This past year I took a fourth year seminar course in philosophy, and found myself using “I think” and feeling guilty (this 15 years after I took my first undergraduate course), but I left it in and still did ok.

Students are taught that using words like “I think” is not objective, and is to be avoided at all costs. I’d like to go back and tell my previous teachers that they failed to consider the long-term consequences of their reinforcements. They had every good intention, I’m sure, but the more I read about writing well, the less and less happy I am with how writing is taught. (I’m watching my stepdaughter go through the same thing in junior high and agonizing over whether or not I should correct her. I’m thinking not, since I’m not the one grading her work.)

“I begin with the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 and its failure to foresee the development of democratic party competition.”

Madison talks about parties and their problems in the “Federalist,” and Washington devotes 20% of his “Farewell Address” to their ways and dangers. In fact in that address Washington says,

“The alternate domination of one faction [party] over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”

Sounds to me like he failed to foresee the competition between parties.

But the most irritating offender is the United States Department of State. It maintains a website under the management of its Bureau of International Information Programs. There you will find the text of the “Farewell Address” as well as the following introductory paragraph (emphasis added):

“Washington, like many of his contemporaries, did not understand or believe in political parties, and saw them as fractious agencies subversive of domestic tranquility. When political parties began forming during his administration, and in direct response to some of his policies, he failed to comprehend that parties would be the chief device through which the American people would debate and resolve major public issues. It was his fear of what parties would do to the nation that led Washington to draft his Farewell Address.”

So your students are not unique. Ackerman, at another place in his book, actually describes the Framers as “dumb” and “stupid,” and I always thought that those guys were about as far from “dumb” and “stupid” as it is humanly possible to be. Shows you how dumb and stupid I am.

You fail to consider the fact that I am right and you are wrong.

So, can you please give me a better grade? Kthxbye.

I myself wonder if the problem you describe might be exacerbated by the way we as teachers respond to student writing. How often do we (by which I mean the vague collective we–I’m sure you’re terrific at teaching writing) as teachers fault a paper for “failing to consider” point A or literature B, rather than engaging directly and forcefully with (and against) our students’ arguments? Many students, it seems to me, have a sense that the perfect paper, the one that could not be faulted by professor or TA, would be one that “considered” everything and made no statement that could be argued against. Where did they learn that if not from us?