Questions to check the essay over

Preparing to Write

1. Have I explored the prewriting questions through brainstorming, freewriting, journal entries, direct questions, or clustering?

2. Do I understand my topic or assignment?

3. Have I narrowed my topic adequately?

4. Do I have a specific audience for my essay? Do I know their likes and dislikes? Their educational level? Their knowledge about the topic?

5. Do I have a clear and precise purpose for my essay?

Writing

1. Can I express my topic as a problem or question?

2. Is my essay a solution or an answer to that problem or question?

Rewriting

Revising the Content

1. Does my essay have a clear, interesting title?

2. Will my statement of purpose (or thesis) be clear to my audience?

3. Will the introduction make my audience want to read the rest of my essay?

4. Do I pursue my topic consistently throughout the essay?

5. Have I included enough details to prove my main points?

6. Does my conclusion sum up my central points?

7. Will I accomplish my purpose with this audience?

Revising the Form

1. Have I organized my ideas as effectively as possible for this audience?

2. Do I use appropriate rhetorical strategies to support my main point?

3. Is my sentence structure varied and interesting?

4. Is my vocabulary appropriate for my topic, my purpose, and my audience?

5. Do I present my essay as effectively as possible, including useful graphic design techniques on the computer, if appropriate?

Editing and Proofreading

1. Have I written complete sentences throughout my essay?

2. Have I used punctuation correctly and effectively (check especially the use of commas, colons, and semicolons)?

3. Have I followed conventional rules for mechanics (capital­ization, underlining or italics, abbreviations, and numbers)?

4. Are all the words in my essay spelled correctly?

So, as you approach the essays in this text, remember that both reading and writing function most efficiently as processes of discovery. Through them, you educate and expand your own mind and the minds of your readers. They can provide a powerful means of discovering new information or clarifying what you already know. Reading and writing lead to understanding. And just as you can discover how to read through writing, so you can become more aware of the details of the writing process through reading.

LEWIS THOMAS (1913)

Lewis Thomas is a physician who is currently president emeritus of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and scholar-in-residence at the Cornell University Medical Center in New York City. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Medical School, he was formerly head of pathology and dean of the New York University-Bellevue Medical Center and dean of the Yale Medical School. In addition to having written over two hundred scientific papers on virology and immunology, he has authored many popular scientific essays, some of which have been collected in Lives of a Cell (1974), The Medusa and the Snail (1979), Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony (1983), and Etcetera, Etcetera (1990). The memoirs of his distinguished career have been published in The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher (1983). Thomas likes to refer to his essays as “experiments in thought”: “Although I usually think I know what I'm going to be writing about, what I'm going to say, most of the time it doesn't happen that way at all. At some point I get misled down a garden path. I get surprised by an idea that I hadn't anticipated getting, which is a little bit like being in a laboratory”.

The following essay, which originally appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine (January 1976), illustrates the clarity and ease with which Thomas explains complex scientific topics. As you prepare to read this essay, take a few moments to think about the role mistakes play in our lives:

· What are some memorable mistakes you have made in your life?

· Did you learn anything important from any of these errors?

· Do you make more or fewer mistakes than other people you know?

· Do you see any advantages to making mistakes? Any disadvantages?

TO ERR IS HUMAN

Everyone must have had at least onepersonal experience with a computer error by this time. Bank balances are suddenly reported to have jumped from $379 into the millions, appeals for charitable contributions are mailed over and over to people with crazy sounding names at your address, department stores send the wrong bills, utility companies write that they're turning everything off, that sort of thing. If you manage to get in touch with someone and complain, you then get instantaneously typed, guilty letters from the same computer, saying, “Our computer was in error, and an adjustment is being made in your account”.

These are supposed to be the sheerest, blindest accidents. Mistakes are not believed to be part of the normal behavior of a good machine. If things go wrong, it must be a personal, human error, the result of fingering, tampering, a button getting stuck, someone hitting the wrong key. The computer, at its normal best, is infallible.

I wonder whether this can be true. After all, the whole point of computers is that they represent an extension of the human brain, vastly improved upon butnonetheless human, superhuman maybe.

A good computer can think clearly and quickly enough to beat you at chess, and some of them have even been programmed to write obscure verse. They can do anything we can do, and more besides.

It is not yet known whether a computer has its own consciousness, and it would be hard to find out about this. When you walk into one of those great halls now built for the huge machines, and stand listening, it is easy to imagine that the faint, distant noises are the sound of thinking, and the turning of the spools gives them the look of wild creatures rolling their eyes in the effort to concentrate, choking with information. But real thinking, and dreaming, are other matters.

On the other hand, the evidences of something like an unconscious, equivalent to ours, are all around, in every mail. As extensions of the human brain, they have been constructed with the same property of error, spontaneous, uncontrolled, and rich in possibilities.

Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones. We get along in life this way. We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.

We learn, as we say, by “trial and error”. Why do we always say that?Why not “trial and rightness”or “trial and triumph?” The old phrase puts it that way because that is, in real life, the way it is done.

A good laboratory, like a good bank or a corporation or government, has to run like a computer. Almost everything is done flawlessly, by the book, and all the numbers add up to the predicted sums. The days go by. And then, if it is a lucky day, and a lucky laboratory, somebody makes a mistake: the wrong buffer, something in one of the blanks, a decimal misplaced in reading counts, the warm room off by a degree and a half, a mouse out of his box, or just a misreading of the day's protocol. Whatever, when the results come in, something is obviously screwed up, and then the action can begin.

The misreading is not the important error; it opens the way. The next step is the crucial one. If the investigator can bring himself to say, “But even so, look at that!” then the new finding, whatever it is, is ready for snatching. What is needed, for progress to be made, is the move based on error.

Whenever new kinds of thinking are about to be accomplished, or new varieties of music, there has to be an argument beforehand. With two sides debating in the same mind, haranguing, there is an amiable understanding that one is right and the other wrong. Sooner or later the thing is settled, but there can be no action at all if there are not the two sides, and the argument. The hope is in the faculty of wrongness, the tendency toward error. The capacity to leap across mountains of information to land lightly on the wrong side represents the highest of human endowments.

It may be that this is a uniquely human gift, perhaps even stipulated in our genetic instructions. Other creatures do not seem to have DNA sequences for making mistakes as a routine part of daily living, certainly not for programmed error as a guide for action.

We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, one bound to be wrong, and the richness of selection in such situations can lift us onto totally new ground. This process is called exploration and is based on human fallibility. If we had only a single center in our brains, capable of responding only when a correct decision was to be made, instead of the jumble of different, credulous, easily conned clusters of neurones that provide for being flung off into blind alleys, up trees, down dead ends, out into blue sky, along wrong turnings, around bends, we could only stay the way we are today, stuck, fast.

The lower animals do not have this splendid freedom. They are limited, most of them, to absolute infallibility. Cats, for all their good side, never make mistakes. I have never seen a maladroit, clumsy, or blundering cat. Dogs are sometimes fallible, occasionally able to make charming minor mistakes, but they get this way by trying to mimic their masters. Fish are flawless in everything they do. Individual cells in a tissue are mindless machines, perfect in their performance, as absolutely inhuman as bees.

Close Work with the text

Meaning

1. According to Thomas, in what ways are computers and humans similar? In what ways are they different?

2. According to Thomas, in what important way do humans and “lower” animals differ? What does this comparison have to do with Thomas's main line of reasoning?

3. What is Thomas's main point in this essay? How do the references to computers help him make this point?

Method

1. Thomas explains that an argument must precede the beginning of something new and different. Do you think this is an accurate observation? Explain your answer.