SCREENPLAY STRUCTURE AS ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAY STRUCTURE: CAN NARRATIVE KNOWLEDGE HELP STUDENTS WRITE STRONGER ACADEMIC ESSAYS?

This qualitative study explores the question of whether screenplay structure knowledge can help students to write stronger argumentative essays, connecting to the notion that defaulting to the standard five-paragraph essay is in many ways too limiting and that it does not adequately promote individual style. The collected data is comprised of short informal writing submissions from twenty-four college freshmen, as well as interviews with fifteen members of that larger group. The students attended a semester of the author’s Composition 101 class at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In that class, the author taught a unit that led to each student writing an argumentative essay which included three elements drawn from screenplay structure. In particular, using the movie Aladdin, the author taught his students to leave “breadcrumbs” throughout their introductions in order to make their arguments more cohesive in the way that movies establish significant elements in their first acts that connect to story beats that occur later; to think of counterarguments as villains in order to strengthen the counterargument and, ultimately, to underscore the strength of the main argument; and to connect their introductions to their conclusions in order to reduce the repetition of their conclusion, just as a movie’s ending is not simply a repeat of its beginning. Throughout the study, the author determined that though this approach was decidedly helpful in leading students to think differently about their own writing, the research presented here is not equipped to answer the original question of whether this approach leads to stronger argumentative writing, as the study does not include a baseline collection of essays with which to make a comparison. That said, several of the study’s participants acknowledge that they believe their writing has improved. In particular, the participants responded positively to the counterargument-as-villain perspective and the connection between introductions and conclusions, even as they acknowledged confusion about how to implement “breadcrumbs.”