Dumbing Down an Argument

I decided to edit Mark Bauerlein’s The Chronicle of Higher Education blog post, ‘Society Is Dumbing Down’. Similar to his other writing on his blog, Bauerlein’s writing in his blog is straight to the point, as in, he does not make use of flowery language and anecdotes. However, when aiming to write straight to the point, one should, in fact, have a point.

This post has major issues regarding clarification. Bauerlein’s implicit and incomplete argument leaves readers wondering what the point of his post is. 

Clarity is the biggest issue here because a reader actually has to assume, based on the title no less, what the author’s claim is. The title of a piece should give a reader an idea of what might be discussed, but should not be the only place where the main point of the work lies. I assume, based on the title and general flow of the piece, that the author’s purpose is to inform and persuade readers, but he does very little of either due to an almost complete lack of information. Without the title, I would probably be thoroughly confused about the direction of this article. As I began reading his post, I assumed Bauerlein’s included evidence would support the claim that society is dumbing down; however, the evidence alone is too insufficient to do so.

He only writes about five lines in this blog post. The remaining content is entirely quoted material. Bauerlein does not include supporting evidence for why he included what he included. The piece could be greatly improved upon with his explanation of his motives and some reaction to the research. It is one thing to let the facts speak for themselves, but this is not written in a compelling enough way for that to be the case. It is nice that he uses specific evidence and distinctly embraces intertextuality, but the article is lacking substance and the evidence does not clearly support any claims. Bauerlein does little to bring any additional information or context to his argument. He does provide links for the reader to learn more about the study, however the majority of the links are broken.

In his post, Bauerlein reduces a complex argument to key points, which is impressive, but the way in which he does so causes readers to lose all the important information, including the general basis for why his argument exists. There is also a serious issue with obscurity. He does not make any original claims and he does nothing to aide readers’ understanding. 

Technically Bauerlein includes transitions in “Society is Dumbing Down,” but readers are unable to follow his thought process since he does not expound on how he links one claim with a subsequent one. The lack of logical transitions, in addition to the bland organization of the piece, erases the distinction between supporting quotes and major claims. The reader has no way to identify which parts of the piece create the main idea because the author does not expand or comment on any of the piece’s components.

Since most of the article consists of quotations there is not much room for line editing. I did, however, edit the organization, use of the quotes, and apparent gaps in the post. My strength in editing this piece lies in being able to recognize what is wrong. An unfortunate weakness is my limitation in fixing the main problem due to lack of context and inability to create Bauerlein’s claims for him.