Reading for Writing: Modeling the Modern Essay

Introduction

Resist much, obey little;

Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved;

Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city, of this earth,

ever afterward resumes its liberty.

- Walt Whitman¹

Your pen is the best defense against injustice. Your life story is the best argument to convince the naysayers to see the world your way. Writing is power. It takes wisdom to see your vulnerabilities as strengths. It takes courage to share who you are. And it takes faith and compassion to believe what you have written can impact people for a better tomorrow. I would argue that the modern essay inherently has a “private view” as well as a “public point,” something important the writer wants the readers to know. Writing modern nonfiction can “right” the world. As teachers, we want our students to “write” a world full of possibilities.

For most students learning to write, the path is nonfiction.² Reading and writing nonfiction like personal memoirs and open public letters can empower the self, others and the world. Memoirs are important primary sources that can help future researchers to understand people’s perception of an event at the time it occurred. With memoir, a writer can fuse emotions and logics into a political call for civic action. Stephen King recalled his former employer John Gould saying: “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”³ Once a piece of writing is written as right as it can be, it longer belongs to the writer, it belongs to anyone who wants to read or criticize it.⁴ As individuals, we write not only for ourselves, but as members of “We the People” who write to connect our private selves to the public world.

This YNI curriculum unit provides teachers creative methods to teach students how to write personal narratives with public messages. Upon completion of their personal narratives in the genre of memoir, students will evaluate all of their public point, then group these points by topics, debate which point has the most weight, and choose a related social issue to jumpstart a collective essay. This class essay will be supported by extensive group research with the goal of sending it to the President of the United States, Members of Congress, Governor, Mayor, and/or editors of reputable news venues. The writer John McFee describes the writing process this way: “You begin with a subject, gather material, and work your way to structure from there. You pile up volumes of notes and then figure out what you are going to do with them, not the other way around.”⁵ Together, students will construct a class essay in an organic matter of gathering relevant information in teams, composing team-arguments, and then comparing notes to organize the final structure. Ultimately, the entire class will co-author an argumentative essay that contains different aspects of all of their private lives while allowing their collective opinions to be heard and understood in a public forum. Through debates and compromises, the class will make a final proposal for a service learning project based on their united decision.