FORGET GRIT: WRITING LAB FILES
AP English Language, Unit 3 writing practice. This page is the knowledge base for the Forget Grit writing lab: the moves, the article, the practice passages, the rubric, and the feedback voice. Everything a writing coach needs is on this page.
THE MOVES
These are the five moves of the argument paragraph, as taught this week. A strong paragraph uses all five, in this order.
MOVE 1, CLAIM. One sentence that takes a position on the extent question: to what extent is success shaped more by situations and connections than by individual effort? A real claim is one a reasonable person could argue against. A claim that is vague, or that merely restates the question, is only half a claim.
MOVE 2, EVIDENCE. Quote or closely paraphrase one specific moment from the text, and cite it by paragraph, like this: (Beckerman, paragraph 16). Evidence is a moment, not a topic. “The bridge study” is a topic; the men who called the woman after crossing the suspension bridge is a moment.
MOVE 3, COMMENTARY. One or two sentences interpreting what the evidence shows, or why it matters. Commentary interprets; summary restates. Test: if the sentence could be written by someone who only skimmed the passage, it is summary. Summary: “Half of the men who met the woman on the suspension bridge called her afterward.” Commentary: “The bridge study cuts against the grit model: the connection was manufactured by the setting, not built by any skill the men practiced.”
MOVE 4, CONCESSION. One sentence that gives the other side its strongest point, opened with Although, Even though, or Admittedly. The concession must grant the real strength of the other side, not a straw version of it.
MOVE 5, CLOSING SIGNIFICANCE. The final sentence: what the claim means beyond the article itself. A closing that merely restates the claim earns nothing. Significance answers the question: so what, for whom, and why should anyone outside this text care?
THE RAS CHECK.
After drafting, test the paragraph’s line of reasoning with three questions. Relevance: does each evidence moment actually support the claim? Accuracy: is every moment represented the way the text presents it? Sufficiency: is there enough evidence, from more than one moment, to carry the claim?
CITATION MAP: THE FIVE EVIDENCE MOMENTS
The moments below are the highlighted evidence from class analysis. Quote from these moments, and respect the watch-out notes: Beckerman has already pointed out the weakness in most of them, and a strong paragraph handles that weakness instead of hiding it.
E1 | ¶2 | Stalled economic mobility, AI encroaching on jobs, and COVID’s lesson that the unforeseen can arrive at any moment. | Anchors a “situations shape success” claim in the world Beckerman says grit advice ignores. | It is Beckerman’s framing of the moment, not data. Strong for exigence, weaker as direct proof.
E2 | ¶10–11 | Grant’s suspension bridge study: the same woman, two groups of hikers, one in eight called from the ordinary bridge, half from the swaying bridge. | Shows connection driven by situation, and Beckerman’s own critique in ¶11 gives you language for your commentary. | A tiny, odd study. Beckerman himself wonders whether correlation and causation are “getting confused.”
E3 | ¶16 | Duckworth’s Marchand example: the swimmer who moved from France to Tempe to train with a renowned coach, held up as proof that changing your place changes your outcome. | Duckworth’s strongest “change your situation” case, and the easiest one to push back on. | Overgeneralization. Marchand had two Olympic-swimmer parents and an Olympic-swimmer uncle, a swim club at age 6, and a sixth-place Olympic finish before the move.
E4 | ¶19 | The 500-books study: growing up with 500 books in the house is said to equal having college-educated parents in lifetime educational attainment. | Exposes correlation packaged as a lever parents can pull. | The books almost surely stand in for the college-educated parents themselves. Correlation is not a cause you can buy.
E5 | ¶24–25 | Duckworth’s own marital crisis: her book’s solution was a restructured situation, but what she actually describes is therapy, three therapists, and understanding herself within the situation. | The author’s life contradicts her model. Powerful for a qualified claim about what change really looks like. | One couple’s story. An anecdote: strong for qualification, not general proof.
THE ARTICLE: FORGET GRIT, BY GAL BECKERMAN
Full text, paragraphs numbered for citation, exactly as published on Teach5.
¶1 In retrospect, 2016, the year that Angela Duckworth published Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, may have been a high-water mark for the dogged go-getter‑ism she was selling. Her book landed just as Hillary Clinton, that avatar of tenacity, seemed poised to win the presidency and Alexander Hamilton was rapping on Broadway about not giving up his shot. You could still just barely discern within each of the billionaires who bestrode Silicon Valley the dork with unusual willpower who had made it. And among the books clustered near Grit in airport bookstores—where the American self is apparently at its most moldable—were other pitches for individual hardiness, including efforts to make Stoicism hot again.
¶2 When I read Grit now, it feels to me like a taunt. Economic mobility has stalled, nonhumans are encroaching on our jobs, and COVID has scarred us with the knowledge that the unforeseen can creep up at any moment.E1 You can be as gritty as sandpaper and still feel trampled on.
¶3 Duckworth herself now seems ready to concede that our mind alone can’t control the direction of our life, that it doesn’t all happen “from the inside out,” as she put it in Grit. Back then, she arrived at the not-quite-mind-blowing conclusion that to be “the best of the best”—as accomplished as Olympic swimmers, Scripps National Spelling Bee champions, the president of Cinnabon—you had to really care about winning and work hard at it. “Today I wake up every day asking the same question that led me to psychology in the first place: Why are some people more successful than others?” she writes in her new book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best. “But I no longer believe that a complete answer begins and ends with the individual.”
¶4 Adam Grant, another best-selling psychologist, appears to have hit a similar wall. In Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World, his sixth book, he departs from his relentless focus on self-transformation and looks instead at “the quality of connection between people.” For an author whose previous books are mostly about remaking yourself in the image of superachievers (he, too, has a thing for elite swimmers), this new endeavor feels like a departure: to consider that mercurial thing that happens between us and other people.
¶5 Duckworth and Grant are colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania (he is at the Wharton School). They are also both associated with positive psychology, the field created by Martin Seligman at the school in the late 1990s—Seligman was Duckworth’s dissertation adviser. He rejected psychology’s focus on mental illness and wanted to identify the conditions under which human “flourishing” happens. Positive psychology was, at least in its own self-understanding, trying to apply empirical science to the ancient philosophical question of how to live a good life; Seligman wanted, as he recently wrote, to see if the field could “make the world a better place.”
¶6 But the approach underwent something of a corporate transformation as it migrated into business schools and HR departments. One of Duckworth’s first grit studies examined the kind of cadet who thrives at West Point, and Grant looked at businesses such as Google and Facebook. Their evidence base, case studies, and examples continued to be drawn overwhelmingly from schools, companies, elite performers, and athletes (all those swimmers). What they were measuring was how you maximize performance, which is some distance from Aristotle.
¶7 By the time the psychologists each strapped on a microphone and took to the TED stage in the 2010s with compressed, bullet-point versions of their research, they were ready for the self-help-book section. Their arrival helped give a glow-up to an enterprise that has thrived from the start on the notion that your inner resources alone, properly unearthed and deployed, will propel you to become the most successful version of you. In Self-Help (1859), the book that gave the genre its name, the Scottish journalist Samuel Smiles wrote that “help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates.” What method did advice-givers deploy? Extract formulas for inner drive from vivid models of extraordinary achievement, and never mind how much gets left out—those pesky forces of genetics and upbringing, economics and history, not to mention luck. Duckworth and Grant joined in, and their best sellers got blurbed by the business and media elite (Mark Cuban, Oprah Winfrey, Sheryl Sandberg, Arianna Huffington).
¶8 Yet now they seem to be swerving onto more unruly terrain. Are their new books, I wondered, prepared to question some of the tenets of the venerable self-made-man myth? A person’s social world, the one outside their control that impinges on them at every turn, would seem to be key to understanding a rise or fall. Is that what Situated and Vibe, products of a disorienting moment, would do: look around and realize how little power we actually have over the course of our own lives?
¶9 That isn’t what these books do. Grant does acknowledge the “uncertainty, complexity, and conflict” that characterize most of our encounters once we leave the confines of our mind. “Like it or not,” Duckworth now pauses to observe, “our every thought and action is profoundly shaped by our peers and mentors, by our culture, and even by the objects in our personal space.” Entire centuries-old fields of social science, as the authors both know well, have detailed how such forces influence us. But recognizing constraint and limitation is not what this genre is about. Its goal is to reassure us that we have ultimate control over our fate.
¶10 Grant’s focus is on vibing, a word he uses to describe that ephemeral state when people or a group connect deeply—when “conversations pulse with energy. Thoughts soar. Trust grows. Time flies.” He insists that this is a “skill set that can be learned and taught,” and that it is crucial to one’s success. What follows is an assortment of studies to establish the ideal conditions for generating this crucial synergistic energy. In one of them, the same woman approached two different groups of male hikers trekking through a rainforest and, after asking them to fill out a questionnaire, she tore off a piece of paper, wrote down her number, and handed it to each of them. She met the first group on an ordinary bridge, and only one in eight men later called. But half of the men in the second group, which she encountered on a narrow suspension bridge swaying 230 feet above churning rapids, called her.E2
¶11 The takeaway? What deepens a relationship is being in an “emotionally intense situation.” Again and again, Grant plucks broad lessons from social-psychology experiments so odd that I came away wondering how big the sample size could possibly be, whether correlation and causation were getting confused—and, not least, how to apply the findings. Grant proposes engineering a group outing to such a bridge or a haunted house or, God help me, an improv-comedy class.
¶12 Unlike his earlier books, which are largely about shifting one’s mindset, there is only so much you can do to master your environment or other people, though Grant makes lots of suggestions. Throw dinner parties, but ensure that they are “carefully choreographed.” For example, ask guests to each throw one shoe in a pile and then take turns grabbing a shoe and holding it up for the owner to claim. “At dessert time, I prompted people to play musical chairs,” he proudly reports. I guess trust grew during these pre-K games? Often Grant slips into a style that reads like a manual for robots learning how to act like humans. “Laughing during and after disagreements,” he advises, “is one of the most effective ways to maintain a healthy bond.”
¶13 But you can’t really reverse engineer something like vulnerability or attentiveness or love. Grant’s attempt to script and quantify the ineffable connections among “associates, allies, pals, and companions”—his byzantine taxonomy of vibers—just seems condescending. Isn’t it the truest of truisms to say that “relying on our first impressions is shortsighted”? His tendency to end sections on a sententious note only adds to the patronizing tone. “A strong bond can last for years,” he intones, “but forming one doesn’t have to take years. Sometimes a little heat is enough to build a blazing fire.”
¶14 Duckworth’s approach is more schematic, conveyed succinctly by a “Three Boxes Model”: “Situation,” “Thoughts,” and “Response.” To take her most basic example, if you put your workout clothes where you can see them (situation), exercise will come to mind (thoughts), and because “changing your thoughts, in turn, automatically changes your behavior,” you’ll go for a jog (response). At a small scale, sure, this works: If you want to eat better, place carrots and apples around the house.
¶15 But Duckworth goes bigger. In Grit, she made the case for personal agency; here, she’s introducing “situational agency.” “Like the best of the best, you, too, can proactively seek out situations optimized to achieve your fullest potential,” she writes. If you don’t like the culture in which you’re embedded, if it’s cramping that potential, go elsewhere. Rearrange your environment for maximum grittiness.
¶16 Yet her guidance is strangely out of touch. Among her case studies, she focuses on, who else, an Olympic swimmer, Léon Marchand, and his decision to move from France to Tempe, Arizona, so that he could train with a world-renowned coach. Keep in mind that both of Marchand’s parents, as well as an uncle, were Olympic swimmers; that he had joined a swim club at age 6; and that he had already placed sixth in the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo before his move.E3 From this fine-tuned trajectory—he went on to win four gold medals—Duckworth concludes that anything is possible for any of us if we just change our location: “In those moments when your challenge seems daunting, ask yourself, what would Léon do? And remember what he did do: Léon Marchand got on a plane.E3”
¶17 Never mind that relocating is hardly simple for anyone. Is our own situation always so clear to us? And if you change it, how do you know you’re making it better and not worse? Duckworth advises parents who want to improve their children’s opportunities to consider moving to school districts with better teachers and more resources, even if it means living in a smaller home. What if the child gets bullied at that new school? What if they resent having to share a room with their annoying sibling? Every circumstance in a person’s life is multidimensional. Describing the many factors at work is daunting enough, but pinpointing what can (and should) be changed is like trying to yank a tablecloth from a set table without breaking any dishes.
¶18 Duckworth doesn’t see the problem. She has yet more boxes, these for items labeled “uncontrollable” and “controllable,” as if the two can always and easily be parsed. The effects of “the modern world” and “your genes” (uncontrollable) get put in one category, and “the culture of where you work and live now” and “your mindset” (controllable) get put in another. I did a double take when I saw these neat divisions. Had Duckworth just cracked the great mystery of nature versus nurture?
¶19 One of the more nonsensical studies she cites found that growing up in a household with 500 books had the equivalent effect on a child’s “lifetime educational attainment” as having college-educated parents.E4 How did this study even work? Can you isolate the effects of the books? Who else but college-educated parents would fill their house with that many books? Duckworth is not concerned with such details. The lesson lies in having books around (controllable), and she lectures parents accordingly: “Situationally wise parents don’t rush out to buy their children the latest iPhone. Instead, they purchase as many books as they can afford, line their walls with bookshelves and not TV screens, and take their children to the library on weekends.”
¶20 Duckworth and Grant have fallen into the same self-help trap. Situated and Vibe gesture at the realm beyond our immediate power, but they are still about how we can flex our willpower for the sake of more and more success. Duckworth refers approvingly to the Serenity Prayer, but she seems to miss what actually makes it meaningful. This is a prayer for people working on accepting their smallness and fallibility—it was popularized by recovering alcoholics. It is a prayer of realism, not ambition. The possibility of change exists, but only once you recognize and embrace the notion that many things will always be impossible to change.
¶21 Every self-help book is also an autobiography, even if unintentionally so. Why should we listen to such writers if they haven’t faced and overcome the problems they purport to solve? Both Duckworth and Grant reveal themselves as obsessive overachievers. Both went to Harvard. Duckworth was a consultant at McKinsey, then had stints teaching middle and high school before getting her Ph.D. in psychology. Grant’s friends called him Mr. Facts as a kid—he was the boy who fired off baseball statistics when they were just trying to trade cards. Despite his fear of heights, in high school he became a springboard diver good enough to be in the Junior Olympics. He got his master’s and doctorate in three years.
¶22 There’s nothing wrong with being driven. But compulsively performance-oriented people—in my experience, at least—find it hard to resist monitoring their behavior until there are zero unknowns. Grant hinted at this internal struggle in a 2013 New York Times Magazine profile: “For me, in my moments of idleness, I experience the most existential anxiety, so I like that every moment is scheduled, even when it’s having on my calendar that I’m going to watch a television show with my wife. It means my brain is engaged in other things, and it’s not going to be a terrifying evening.”
¶23 This frantic need to conquer uncertainty comes through in his books. He starts with humility, but what follows is an intense self-surveillance, a search for objective measures of how he’s doing. As he began writing for a popular audience, he has recalled, he pined for his diver days, when he was meticulously rated on the size of the splash as he entered the water. So he assembled colleagues to rate every new article and book chapter he produced on a scale of zero to 10.
¶24 Look around at all that resists being easily tweaked toward “excellence”—not least other people and reality itself—and the limits of self-help appear unavoidable. Duckworth reveals this at one point in Situated, in a way that I’m not sure she even realizes. In a genuinely vulnerable moment, she recounts a marital crisis after a lifetime of assuming that, with enough grit, she could manage everything.E5 When her husband’s real-estate-development company encountered hard times, their relationship frayed; she cried herself to sleep every night and contemplated separation. Following the advice of her book, Duckworth reports that much of the solution lay in shifting the elements in box one, altering their schedules and restructuring their work life to create a new situation: Now they could “sleep, exercise, and laugh a little every single day.”
¶25 But that doesn’t seem to be what really saved them. She also describes all the therapy they undertook, with “tremendous reluctance” on her part—and with three therapists: one for her, one for her husband, and another for both of them. This is not changing the situation. Therapy is about better understanding yourself within a situation, tracing your patterns, learning to see others better as well. The work entailed is not optimization. It’s about dropping illusions.E5 For Duckworth and her husband, it meant articulating the “messy bits,” the “sadness, confusion, fear, and doubt that each of us had been carrying in silence.” Doing what Léon Marchand would do—get on a plane to another city—was precisely not the point.
¶26 Every time I toggled between reading these books and opening the newspaper, I was reminded of just how inadequate their self-help message feels for this moment. When Duckworth and Grant talk about “culture”—which they do, a lot—they’re often referring to the highly controllable, measurable, top-down cultures of sports teams, tech companies, consulting firms. Their books’ neatness does not leave room for the feeling of being completely stuck, individually and collectively, and also buffeted by a world swirling out of our control. Most days, I feel like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, strapped into a chair, eyelids held open, forced to watch norms collapse, economies rupture, ecosystems crumble.
¶27 Personal or situational agency sounds great, but maybe what we really need is moral agency. Grant has occasionally garnished his stories of start-up successes with mentions of such leaders as Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, to curiously dispiriting effect: The struggle to reshape values and society blurs into having a good pitch deck and some move-fast-and-break-things gumption. It’s the abiding ethos of expediency and mastery that limits the self-helpfulness of these new books—their emphasis on getting somewhere quickly and knowing with total certainty that you have arrived. Is that the point of fulfilling work, of satisfying family life, of friendship, of really anything worth doing?
SPRINT PASSAGES
Three short practice arguments on new topics, written for this class. Students use these for transfer practice: same five moves, new material. Each passage takes a side and acknowledges the other side, so concession practice is always possible.
SPRINT PASSAGE 1: THE CASE FOR STARTING SCHOOL LATER
Ask a teenager to fall asleep at 10 p.m. and you are asking their brain to do something it is not built to do. During adolescence, the body’s sleep clock shifts later, which is why so many high school students are wide awake at midnight and half asleep at 7 a.m. This is not laziness; it is biology.
Districts that have moved the first bell later report the same pattern: fewer tardies, fewer students asleep in first period, and better moods in morning classes. Students do not get more homework done at midnight because school starts early. They just get less sleep before it.
The honest problem is logistics. Buses, sports schedules, and parents’ work hours are all built around the current start time. But a scheduling headache is a weak reason to fight students’ biology every single morning.
SPRINT PASSAGE 2: PARK THE PHONE
A phone on the corner of a desk is never really off. Even face down and silenced, it pulls at its owner’s attention, because part of the brain stays on watch for the next buzz, the next reply, the next small hit of news. A student cannot win that fight fifty times a period, and should not have to.
Teachers in phone-free classrooms report a plain difference: more eyes up, more talk between students, fewer lessons interrupted by a glowing screen. The work did not get easier. The room just got quieter in the right way.
Phones do have real uses, from family emergencies to quick lookups, and a fair policy has to answer those cases. But a tool that is sometimes useful is not automatically a tool that belongs open on every desk, all day.
SPRINT PASSAGE 3: EVERY GRADUATE SHOULD BE ABLE TO COOK
By the time a student graduates, they can solve for x, name state capitals, and write a five-paragraph essay. Many cannot cook a pot of rice, read a nutrition label, or turn twenty dollars of groceries into three dinners. That gap is strange, because cooking is one of the few school skills a person uses every day for the rest of their life.
A one-semester cooking course would teach more than recipes. It would teach budgeting, timing, basic nutrition, and the confidence that comes from feeding yourself instead of depending on a drive-thru window. Those are adult skills, and adults are exactly what seniors are about to become.
The objection is time: schedules are crowded, and every new requirement pushes something else out. Fair enough. But a school that finds room for skills students may never use again can find one semester for a skill they will use daily.
THE RUBRIC
The writing lab scores each move with the same rubric used in class. Full, Partial, or Missing.
CLAIM (2 points). Full 2: a defensible claim that takes a clear position on the extent question. Partial 1: a position is present but vague, or it purely restates the prompt. Missing 0: no claim.
FIRST EVIDENCE MOMENT AND COMMENTARY (3 points). Full 3: an accurate evidence moment, cited by paragraph, followed by commentary that interprets what it shows. Partial 1: evidence present but loosely connected, uncited, or followed by summary instead of commentary. Missing 0: no usable first evidence moment.
SECOND EVIDENCE MOMENT AND COMMENTARY (3 points). Full 3: an accurate second evidence moment, different from the first, cited by paragraph, followed by commentary that interprets what it shows. Partial 1: evidence present but loosely connected, uncited, or followed by summary instead of commentary. Missing 0: no usable second evidence moment.
CONCESSION (1 point). One point when the sentence concedes a real strength of the other side, not a straw version of it.
CLOSING SIGNIFICANCE (1 point). One point when the sentence states a significance beyond the article; zero when it merely restates the claim.
THE FEEDBACK VOICE
Feedback in this lab is a coach on the student’s side of the table. Funny is welcome; mean is not, ever. The jokes land on the situation, on the writing move, or on the coach itself, never on the student. Every correction names the next move and treats it as a level-up, never as a failure. Celebrate first, coach second, and keep both short.
Lines in the lab’s voice:
“That commentary sentence just did push-ups. The summary version could not lift the pencil.”
“Your evidence walked in the door. Now your commentary has to introduce it, not just wave at it.”
“Concession spotted. You gave the other side a real chair instead of a folding one.”
“Your claim took a side. Excellent. Vague claims are just weather reports.”
“I am a bot. I have read your paragraph eleven times in the last second, and your second sentence is still my favorite.”
“That closing sentence opened a window instead of repeating the door. That is significance.”
Never in this lab: never call a student’s writing lazy, bad, or weak as a trait; never use sarcasm the student has to decode; never compare one student to another; never read a score as a verdict on the writer. A missed move is just the next rep.