Abigail Lipson

[1] The article “Learning: A Momentary Stay Against Confusion” by Abigail Lipson tackles the process of learning by analyzing the learning path that passes through “clarity” and “confusion”. Lipson uses examples from her personal experience, diagrams and quotations from professional sources to examine the topic and reach a conclusion on the effects of clarity and confusion in our learning experience in life. She defines clarity as the phase in which we are sure of our knowledge. As a result we feel comfortable with it and tend to choose it over confusion (11). Confusion phase, on the other hand, is when we encounter new and challenging material and we feel less confident and comfortable with ourselves (11). In the end of the article, Lipson

comes to a conclusion that even though clarity is what we lean on, confusion is the phase that creates the opportunities to learn and grow. Hence, when we feel clear on topics, we should open ourselves for confusions and consecutively learning while comforting ourselves that we will reach clarity after confusion (11). For reaching these conclusions and convincing the reader into her claims, Lipson benefits from a persuasive structure and supportive evidences while maintaining a non-aggressive argumentative tone.
[2] For being structurally convincing, Lipson uses a circular path to express her ideas. While the paper opens with a quotation from Robert Frost, giving us a hint about the introduction; after reaching the conclusions, the arguments again tie to Frost’s quote to complete the circle. In this way, the reader can connect the initial claim of the paper to the conclusion that they reached after exploring different ideas. Moreover Lipson does not openly state her thesis until the very end of the article. The reader first experiences a phase of confusion and learning through the paper, and then finally reaches the thesis in the conclusion reaching a new level of clarity. In this way, they can experience the circular path themselves making the argument more relevant to their lives. Apart from using circular Frost path, Lipson also uses a divided structure in her paper to make it more organized and in a way more persuasive. After getting the introduction, the reader can see an example, followed by an explanation of that example, and quotes to further analyze the given example each section identified with a number to make it clearer. With this method, the reader can build the knowledge step by step and can go back to distinctly separated pervious steps to clarify everything.
[3] Apart from the structure, Lipson benefits from diagrams, examples and quotations form professionals as supportive elements for strengthening her claims.

In the beginning, she uses a scenario which she experienced before of a student discussing the probability of heads and tails of a coin. The student is sure about their knowledge but then gets confused about their knowledge to finally reach a more complex clarity (3-5). By using this example, Lipson brings a visual aspect to the paper where the reader can actually picture real life situation. After explaining the example, Lipson immediately introduces Piaget’s terms of “assimilation” and “accommodation” to strengthen her claim by supporting it with a professional’s definition. Here while Lipson defines Piaget’s assimilation as “the incorporation of experience into already existing cognitive structures” while also showing in which lines this can be seen in her student-teacher example (6). She then defines accommodation, as the phase when the cognitive structure changes to adapt to the environmental demands. The reader can this way relate clarity to assimilation, and confusion to accommodation phase which are already defined by a developmental biologist making it more convincing. After tackling the example in depth, to target the visual stimulus in the readers, Lipson creates a diagram of learning which includes “Initial State, Resistance, Disruption, Reorganization” and “Final State” where she analyzes the students’ behaviors and teachers’ reactions to make her abstract argument a more tangible one (8). This helps the reader to simplify the idea given in the text, but also connect it to real life by the example reactions given by the students and teachers in every phase (8). Finally, Lipson criticizes her diagram by saying that “It doesn’t describe every learning experience. (10)” In this way, she gets the chance of replying a possible criticism which results in an increased trust from the reader. After

explaining that all these were specific examples and that they cannot be applied to every learning process, Lipson explains what the reader can gain from this specific one. By this way, the reader is not only convinced by the previous supportive material, but also can see that what they read was actually helpful and applicable in real life.
[4] Even though the paper discusses about the learning process and how these paths are a part of it, it does not directly make an aggressive claim. Lipson shares her way of defining the learning process by giving examples, and never states that this is the only way that this can be done. This makes it much easier for the reader to be convinced to the paper as they are not opposing an aggressive claim, but rather learning about Lipson’s opinions. Both by the paper’s structure and by the evidence it uses, the reader can convince themselves to see how learning process consists of confusion and clarity paths, and how these paths can lead to real life uses without being have to be persuaded that Lipson’s statements are the only truth.