This is the first in a series, Adventures in Composition and the Essay.
Since I’m teaching the most composition courses I’ve ever taught in a single semester (three), I have the structure of writing on the mind. For one of the courses I put together a little history of the essay, which got me thinking about that particular trajectory.
It always helps with my own writing to remember that the so-called father of the essay, Michel de Montaigne, called his mental journeys, essais, from the French infinitive, essayer, to try, attempt, or test. I love this because it gives the essay an experimental quality that often gets lost when we think of the essay in general, but especially when we consider the college essay.
Unfortunately, students often perceive the college essay as a tepid creature, and who can blame them when they were reared on the five-paragraph monster? My class, then, becomes about how to teach the students to write papers that fulfill course requirements while still being lively, experimental, creative, and even potentially revolutionary pieces of work that the student enjoys writing and the teacher enjoys reading.
So often I find that the students forget there’s another person on the line in this essayistic back-and-forth. I think they imagine that all those hours staying up the night before (I see you) in order to pump out this piece of writing will result in their simply throwing it off a cliff. But someone does read these essays, and that someone is me. And I need to be entertained just as much as the next (from the perspective of my students, probably) elderly cat lady with a PhD.
So, how to do this? Stay tuned and I’ll try to take you with me on this faltering journey to treating composition and the college essay as an edgy, experimental, fascinating undertaking (hopefully).