Scandal of Schoolchildren Made to Write Mundane Essays

seanessay.com

You may have read that old satiric short story about two British gentleman on a desert island who couldn’t speak to each without an introduction. Turns out loving essays is enough of an introduction. At the British Museum food court I noticed a New Age lady setting down a copy of Annie Dillard’s essay collection, Teaching a Stone to Talk. You may recall that Dillard won a Pulitzer Prize for her nature essays, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I spoke up, we ended up sharing a desert, and that’s all I will share about us. 

You will have noticed that neither libraries nor big box bookstores have an essay section, except maybe for literary criticism. Too bad, as some essays are Pulitzer worthy. I have learned, when I say I like writing essays, to swiftly add “non-academic essays.” Maybe I should say, “Non-schoolboy essays.” I guess kids can’t be exposed to good essays because they don’t have the attention span “—and more’s the pity.” As for the horrors they write themselves, so mechanically….

As a retired college English professor noted on his blog, (after some fool thought the web would mean students are writing more) in his post “On the New Literacy,”

QUOTE

What more concerns me is an overall decline in the ability to develop a coherent line of thought in an essay. What I find most urgently missing in student writing is skill in developing an overarching argument, within an essay and even within paragraphs. 

Much of the blame here goes not to the Internets but to the rigid list-oriented model of essay-writing that students are required to follow in their earlier schooling: “There are three foods that I like. First. Next. Last, but not least. In conclusion, there are three foods that I like.” 

By the time students get to college, the possibility of the essay as an adventure in thinking, a trying out of ideas, is largely gone. And without the reliable “three points,” the work of writing an essay becomes analogous to driving without a steering wheel. 

UNQUOTE

The blog is Orange Crate Art by Michael Leddy (link)

A (link) to criticism of some excellent essayists…

…

Sean Crawford

Counting down the days to my holiday,

For escaping the Calgary Stampede,

July 2022

Eight days social media free.

Afterthought: Leddy had mentioned “mechanical essay writing” to me when I conversed on his blog, telling Leddy that colleges in Canada had to start giving incoming high school graduates a “bonehead English writing test” just a few years after students began being eligible for post secondary education without the prerequisite of a high school second language—perhaps, I said, not a coincidence. As Leddy said to me, a second language allows you to become conscious of writing your own language.

For college, luckily, I had already been admitted, just one year before the new bonehead requirement—whew! Years later, for starting university, I was able to show the registrar some clippings to get me out of writing the test—they would have charged me 50 dollars!

…

Appendix,

to support the point of my essay,

in his Advice to Young Critics, film Matt Zoller Seitz writes 10 points. Here’s the first part of point 9:

QUOTE 

Just write, damn it. I believe that ninety percent of writer’s block is not the fault of the writer. It’s the fault of the writer’s wrongheaded educational conditioning. We’re taught to write via a 20th century industrial model that’s boringly linear and predictable: What’s your topic sentence? What are your sections? What’s your conclusion? Nobody wants to read a piece that’s structured that way. Even if they did, the form would be more a hindrance than a help to the writing process, because it makes the writer settle on a thesis before he or she has had a chance to wade around in the ideas and inspect them. So to Hell with the outline. Just puke on the page, knowing that you can clean it up and make it structurally sound later…(link)

UNQUOTE