters, ages 16 and 18, both of whom have smartphones and regularly spend time online and using different apps. For him, "it's less about having strict rules and more about just having lots of conversations about it." His children will call him out if they think he is on his phone too much, and as a family they don't have screens at mealtimes. They will "sometimes take vacations where we're completely off the grid."

Helping children and teens create consistent, compartmentalized time offline is key, though what that looks like can differ depending on children's ages and their susceptibility to overusing technology. Keeping phones out of the bedroom at night and tracking, monitoring and shutting down usage with tools such as Apple's Screen Time or Google's Family Link can create consistent structure and conversations around awareness.

I occasionally meet parents who try to shield their kids from technology, and that can quickly become counterproductive, given that so many kids communicate using devices. A few years ago, a ninth-grade girl and her mother came into my office because the daughter was miserable at her new school and wanted to transfer. Within a few minutes, I discovered that the mother refused to give her daughter a phone, reasoning that her daughter's new classmates "could call our house if they wanted to make plans." But most of her daughter's classmates were texting or messaging -- and her daughter felt alone and ostracized.

That ninth-grader's experience relates to a recent Pew Research Center report, Teens' Social Media Habits and Experiences, which found that 81 percent of teens feel more connected to their friends using social media and that 69 percent feel as though social media helps them interact with a more diverse set of people. At the same time, teens still struggle with information overload and what I call the all-about-the-likes personal values development, in which likes, loves, comments and followers have become the new barometers of popularity.

Katy Roybal is director of education technology at a Silicon Valley independent school with an iPad program. She is also the mother of three boys (a college freshman, a high school junior and a second-grader). She stresses that kids should recognize the importance of controlling their own device and what they put online.

To help tweens and teens become more aware, I recommend parents require kids to do a little research before downloading any new apps or opening new online accounts. Who founded and created the app? Have there been any recent related scandals in the news? Can they find out anything about the app's data privacy and cybersecurity issues? This process of investigation can help kids actively reflect on how and where they should spend time online. And, I should add, it's no less applicable for apps that are marketed as educational, as the FBI recently warned.

In the end, as Instagram's Zigmond puts it, "the basic issues around parenting and helping to set boundaries and helping kids make healthy choices around all kinds of things are kind of the same, no matter what." Parents around the country are more in line with Silicon Valley parents than they might believe: We're all trying to figure it out in an ever-changing digital world. It's a good idea to keep up the pressure on companies to protect children. And less shaming and more proactive solutions will go a long way in creating a safer, happier, healthier world for kids online and in real life.

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Homayoun is an author of three books, including "Social Media Wellness: Helping Tweens and Teens Thrive in an Unbalanced Digital World."

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What to Know in Starting Your Essay

Writing an essay, paper or thesis is for many students the biggest challenge of their study.

It is often possible to stamp exam material, but write a piece of it yourself … And even for those who want to become a writer (perhaps even feel self-harm). Do not know where to start (writer's block), take out nights to finish the essay … And nobody told you that you can have your own opinion. It can be a crazy idea to disagree with all those academics who have done research for years. These are all not crazy ideas since – with literary studies – little attention is paid to writing skills during your studies. This keeps it something elusive. It looks like a trick that you should have a tendency to. Nothing is less true. There is indeed a system in it. If you know this system, it is a question of practice. This process can be accelerated even further by targeted feedback from an expert, which is often lacking.

Why write an essay?

Frequently heard reasons for writing an essay or paper are: "because it has to", "to get a good grade", "to show the teacher what I know" and "to make a point". While the first three reasons seem legitimate, an essay ultimately has one simple goal: to keep an argument. With this argument you answer a specific (research) question, demonstrate that you have studied the subject critically, present a rational argument, use an academic writing style and ensure professional design. Remember that an essay is an argument and not a summary of what you have read. So do not be tempted to show off all your freshly acquired knowledge (an essay is not a selfie), but only use knowledge that really contributes to the point you want to make.

What is an essay?

See an essay as a thought experiment. An essay takes the reader on a journey from the starting point (introduction) to the destination (conclusion). An essay punctuates a topic and answers a question on the basis of an argument. You do this by using academic arguments. These consist of three elements: a claim, a reason for this claim, and arguments and evidence to link the reason to the claim. A reasoning consists of ideas in a logical structure, while proof is information that suggests or demonstrates that these ideas are credible. For example: "A communist regime is untenable, which is demonstrated by the activities of governments to uphold it, such as censorship and the closing of national borders."

To start!

A good start is half the work, just to name a cliché. A good essay is planned, written and edited (in this order). Work out what you want to say, write it down and make it easy to read. Sounds simple right? However, students and writers often suffer from procrastination and sometimes they need some help from an buy essays online. You secretly hope that the assignment disappears, you decide to do something more important (like the dishes) or take a short break that mysteriously gets very long. Against this, roughly two different strategies can be offered. Strategy one is for stubborn dropouts: put everything aside and agree with yourself that you will work on your essay for 20 minutes non-stop. Once you are busy you will see that this will soon be more than 20 minutes. Strategy two is for those who have a particular dislike of writing: bring writing closer to speaking. Write everything that comes to mind spontaneously and do not pay attention to writing style, spelling and punctua tion. That will come later.

Answer the question

The first step in planning your essay is to answer the question. In order to do that, you first need to understand the question well (what is the scope and context?) And ultimately communicate this to the reader. You place a figurative framework around the essay. For example terms that you use are "in the context of …", "in the light of …", "in relation to …" The second part, answering the question, is a process that consists of creating, testing and refine the position. With this position (or 'thesis statement') you express one idea in a single sentence, answer the question of the essay in a direct way and do a claim that a reader can disagree with (otherwise it is not a point of view) or is it not worth it to transfer an essay).

The steps above really need to be done to start a quality essay. Hopefully this article can be useful for you.

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Christmas Essay: Why Objectivity Is Still A Thing

Objective Truth

is a total red herring today.

The Cambridge dictionary does a good job of making clear why. It explains that objectivity is

"Being based on facts and not influenced by personal beliefs or feelings."

Let's unpack this.

A view is more objective if it relies less on the specifics of the individual's makeup and position in the world. To gain a more objective understanding of some aspect of life or the world, we step back from our initial view of it and form a new conception which has that view and its relation to the world as its object:

"This approach allows us to transcend our particular viewpoint and develop an expanded consciousness that takes in the world more fully." — Thomas Nagel,

The View from Nowhere (1986)

And from this 'view from nowhere', we can see reality 'as it really is' and understand how the world works independently of us.

That, at least, is the idea.

Unfortunately, ascending to this maximally objective viewpoint has turned out to be a tough climb that might be impossible to complete.

Beyond appearances

Here's why.

We believe that the world is a certain way because the world appears to us in a certain way. Our beliefs are based on appearances but are supposed to be about something — reality — that goes beyond appearances.

For instance, many people have come across the idea that "the observer affects the observed". If that's so, then, in trying to figure out what is true about the world by observing it, we cannot get completely 'outside' ourselves.

When observing things, what we observe will, in part, appear to us at it does because the observer is human. The world appears to us in a certain way and that these appearances result from our interaction with the world.

Whenever we try to step outside of ourselves, something stays behind the lens. Something in us will always influence the resulting picture. As such, the way things seem to us might be a fallible guide to the underlying thing that's 'there', generating the appearances.

There is, then, a challenge to explain whether, and if so how, subjective impressions can lead to knowledge of objective reality.

Descartes' doubts

When we look at the world, it might be inevitable that something will stay behind in the lens and that's a genuine obstacle for Objective Truth.

More specifically, it is an obstacle for distinguishing opinions from knowledge.

In building up our map of reality, our only option is to rely on appearances. Our access to that underlying thing can only proceed through these appearances. Hence, we cannot check our beliefs about what the world is like directly against reality itself. Rather, and more modestly, in deciding whether something is true, we check it against only against other beliefs about reality that we already accept as true.

In attempting to solve this problem, René Descartes famously searched for an indubitable starting point to use as the fundament for his house of knowledge. Descartes' wrote about his requirement that "knowledge is to be based in complete, or perfect, certainty amounts to requiring a complete absence of doubt — an indubitability." In applying the methodology of doubt, Descartes aimed to arrive at certainty by rejecting all opinions whose truth may be open to question. Such an indubitable starting point would provide maximal certainty, softening the blow of our lack of direct access to a mind-independent reality. Whatever survives the test is what I can justifiably claim to know. When I have discerned that, I can build my map of the world back up from more solid foundations.

Applying this test, Descartes found that he could doubt everything, except for the fact that, when he was doubting, he was doubting. He inferred from this that there must be 'a doubter' and famously concluded that:

"I think, therefore I am". — René Descartes,

Discourse on the Method (1637)

Or, formulated more intuitively: "I am thinking, therefore I exist". We cannot doubt our existence while we doubt. I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.

However, according to Descartes' own Evil Demon argument, it's possible that an evil demon deceives me about the existence of an external world. Every thought we might have about the world outside us can only doubtfully be true of the outside world. Reminiscent of present-day Simulation Theory, the challenge Descartes raises is: how can we know that the Evil Demon hypothesis is false, if such a scenario is indistinguishable from what we take to be our actual scenario?

Long story short, it turned out that this problem was rather difficult to solve. When "I think, therefore I am" is the indubitable starting point, your knowledge of the outside world rests on shaky foundations unless there is a Helpful God guaranteeing that your senses are not fundamentally 'off-track' in the, in Descartes' words, "clear and distinct" impressions they deliver to the 'undoubtable doubter' about what reality is like. Without such a Benevolent Being to secure this harmony, Descartes could not exclude the possibility that appearances don't report the outside world because we are being deceived by an Evil Demon. And anything that it's possible to be deceived about, is not a reliable source of knowledge.

Cartesian doubt is methodic doubt used to arrive at certainty in separating what one believes is true and what is actually true. It turns out that the search for a rock-solid foundation leads to Cartesian Skepticism instead: the problem of explaining how knowledge of (or justified belief about) the external world is possible only looms larger when we require indubitability for making this separation.

Coloring within the lines, repairing a ship

About three hundred years after Descartes, the Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath brilliantly captured the predicament that the impossibility of direct access to reality leaves us in. In the metaphor of Neurath's Boat, he compared our body of knowledge to a boat that must be repaired at sea:

"We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction". — Oliver Neurath,

Anti-Spengler (1921)

Any part can be replaced, provided there is enough of the rest on which to stand. Otherwise, the boat will sink.

In other words: to some extent, what we accept as true about the world cannot but depend on whom you ask — on "the rest of which to stand".

Contemporary humans, for example, have intuitions of truth and falsity, logical consistency, and causality that are foundational to our thinking about anything. Our knowledge of the world seems to require that it behaves in certain ways (e.g. if A is bigger than B, and B is bigger than C, then A will be bigger than C).

Such epistemic concepts determine what we find reasonable — or even intelligible — at every stage of any inquiry.

Attaining knowledge is like coloring within the lines set by these fundamental concepts — it's not like working with a blank slate.

No neutral ranking

So far, we've seen that, in deciding what is true about the world, we can never "start afresh from the bottom". Instead, we can only assess certain beliefs — 'my shirt is red' — in virtue of other beliefs we already accept as true — 'generally, when I perceive an object as red in normal conditions, it is red'. If we 'start from the bottom', our boat sinks.

Here's Friedrich Nietzsche's diagnosing the failure of the Cartesian project:

"Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a "pure will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject" [contra Descartes]; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as "pure reason" [contra Kant] "absolute spirituality," [contra Hegel] "knowledge in itself"" — Friedrich Nietzsche,

On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

If we strive for 'knowledge in itself' — if knowledge requires "indubitability" or "a view from nowhere" — we cannot be sure that we know anything.

Now, let's exit the philosophical armchair and look at real-world consequences of this.

Here's the most important one.

Because Objective Truth is unattainable, we can't neutrally rank webs of beliefs based on their correspondence to reality, using the Truth-Benchmark. Instead, we are condemned to evaluate whether claims are true 'from somewhere', using another system of beliefs, which itself is not neutral but depends on "the rest on which to stand".

In map language: there is no neutral, map-transcending yardstick for assessing maps, so we can only rank them from a certain perspective: the benchmark can only be given by another map.

Let's call this 'no neutral ranking'.

Some draw rather radical conclusions from this, and infer from no neutral ranking of beliefs to equal validity of beliefs. According to them, because we can't get to Objective Truth, we should give up on trying to differentiate opinions from knowledge.

No Objective Truth — real life

My favorite Dutch TV show is Zomergasten, which translates as Summer Guests in English (sounds lame, I know). Airing during the summer break, it's a weekly Sunday-night live interview of over 3 hours (!) with a noticeable guest about what he or she thinks is important in life and about how the world is doing. It's deep. I particularly recall this year's episode where the interviewee was our current Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, Eric Wiebes.

About two hours into the conversation, Wiebes was talking about Donald Trump and Boris Johnston and expressed his frustration with today's prevalence of "The Image". Contra so-called 'alternative facts', he made a case for "good, old-fashioned facts".

When the interviewer pressed him about these 'facts', he had to admit that the effects of governmental decisions can never be quantified with complete reliability. Rather than concluding that this is where good decision making comes in, the hostess, like a true Cartesian skeptic, replied that this lack of certainty meant that making one choice and not the other was equal to "reading the tea leaves".

Truth requires absolute certainty. No belief is certainly true. So all beliefs are equally justified — just as random as reading the tea leaves. 'No neutral ranking' implies 'equal validity'.

Visibly frustrated, Wiebes points out that this jump is way too quick. When some belief about reality isn't quantifiable with total accuracy, it doesn't thereby follow that assessing its truth is like "reading the tea leaves":

"Not all of reality fits into a calculator, but it doesn't follow that everything is mere speculation. True, not everything is mathematically provable. Yet, that doesn't license the making up of bullshit. Alternative facts are not equally factive as facts."

In the words of Ricky Gervais: "You can have your own opinions. You can't have your own facts".

Yet, the hostess' contention that the unattainability of Objective Truth means that there's no principled difference between opinions and knowledge and it's all "reading the tea leaves" is not an uncommon attitude:

"If we read an article in the newspaper presenting two opposing viewpoints, we assume both have validity, and we think it would be wrong to shut one side down." — Naomi Oreskes,

Merchants of Doubt

In the final part of the essay, I want to make two points. First, 'equal validity' does not make any sense at all. Second, we need to, and can, distinguish facts from alternative facts, even though we can't get to Objective Truth.

Don't be fooled

Equal validity is a fine assumption to begin an inquiry with: before you start looking into the matter, you hold the conflicting ideas in mind. And sometimes, at this stage, it seems like there are arguments for both sides.

I have noticed that many people get discouraged when this is the emerging picture. It means that uncovering the most credible opinion will require some hard thinking. Reluctant do to the work, they seem to think that, once matters get somewhat complicated, we cannot assess the quality of arguments, but can only conclude that 'there is something to say' for both sides.

'Ah, there seem to be arguments for both sides of the debate, that'll probably mean that the truth is somewhere in the middle.'

This inference is mistaken. That we can conceive of possible arguments for two opposing viewpoints, does not mean that the truth is "in the middle".

It's a mistake to conclude from the omnipresence of apparent arguments for an opinion, that this opinion is in fact well supported. It simply doesn't follow from the fact that some people argue that such-and-such considerations support their opinion, that their theory is in fact as well supported as they claim it is.

Curiously, in cases like the Flat Earth theory, we see through the conjuring trick and recognize that the proposed arguments are bad arguments and do not judge the opinion that the earth is flat to be credible.

But in many other cases, bad arguments and 'alternative facts' continue to fool us.

In the climate debate, for example, many people attach at least some weight to the Deniers' claim that 3% of the scientists don't believe in climate change. The absence of full consensus is taken as support for the claim that we cannot conclude that one side is right. The lack of consensus doesn't warrant this conclusion at all, though. Truth isn't a democracy. Disagreement does, by contrast, warrant further investigation into which side has the better arguments.

In general, when we are presented with two opposing views, the thinking deeper starts — it doesn't end. We should not shy away from giving up the equal validity assumption if holding on to it is no longer warranted due to a difference in the quality of the arguments that both parties bring to bear in support.

The unavailability of Objective Truth should not paralyze us out of making such judgments. It does, however, presents us with a challenge about how we can be justified in making them. We ought to figure out how that is possible without full-blown objectivity, not blankly stating that objectivity isn't real.

No neutral ranking does not imply equal validity

No absolute certainty doesn't support the conclusion that there's nothing to be said one way or another. Likewise, the impossibility of a view from nowhere does not mean that so-called alternative facts are equally true as non-alternative facts.

Think about it. The idea that because we can't reach The Truth and objective reality can't fact-check my opinion, it follows that there is no principled difference between facts and alternative facts is completely bonkers.

It goes very far to say that parties in a debate are immune from refutation because there is no Truth and there are 'alternative facts'. The temptation to do away with the natural thought that certain types of knowledge are more or less accurate than others, and some might even be truer than others, replacing it with the contention that it's all just reading tea leaves, exaggerates.

For instance, there is not a single serious journalist who takes the failure of the Cartesian project to entail that he is just giving another opinion when he facts-check a news item.

That we can't give a mathematical proof for or against conflicting opinions, doesn't mean that objective reality is powerless in telling you that one of the opinions is less credible.

Be that as it may, there is still a puzzle here. When Wiebes says that facts and 'alternative facts' are not equally factive, how can we substantiate this difference given the unattainability of Objective Truth?

How can we resist the inference from 'no neutral ranking' to 'equal validity'?

What's wrong with alternative facts?

To do that, we must make sense of a middle position in the objectivity and truth debate, in a way that the impossibility of a 'view from nowhere' doesn't entail that all hopes for objectivity are lost.

Conceptually, truth has an internal connection with opinions and knowledge. When asking a question, one normally wants a true answer.

In "reading tea leaves", whether the alignment of the leaves corresponds to anything in reality is … up for debate. However, the fact that most other beliefs also can't be supported with mathematical certainty doesn't mean they're similarly sealed off from reality.

Refusal to engage with common faith only makes it harder to find common ground between different worldviews and that's not in anyone's interest. More importantly, we should try to create common ground by each doing our part and trying to be mindful and truthful in what we say. We desperately need a reappraisal of what Sir Bernard Williams called 'truthfulness':

"Virtues and practices, that express the concern to tell the truth — in the sense of both telling the truth to other people and, in the first place, telling the true from the false." — Bernard Williams,

Truth and Truthfulness

There's a difference in intention between opinions that flow out of a "concern to tell the truth" and those that result from other aims. Although we might not be able to get at capital-T Truth in the philosophers' sense of the term, we can still substantiate the claim that some beliefs are more likely to be true if we consider the belief-forming process that is at play here. Furthermore, we can investigate the evidence and the arguments supporting a belief, even if it seems as if there are arguments for both sides of a debate.

Rather than throwing our hands up in the air and pretending un-truthfulness isn't a thing by sweeping clear differences in factiveness under the rug of equal validity, we should embrace uncertainty and stress a concern to tell the truth. Nietzsche was right: rather than using whatever, we should be extra "on guard" when we're selecting the beams to repair our boat with.

Otherwise, we might sink.

Or worse: distort into a malicious submarine.

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'The Five-Paragraph Essay Must Die'

In new book Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, John Warner dispenses with arguments that the current moment of compositional crisis is related to screen time, text-speak, Twitter, or the idea that kids have become snowflakes who want participation trophies. An anonymous reader shares a report: There are, however, specific factors that have erected specific challenges to teaching writing in 2018; these include standardized testing, over-reliance on teaching grammar instead of writing, reliance on formulaic structure (i.e. those five-paragraph beasts), classroom surveillance, and college labor conditions. Warner examines the systemic causes in K-12 education that propel students into college without having discovered much about themselves as writers. Having explained the problems, Warner turns to solutions. The second half of the book offers his philosophical approach to teaching writing, honed over 18 years teaching first-year-writing classes at various schools, paired with practical exercises. Warner's next book, The Writer's Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing, a book of exercises, will be coming out next February. Together, they offer his assessment of the problems and plan for transforming how we teach college writing in higher education.

[...] Interviewer: So why isn't the five-paragraph essay a useful starting point? Why isn't it like doing scales before playing music, or practicing free throws before playing basketball?Warner: The danger is the prescriptive process that the use of the five-paragraph essay privileges. Students are given rules -- not just parts of speech and subject-verb agreement rules -- but [they are told] all paragraphs should have five to seven sentences. The last paragraph should start, "In conclusion," then summarize the previous three paragraphs. In a 500-word essay, the audience hasn't forgotten what you've said! So if there's a specific purpose where a five-paragrap h essay is useful, go nuts.

Students need to be given experience wrestling with the full rhetorical purposes of writing. Doing that allows them to develop the kinds of thinking that writers do [and] makes them far more amenable to examining the quality of the sentences. I write bad sentences all the time in my drafts. I write ungrammatical sentences. That's how I believe how most writers work. So that's what I want students doing. A lot of what I talk about in the book a matter of re-orienting our values. The publisher hype calls The Writer's Practice revolutionary. I see it as the opposite. I have an assignment that my third-grade teacher did about the components of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It's not a revolution. It's stripping away the apparatus of school and getting back to essence.

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How to start an argumentative essay

Question:

How to start an argumentative essay

The Purpose of an Argumentative Essay:

An argumentative essay is just what it sounds like--an argument. As a writer, your goal is to present the reader with an argument. Just keep in mind that the reader can't argue back or respond to you or the points you've made.

Answer and Explanation:

As with any essay, you may want to start your argumentative essay with a provocative question, an interesting fact, or a shocking statistic. No matter...

See full answer below.

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How to get a scholarship when your grades 'suck'

Each year, roughly $46 billion in scholarship money is awarded to students across the U.S. And even if your GPA is low, that certainly doesn't mean you're out of the running.  Felecia Hatcher, author of "The C-Student's Guide to Scholarships: A creative guide for finding scholarships when your grades suck and your parents are broke," recently sat down with Yahoo Finance to explain that there is money out there for the taking, regardless of your grades. You just have to know where to lo ok.  

Play the scholarship "lotto"

Hatcher recounts the story of her high school guidance counselor advising her not to even consider college because of her low GPA. But Hatcher did not let that stop her from applying for financial aid. Out of 300 scholarship applications submitted, she won $130,000 in scholarships and grants by fo cusing on local scholarships in her community. She urges students to apply for as many scholarships as possible. "It's almost kind of like the lotto. The more you play, the better your chances of winning."   

Go for "no" or "low" GPA scholarships

Hatcher says that 60-65% of scholarships and grants either require less than a 3.5 GPA, or don't ask for a GPA requirement at all. "Students would actually be surprised at the sheer number of scholarship opportunities that don't ask for a GPA requirement. A lot of them are mostly geared toward extra-curricular activity."

Tap your parents' network

Hatcher also mentions that the process begins with asking your parents to tap their network of family, friends and colleagues. They might be involved in scholarship committees and they also might be good candidates for writing you recommendation letters. She notes that she received a scholarship based on her mother's professio n. "My mom is an educator and so one of the scholarships that I got was a Classroom Teachers' Association that I only got because she was an educator," she says.

Pre-package your application materials

The process can be daunting, but Hatcher suggests packaging up application materials so that students can send out a high volume of applications with less of a time commitment.  She says "you may need to rework a few sentences, but you don't have to sit down for hours and rewrite a whole new essay. So you can quickly send things off, instead of thinking that you need to star t from scratch every time you have a new application."

Use social media

High school students are on social media a lot so they should make it work for them where scholarships are concerned. "You can search for scholarships via hashtags. You can search for scholarships in the keyword section on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram," she says.   

Embrace failure

And a good life lesson for any young person: use failure to propel yourself forward. "You're going to get a rejection letter, and that's absolutely okay," says Hatcher. "But you can't let that stop you from moving forward."

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Discover How to Align ACT, SAT Prep to Your Learning Style

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3 Ways the Optional SAT Essay Builds Writing Skills

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How to Write a ‘Lives’ Essay

William James Warren/Science Faction, via Corbis

The "Lives" essay has been running in our magazine nearly every week since 1996. For those who don't know, it is a place for true personal stories, running about 800 words long, and in the print edition, it's the last bit of editorial content, right inside the back cover. Though we do solicit professional writers, it is open to anyone with a good tale to tell, and we try as best we can to keep up with the steady torrent of submissions. At the risk of making our jobs utterly impossible, I want to encourage even more writers to take the plunge — because the more stories we get, the higher the quality of what ends up on the page. In doing this, it is not our intention to set people up for failure. The truth is, while getting published is a wonderful achievement, the process of writing a story is itself a rewarding experience. You won't be sorry for having tried.

To help you think about how you might approach writing your own "Lives" essay, I asked the magazine's editors for a single, succinct piece of advice. This is obviously not meant to be a comprehensive list, and we would love for readers (and writers) to submit their own counsel in the comments section.

Here's what my editors suggest:

• More action, more details, less rumination. Don't be afraid of implicitness. And the old Thom Yorke line: "Don't get sentimental. It always ends up drivel."

• If it reads like it would make for a Hallmark TV episode, don't submit it.

• Meaning (or humor, or interestingness) is in specific details, not in broad statements.

• Write a piece in which something actually happens, even if it's something small.

• Don't try to fit your whole life into one "Lives."

• Don't try to tell the whole story.

• Do not end with the phrase "I realized that … "

• Tell a small story — an evocative, particular moment.

• Better to start from something very simple that you think is interesting (an incident, a person) and expand upon it, rather than starting from a large idea that you then have to fit into an short essay. For example, start with "the day the Santa Claus in the mall asked me on a date" rather than "the state of affairs that is dating in an older age bracket."

• Where, exactly, did it start?

• Write past what you think the end of the story is. (Hat tip to Raymond Carver.)

• Do not make it about illness or death, unless that is the story you have to tell.

• Try an Oblique Strategy.

• Go to the outer limit of your comfort zone in revealing something about yourself.

• Embrace your own strangeness.

• If you can't write it, try telling it.

Oh, and here's the address for submitting your essay: lives@nytimes.com.

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