Examining Personal Essay Structure: The Lead and the Ending
As high-school teachers know, teens sometimes think they know more than they do. Last fall, I selected a chapter from Ta-nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, which appeared in a 2015 issue of th Atlantic as “Letter to My Son,” as a mentor text.
My approach failed.
I approached the text through my eyes as a man of color raising a boy of color in an urban setting, as a first-generation college grad, as a Chicano, as a writer. I quickly realized that, despite the pre-reading and during-reading guidance I provided, the takeaway for my 11th grade Chicago students came down to this: “Yeah, there’s racism in the world. We know.”
How? How could this be all they saw?
Despite over two decades of teaching experience, I still struggle sometimes. I actually welcomed the opportunity to re-think how to help students engage with this complex text about an issue that grows more and more complex each day under a presidency that tells congresswomen of color to “go back where they came from.”
I realized my mistake when I reflected on Deeper Reading by Kelly Gallagher where the author discusses the questions posed by Sheridan Blau to guide students through a second reading of the text, “second-draft reading.”
- What does it say?
- What does it mean?
- What does it matter?
My approach to this text mainly focused on the first question and somewhat on the second. Engagement and discussion faded quickly because I didn’t structure a reading and writing experience that would answer the third question.
The first question is one most teachers focus on: the “literal-level comprehension.”
Now, I’d like to modify the second question. It’s vague and can mislead students toward that fallacy of “it can mean anything you want it to” in English class. No, it can’t. I propose this instead: “What does it reveal?” With this question, students can begin looking for motivation, subtleties in relationships, subtextual arguments, intentions.
Still, the most important question is the last one. As Gallagher explains, “Asking ‘What does it matter?’ becomes the reason we read great [texts] in the first place.”
One way to get students to questions two and three rests with the insights Zinsser gives us in his chapter about “The Lead and the Ending.” Here, he explains that “The most important sentence in any article is the first one . . . Some leads hook the reader with just a few well-baited sentences; others amble on for several pages, exerting a slow but steady pull. Every article,” we must remember, “poses a different problem, and the only valid test is: does it work?” (54).
Here’s what students could have discovered and discussed and evaluated in the lead of Coates’s essay.
The first detail to consider is the James Baldwin quote that Coates selected as the epigraph: “And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white.” Readers need to pause for a moment and recognize that there is no subject in the quote. “Who has brought?” readers should ask. When the reader finally gets a subject, it’s vague: “They.” The simplest and most important question this should generate in readers is “Why? Why do ‘they’ think they’re white?”
A quick Google search gives readers an understanding of the complexity of Baldwin’s works. An astute reader might ask, “If someone thinks he or she is white, does Coates fear his son will think he’s white?” Or more blutly: “Why does Coates fear his son will think he’s white?”
The image of a younger Coates and his son, who appears a few months old, should also be part of this conversation. The image Photoshopped by the Atlantic sets up the context readers to explore the question of why this matters. The pose, the posture, the facial expressions should all be examined. The background and color added to this image should be as well. A good question I picked up somewhere, some time ago is “How would it be different if . . . ?” For example, how would it be different if the father and son were smiling?
After reading the essay once and engaging in experiences to ensure students understand what this essay says, students should then move into a close reading of the first and last paragraphs of this essay (analyzing the entire piece would take too long and decrease student engagement).
“Son,
Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote studio on the Far West Side of Manhattan. A satellite closed the miles between us, but no machinery could close the gap between her world and the world for which I had been summoned to speak. When the host asked me about my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced by a scroll of words, written by me earlier that week.”
Following Zinsser’s guidance, we notice that the first sentence is a direct address to a primary audience being accessed by a secondary audience. Students should explore what it means that it opens--not with the son’s name--but with a title. The salutation appears in the essay separated from the text, mirroring the relationship the author likely feels with his son in this context. Coates sets up the context by begining the full sentence with “Last Sunday.” Sunday traditionally becomes a day of rest and reflection. But not for this writer. His ideas, his being gets questioned. Futhermore, the writer remains unconvinced his expression of ideas in that response made any difference. The doubt lingers, tugs at his insecurities. The writer has a public audience at his grasp. However, he does not know how to respond. This moves us closer to answers for the third question. Coates reveals that a reflective context--setting us up for a public point that exceeds the oversimplified interpretation my students hastily reached. This reveals the sense of loss and emptiness this father feels and fears in today’s volatile political context. “To lose,” “the gap,” “replaced” all contribute to the father’s fear that his son will fade into an identity of whiteness. The use of “summoned” communicates a power dynamic between the writer and the host, a dynamic symbolic of the divisions in today’s context. And then, climactically, the writer must confront his own words, as if they were thrown to him, at him, on him not in an interview but in an interrogation. The conflict emerges.
In the last paragraph, students should consider Zinsser’s insight that conclusions in an essay--any essay, really—“should encapsulate the idea of the piece and conclude with a sentence that jolts [readers] with its fitness or unexpectedness” (65). Zinsser elaborates by sharing how he tries “to bring the story full circle--to strike at the end an echo of a note that was sounded at the beginning” (65). An echo.
Students can juxtapose the first paragraph with the last in Coates’s essay:
“I am speaking to you as I always have—treating you as the sober and serious man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long arms, his beautiful smile. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. None of that can change the math anyway. I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.”
The echoes in the ending exist in the contrasts. There is a familiarity in the unapologetic tone the speaker uses in the closing. It’s clear these conversations, these interactions happen between this father and son. The distance disappeared. The dash adds emphasis to the parallelism of the ideas that follow, a way to make the father’s confidence echo off the page. Coates found the words he needed when the essay began. “You” makes the conversation intimate, sentimental. The affirmation of identity rings true.
In the beginning, the speaker wanted to bring his son close for the conversation. At the end, he prepares to let him go into a world described in opposites. The “attack” the father wishes his son to espouse is punctuated by the alliteration of the words that follow. Most importantly, Coates draws a distinction between his son and those “who must believe they are white” in such a confident tone that an insecurity the speaker demonstrated in the beginning has faded. The emotional tremor shifted--as it should in all personal essays when we examine the lead and the end.
Uncovering these “echoes” should prepare most students to judge the structure in their own writing and make the necessary revisions.
To help students mirror the effective use of echoes in their own writing, they can juxtapose the opening paragraph--which should set up the conflict--with the ending--which should offer echoes of resolution and emotional shift. Cutting these out and glueing them side by side on a sheet of paper lends itself to a visual, structured comparison.
One strategy I suggest to students, after they identify the conflict they want to write about, is to reflect on the moment when the situation somehow changed significantly. If they write that transformation scene first and fill it with the emotional and intellectual weight of the experience, they can then make decisions about how to open and close the essay. I say more about the structure of the actual essay later in this unit.
Comments: