Marianne Meye Thompson has pushed me towards written precision more than any other educator I’ve had. It’s a bittersweet blessing, of course, because it hurts to have your flaws exposed (I know, it’s difficult to imagine me having flaws). But it makes you stronger. In class today, she shared with us some of the most common advice that she writes on papers. One of the highlights for me is her emphasis on making arguments, rather than assertions. The blogging world is, of course, heavily tilted to the side of assertions. That statement itself is a case in point. I do not provide any evidentiary support to show that the blogging world is full of assertions, but I think it’s something that most of us can agree on. It’s a pithy medium, given to terse and often pejorative thoughts. One may see a few exceptions to the rule (and one hopes one would find these exceptions within biblical studies blogs), but it seems they are simply exceptions.

When writing essays, however, scholars and especially scholars-in-the-making need to rely on tedious argumentation to establish their point. Dr. Thompson says: “The following things do not ‘count’ as arguments: (1) The interpretation of another scholar or even the ‘majority view’ or ‘the established consensus’; (2) your opinion; (3) any body’s opinion.” She points out that you should never say “I think that” or “in my opinion,” but should rather give reasonings and simply remove those phrases. “Similarly,” she writes, “don’t say ‘this argument is convincing’ unless you say why or how it is convincing.”

Here’s an example. One famous essay that we read for our class states:

Nevertheless, it has become abundantly clear that the Johannine literature is the product not of a lone genius but of a community or group of communities that evidently persisted with some consistent identity over a considerable span of time.

The author offers no support. He doesn’t even quote other scholars who make the argument for the putative “Johannine community.” He simply asserts it as fact. Dr. Thompson brought this quotation up in class discussion when we went over the essay a few weeks ago, but she has trained my reading eye so well that I had already marked the sentence and wrote in big letters next to it: “ASSERTION! Why is it clearly the product of a community?” Writing qualifiers like “abundantly” does not make it any more of a valid argument.

One cannot support every single assertion in a paper, of course. It would otherwise become the longest paper ever produced. So we need to make wise choices about which assertions are the most crucial to the argument (the assertion quoted above is quite crucial to his argument). And when we are starting out in scholarship, Dr. Thompson offered, it’s better to err on the side of support.

It seems like a simple distinction to make (assertion vs. argumentation), but I was never quite so cognizant of its importance until coming to Fuller. I think I generally tried to follow the rule, but I just didn’t do it intentionally. And when becoming a better writer and finding my scholarly voice, intentionality is of the utmost importance. And with that assertion, I shall end my thought for today.