The Tight rope between bias and interest

To me, what makes a good essay? Whether it is an essay that I have written, or an essay I read, to me a good essay is one that is on a subject of interest to me, and is also presented in a convincing, non-biased way. Agreement with the authors point is secondary to me. It is more important that I am interested in the subject then that I agree with the author on everything. However, reading an essay I disagree with does get me riled up, and while that’s fine sometimes, it’s also nice to have the occasional essay that I agree with.
Sometimes what causes bias in an essay is having a preconceived idea about what the author is saying. Sometimes I might have a preconceived idea based on from whom I received the information. Is my teacher a liberal. Chances are she or he is going to give me liberal material that I should “of course” be automatically discarded. The opposite of having a bias against something is believing everything. Since I am conservatively minded when I have a conservative teacher it’s easy to believe that I’m going to agree with everything that the teacher presents. I might not stop to question weather or not I agree with the teacher.
Another way I form a bias for or against an essay is through a preconceived idea from what the author said somewhere else. When in his essay, The Owl Has Flown, Sven Birkerts writes that “wisdom has nothing to do with the gathering or organizing of facts” I assumed throughout the rest of the essay that he was saying that no facts are helpful for gaining wisdom, but now looking back on the essay I believe that Birkerts may have been saying that it’s not just the amount of facts that we gather, but also the quality of the facts. While Birkerts and I might disagree on several things, we may not disagree on quite as much as I assumed we did at first.
Do I avoid biasness in my writings? Not as much as I wish I did. Several times in my reading responses I have slammed the author when I really agreed with him or her on several issues. Sometimes my preconceived biasness causes me to believe that the author was speaking against a subject when all along he is just making his readers aware of a subject. In his essay, The Loss of the Creature, Walker Percy examines expectations. I believed that he was saying that all expectations are bad when in fact he might have been more trying to make us aware of them then proving them to be wrong. I think he did still have a slight tend against expectations, but he probably wasn’t as against it as I had thought him to be.
What is biasness and why is it wrong in an essay? Biasness is the lack of coherent thought. It is the ignoring of facts of the other side. I may believe that the reasons to believe one side of an argument outweigh the reasons on the other side, but there are almost always those reasons for the other side. To ignore the reasons for the other side, and even say that they don’t exist, causes me to loose credit with my readers. My readers start believing that I am not smart enough to see that there are two sides to every coin. Biasness causes a person to abandon reasoning of both sides of the evidence for ranting about why your side is right and the other side is wrong. It quite often leaves out important facts and illustrations such as was true in Disney World. Biasness will cause my readers to loose faith in my ability to be trusted as a thinker.
Why do I need to pick a subject that I am interested in to write about? Because other wise the essay will turn out very uninteresting. I have lots of friends who are extremely into sports, but I could probably only name three or four Mariners and even fewer Seahawks. I’m sure my friends could write an excellent paper on sports. However if I tried to write a paper on sports it would turn out horribly because I’m not interested in sports. I know that there once was a baseball player nick-named Babe Ruth – on what team and at what position he played I have no idea. Moreover I don’t care to have any idea. Now what would an essay I wrote on a subject I had no idea about and had very little desire to know anything about look like? Pretty darn bad. There would be no soul. It would probably be a list of boring facts that I found in research books. Now who wants to read a bunch of boring facts? No one. So that’s why it’s important to write about something that I’m interested in. I really enjoyed the personal analytical essay a lot because it allowed me to talk about two subjects of interest to me – architecture and my future.
One thing that this class has taught me is to find a balance in-between interest and biasness. Why is finding the balance important? Because an essay written on a subject of no interest to me will turn out retched. However an essay written on a subject that I am passionate about, but was written in a biased way will also turn out unconvincing. It is important to harness interest into examining all the facts not just spouting out my opinion. The readers will loose interest either because I am not interested in the subject as a whole, or because I am not willing to be interested in addressing the other side. When I loose the interest of my readers, what good is an essay?
How do I find the balance in between biasness and passion? Do I? Unfortunately not always. In my reading response to Susan Willis’s Disney World, I ranted against, of all things, ranting. Given the opportunity, I normally don’t have a problem with writing on a subject of interest to me. However sometimes I do have a hard time calmly discussing both sides of the argument and rationally showing the reader how it is that I came to my conclusion about the subject. I now realize that to rationally discuss all the evidence is far more convincing than dogmatically stating my view. This does not compromise my views, rather it allows me to share them in a far more convincing manner. And that makes it a far better essay.