Two ways to start
Two openings for the same essay.
A. Nowadays migration is a very important topic and there are many opinions about it. In this essay I will discuss some of them.
B. Cities are defended as engines of opportunity, and the defence is accurate. It is also incomplete.
Four questions.
1. What does opening B do in its second sentence?
2. How does the second sentence of B begin?
3. What is the chain-relevant problem with opening A?
4. In 330 words, what does opening A cost?
The model · 327 words
Who a city is built for
Cities are defended as engines of opportunity, and the defence is accurate. It is also incomplete, because opportunity is what a city offers to somebody who can already afford to be in it for six months without earning.
Six months is the real barrier. It is not a barrier of talent, and it is not a barrier of willingness. It is a barrier of savings — of a deposit, of a month’s rent in advance, and of a margin for the job that does not last. Those things are unevenly distributed, and they are distributed along the same lines as everything else, which is not a coincidence.
The people least able to cross that barrier are therefore the ones most often described as unwilling to move. Admittedly, some people genuinely do not want to leave the place they are from, and that preference is real and is nobody’s business. Nevertheless, unwillingness and inability produce exactly the same number in a dataset, and only one of them is a fact about character.
What follows is a question about measurement rather than about attitude. A survey that asks whether people would consider relocating for work records intentions; it does not record what would happen if the deposit were found. The two are reported as though they were the same, and policy is then built on the smaller of them, which is a decision nobody records making.
There is a second question, which is about who the city is being built by. Housing that is affordable in the sense of being cheap to build is not the same as housing somebody can arrive in with two months’ savings, and the difference lies entirely in the deposit and the length of the lease. Neither of those is an engineering problem.
It was never the rent that decided who could come. It was the entry cost — and the entry cost is the one number that almost never appears in the argument.
Four questions about the model.
1. Write the first three words of each paragraph. What do you get?
2. How many discourse markers does the essay use?
3. What does the concession in paragraph three do?
4. Why is the last paragraph a cleft?
Repair a weaker one
The five moves: concede the standard view and limit it · name the real mechanism and build the paragraph out of it · concede the strongest opposing point and answer it · turn the question into one about measurement · the cleft, once, at the end.
Below, a second essay with four sentences removed.
Four sentences have been removed. Put each one back where it belongs.
Return is usually treated as the natural end of a migration, and as a kind of success. [1]
The assumption is that somebody who leaves intends to come back, and that coming back completes the story. [2] What accumulates instead is a set of small commitments — a lease, a school, a job that would be difficult to explain leaving.
[3] Each is reversible on its own; almost none of them is reversible together.
Admittedly, some people do return, and some of them describe it exactly as the story does. [4] A category that includes both the person who chose to come home and the person whose visa ended is not measuring one thing.
It was never the intention that decided who returned. It was the number of things that had quietly attached themselves to staying.
Register, and the chain it runs on
Rewrite each line for an argumentative essay. Keep the point; lose the speech, the padding and the false emphasis.
Spoken → essay register
Basically the thing is that cities are only good if you’ve already got money, obviously.
Announcement → argument
In this essay I am going to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of migration.
Topic-fronted → repacked
The people who leave, they are usually the ones who could afford to.
Over-signposted → chained
Housing is expensive. Furthermore, however, deposits are high. Moreover, leases are long.
Overstated → precise
It is completely obvious that everyone would move if they could.
Six sentences from drafts. Four are cohesion or packaging; two are what 330 words cannot afford.
1. In this essay I will discuss migration and its effects. — 330 words
2. The deposit, it is the real barrier.
3. Housing is expensive, however deposits are the real problem.
4. Furthermore, the opposite is true in smaller towns.
5. In conclusion, migration has advantages and disadvantages for everyone.
6. What decides who can come it is the entry cost.
Write it
Task card · Writing · Alone · 17 minutes
Write a 330-word essay on a question about mobility or migration — the one from Lesson 5, or a better one since.
Five moves, in order. Seventeen minutes writing, six checking.
- Open by conceding the standard view and limiting it. No announcement paragraph.
- Name the real mechanism and build a paragraph out of it, sentence by sentence.
- Concede the strongest opposing point in full — admittedly — and answer it — nevertheless.
- Make one move about measurement: what is being counted, and what is being reported as though it were the same thing.
- Use the cleft once, at the end.
- Before you hand it over, write the first three words of each sentence down the margin.
Task card · Checking · Pairs · 6 minutes
Swap. Read the column first and the essay second.
Six minutes, four answers, written where the writer can see them.
- Read the margin column aloud. Does it chain? Mark the first entry that does not.
- Count the discourse markers. For any above four, ask whether the relation is nameable.
- Find the concession. Is the opposing point given at full strength, or at a strength that was easy to answer?
- Find the cleft. Is there exactly one, and is it on the point of the essay?
Read the column before the essay. Once you have read the essay you will supply the connections yourself out of politeness and memory. The column read cold is the only honest test.
What the column showed
Two questions.
1. Where did your column first stop chaining?
2. How strong was your concession?
The column, the concession, the cleft
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. Where does an essay most often lose its thread?
2. How many clefts in a 330-word essay?
Next. The same argument, spoken, to people who will ask which position they are hearing — and a look back at the unit.