Opinion Essay Write-In Supports Dialogue Across Difference Initiative

Sue Mendelsohn and Aaron Ritzenberg, both senior lecturers in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, have won a Dialogue Across Difference Seed Grant for their project, Opinion Essay Write-in.

Dialogue Across Difference, an Office of the Provost initiative, aims to support new spaces for critical, difficult conversations that promote constructive dialogue with mutual respect and understanding. The seed grants are designed to fund collaborative, faculty-led projects that engage Columbia professors, students, and staff.

“The opportunity to meaningfully engage with diverse perspectives is at the heart of every great university,” said Provost Angela Olinto when announcing the seed grant recipients back in May. “There is no substitute for being able to respectfully talk through difficult issues, and to learn from differing points of view.”

Mendelsohn and Ritzenberg sat down with Columbia News to discuss Opinion Essay Write-In, and how it supports the Dialogue Across Difference program.

How did your project, Opinion Essay Write-In, come about?

Nearly all Columbia undergraduates take University Writing, a one-semester seminar designed to facilitate their entry into the university’s intellectual life by teaching them to become more capable, independent readers and writers. The course’s culminating assignment is an opinion essay. Hundreds of students have published their opinion essays—in publications ranging from The New York Times to The Jerusalem Post to Task and Purpose to South China Morning Post—and we’d like to see even more get published. We know that students are writing in a charged political environment, and we want to give them the tools they need to be effective participants in the public sphere. The Opinion Essay Write-in is our way of offering those tools.

Our wonderful colleague, Columbia Writing Center Coordinator Jason Ueda,proposed the idea for the Opinion Essay Write-in during a meeting of the Undergraduate Writing Program’s Racial Justice Working Group. And a few years ago, we published a writing handbook, How Scholars Write, with a chapter on public writing. So we thought we’d be the right people to run with Jason’s idea. Our colleagues Michael Druffel, Abby Melick, Barbara Paulus, Sarah Yukiko Ng, and Liz Walters were eager to collaborate. The Dialogue Across Difference grant is allowing us to create opportunities for students to try out ideas before subjecting them to scrutiny in today’s hyper-contentious public sphere.

How does Opinion Essay Write-in support the purpose of the Dialogue Across Difference program?

The opinion essay is an ideal genre to bring to the Dialogue Across Difference program because it asks academic writers to communicate with readers who may not share the same backgrounds or perspectives. To write across that sort of difference is a learned skill that requires careful research and analysis, as well as the ability to consider new perspectives. It’s a skill we feel invested in teaching, especially right now. 

We’re at a moment where the stakes for political speech are high. It would be understandable for students to retreat to the safety of silence to avoid the risk of being misunderstood or criticized. But we emphasize to our students that the consequences of staying silent can sometimes be riskier than the consequences of speaking. If people of good conscience don’t speak and publish, we cede public discourse to demagogues. In 1927, Columbia Professor John Dewey put it another way: “The cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy.” (The Public and Its Problems). The greater diversity of thoughtful opinions we encounter, the more informed choices we can make as citizens. 

What form will Opinion Essay Write-In take?

We’re planning three hours of programming to help University Writing students with the opinion essays they’ll be working on for their classes. We’re building this around the Op-Ed Event, a lively panel discussion hosted every semester by Glenn Michael Gordon, the Undergraduate Writing Program’s assistant director. Following the event, 120 undergraduates will cycle through four mini-lessons taught by Undergraduate Writing Program faculty and graduate teaching fellows:

• How to speak in the world as a Columbia student
• How to demonstrate ethical listening in your writing
• How to write about and for people who are different from you
• How to change other’s minds . . . and change your own

After the mini-lessons, students will take part in a guided writing session, where they will begin drafting their opinion essays and practice pitching their ideas. In the pitch sessions, Writing Center consultants will help students make choices that are rhetorically effective and capture the complexity of real-world debates. 

In today's polarized climate, do you think it has become harder to get an opinion essay published?

We can’t speak to how hard or easy it is to get published right now, but we think it’s fair to say that people are listening less and less to one another. Indeed, as many thinkers have pointed out, media has become more insular, and echo chambers have become more difficult to escape. 

Are there any tips you can share for those aiming to get such an essay published?

For Columbia alums, the lessons you learned in University Writing still apply. We suggest that you think of your opinion piece as an inquiry-driven essay. Instead of starting with a stance, start with a genuine question. Then think of your readers: How do they see the world? What do they assume? How have they approached the question you’re raising? How does your approach offer new insight? 

In the spirit of the Core Curriculum, we turn to Aristotle to address these questions. In On Rhetoric, Aristotle argues that people judge speech not only on its logic, but also on their impressions of the speaker’s ethos. He describes three qualities that form a compelling ethos, or character: practical wisdom (phronesis), virtue (arete), and goodwill (eunoia). We think that one way to demonstrate these qualities is to convey how well you listen to others. Indeed, skeptical readers resist arguments that come across as strident and righteous. Instead, they’re drawn to those who grapple with others’ ideas in good faith. Some of the most persuasive opinion pieces we’ve seen come from writers who have changed their own minds as a result of new evidence and new thinking. When writers show a willingness to change their own minds, readers are more likely to consider changing theirs.