Reading for Writing: Modeling the Modern Essay

Unit Content

“Writing well has everything to do with being able to read one’s own work with an eye toward the unmet possibilities that are there.”³

- Lucy Calkins

What are Personal Narratives?

Have you ever said in conversation “I could write a book” when referring to all the stories you could tell about your everyday life as a teacher? I have, and I am sure it could be a number one best-seller! It would be full of hilarious anecdotes or vivid vignettes that share the very essence of the days in the life of the multiple hat-wearing educator. In literature, a vignette is a short descriptive scene that captures a single moment or a defining detail about a character, idea, or other element of the story. They are small parts of a larger work, and can only exist as pieces of a whole story, pieces of narratives. So what are narratives? “Narrative genres tell a story, using vivid details about people, events, and conflicts or crises. They also reflect on the meaning of the stories, offering the reader an interpretation or explanation of what occurred. Common narrative genres include the memoir, personal essay, and literacy narrative.”⁴ In my unit I will focus on personal narratives with my third grade students. I will teach them how using anecdotes and vignettes make up a personal narrative.

During the 2019 Yale National Initiative seminar Reading for Writing: Modeling the Modern Essay under the leadership and guidance of Yale University’s Professor of English Jessica Brantley, we explored several different genres of non-fiction including personal essays, profiles, cultural criticism, and political argument. Some of the writers include: Joan Didion, Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Tom Wolfe, Scott Russell Sanders, Maya Angelou, and Nancy Mairs. In doing this I discovered how meticulous and deliberate writers are when sharing their stories. We unpacked each essay and analyzed the writer’s craft while exploring how they shaped their personal experiences to create a public point. A public point is the overall message the writer is trying to show the reader. Through identifying each writer's public point, we were able to discover their tone, audience, and rhythm, all of which are key components of good writing. I gained a newfound appreciation for the art of writing and the very essence of putting pen to paper that I have never really had before. In the seminar, we also explored the value of writing workshop, where we went through the process of drafting out our own personal essays, then reading and discussing our writing with each other, learning to teach each other to become better writers, as well as better teachers of writers. 

So what exactly are personal essays? “Personal essays focus on a significant personal experience in the writer’s past and draw out the meaning as the writer tells the story and reflects on the experience. Its key features include a dramatic event or episode; vivid details and narration; and an interweaving of narration with reflection on the interpretation of the essayist’s experience.”⁵  

As a writer you want to stay in control of your reader’s energy and where it is going. You want your writing to be good. So how do we decide what is good writing? There are a few things that will help you determine this. It can be considered good writing if it speaks to you, moves you, and you can remember it years later because there was something so special about it that it stuck with you. In the seminar we talked a lot about writing that stands the test of time. Some of the essays we explored were decades old. But what made them worth reading and enjoyable after all the time that has passed, was the fact that they touched the reader in one way or another, whether it was talking about something that is still relevant today, or moved the reader by doing an excellent job with the components mentioned above: making a public point, speaking in a relatable tone, hooking the reader with a pulsing rhythm or form, or speaking clearly to the intended audience with the perfect word choice.

When writing a personal essay, one should always have a public point. It gives the reader something to take away from the essay, instead of just being solely about something that has happened to the writer. Having a public point, makes the piece more interesting for the reader. In Maya Angelou’s 1969 essay “Graduation”, she tells about growing up in a small town where the middle and high school graduation is THE event of the town. It reminded me of small town Friday night football, where everything shuts down for the big game each week. She takes you on this journey of her day, where everyone is pulling out all of their best of everything, because it is such a special occasion. To show how important this event is, she tells us how her mother makes Sunday breakfast on a Friday, how she wears a beautiful yellow dress, and how she gets a brand new Mickey Mouse watch as a present. But a key part of the essay is when she tells the reader “Oh, it was important, all right. White folks would attend the ceremony, and two or three would speak of God and home, and the Southern way of life…”⁶ This is a key part because it is when the speaker enters the graduation, a white man, that the whole tone and mood of the essay changes. Angelou paints this picture of a wonderful day filled with a great sense of pride and excitement, for in her very small town graduating from 8th grade was a great accomplishment. Most of the teachers there had only completed an 8th grade education.

The day takes a turn, and this high that everyone has been feeling all day is spoiled as the white speaker of the graduation, Mr. Donleavy, makes some very discouraging remarks in his speech. After mentioning that he pointed out to someone that his favorite football player attended the school, he continued saying that “one of the best basketball players at Fisk sank his first ball right here at Lafayette County Training School.”⁷ Angelou then says “The white kids were going to be Galileos and Madame Curies and Edisons and Gauguins, and our boys (the girls were not even in on it) would try to be Jesse Owenses and Joe Louises.”⁸ His words cut the people of the audience, especially the graduates, like a blade freshly sharpened. They killed all hope in the moment and made them feel as their huge accomplishment that they were all so proud of, actually was all for nothing. Angelou says “The man’s dead words fell like bricks around the auditorium and too many settled on my belly...Graduation, was finished for me before my name was even called. The accomplishment was nothing...Donleavy had exposed us. We were maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous”.⁹ Angelou then lets the reader in on her thoughts of how it made her feel that it was awful to be a negro, how she wanted to be dead. 

But it was at the end of the graduation, when Henry Reed, another student in her graduating class turned to them and began singing the Negro national anthem with his head held high that their spirits were lifted. Angelou says she had learned the song as a child and had sung it many times before, but it wasn’t until this moment that she really heard it for the first time. Its lyrics spoke to her dampened spirit and gave her a sense of empowerment which seemed to be true for the rest of the people in attendance as well. “We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.” The words of the song held such a deep meaning. She goes on to say “While echoes of the song shivered in the air, Henry Reed bowed his head, said “Thank You”, and returned to his place in the line. The tears that slipped down many faces were not wiped away in shame. We were on top again. As always, again. We survived. The depths had been icy and dark, but now a bright sun spoke to our souls. I was no longer simply a member of the graduating class of 1940; I was a proud member of the wonderful, beautiful Negro race.”¹⁰ Angelou’s public point was to persevere and take pride in one's accomplishments to overcome adversity. From the lyrics of the song, she is reminded of how the history of her people, the Negro race, has been able to rise above things that were meant to tear them down. From that she was reminded to hold her head high and be proud of who she was, and hopeful to be whatever she wanted to be in the future. You could feel the confidence and emotions through her words on the page. It was very moving for me as a reader.

In Scott Russell Sanders’ essay “Under the Influence” which was originally published in Harper’s Magazine in 1989, he does a wonderful job of setting an appropriate tone to match his topic. In literature, the tone of the piece expresses the writer's attitude toward or feelings about the subject matter and audience. When we speak, our tone of voice conveys our mood—frustrated, cheerful, critical, gloomy, or angry. When we write, our images and descriptive phrases get our feelings across. Sanders’ essay is about growing up with his father who was an alcoholic. He sets the tone in the very beginning in the first few sentences when he writes: “My Father drank. He drank as a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles food-compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling.”¹¹

From the very start I knew that the tone of his essay would be dark and emotional. He goes on later to say that as he became an adult, that he then knew that his father was an alcoholic. Throughout the essay he gives accounts of encounters with his father after he had been drinking and how it made him and his siblings feel. “...and behind the closed doors they slam in fury or disgrace, countless other children tremble. I comfort myself with such knowledge, holding it against the throb of memory like an ice pack against a bruise.”¹² These lines show that Russell tried to find comfort in the fact that he was not the only child living in a house with an alcoholic father. That there were other children who shared the same trauma, humiliation, and fear that he did. “When drunk, our father was clearly in his wrong mind. He became a stranger, as fearful to us as any graveyard lunatic, not quite frothing at the mouth but fierce enough, quick-tempered, explosive; or else he grew maudlin and weepy, which frightened us nearly as much.”¹³ In his use of descriptive word choice (quick-tempered, maudlin, and weepy), the tone of his words painted a picture of a painful upbringing of watching his father suffer this illness, he pulled the reader into his story.

Then, there is rhythm. It is the sense of movement in speech, marked by the stress, timing, and quantity of syllables. In William Zinsser’s classic guide to writing non-fiction titled On Writing Well, he says when you’re choosing words and stringing them together, you need to always bear in mind how they sound. I like to think of it as a catchy song you hear on the radio that you can’t help but sing along to because the rhythm flows so well. It draws you in. Zinsser says that while “..readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize. Therefore such matters as rhythm and alliteration are vital to every sentence.”¹⁴ He gives an example with two words “serene” and “tranquil”-one so soft, the other strangely disturbing because of the unusual n and q. Such considerations of sound and rhythm should go into everything you write.¹⁵

In Joan Didion’s 1968 essay On Keeping a Notebook, she writes “Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.” I think she does a wonderful job in stringing those questions together to create a nice rhythm that draws the reader in. Some of the sentences being shorter than others helped the flow as well. Zinsser says “An occasional short sentence can carry a tremendous punch. It stays in the reader’s ear.”¹⁶

Lastly, there is audience. Before you begin writing, a question you should ask yourself is “Who am I writing for?”. Zinsser says “It's a fundamental question, and it has a fundamental answer: You are writing for yourself...You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for.”¹⁷ In Nancy Mairs’ essay On Being a Cripple, she tells her story of being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (also known as MS). MS is a chronic degenerative disease of the central nervous system, in which she explains that during its course, which is unpredictable and uncontrollable, one may lose vision, hearing, speech, the ability to walk, control of the bladder and/or bowels, and coordination of movements. 

In this essay, Mairs does a phenomenal job at reaching her audience, which seems to be multiple audiences; people with MS, family members or friends of people with MS, or people who have been diagnosed with other life changing diseases and are learning to cope with them. It is such a powerful essay where she embraces her diagnosis and takes the reader on a journey with her on how her life changes in dealing with her relationships with family and friends and maintaining a job. Living each day trying to make the best of it, not knowing what’s in store. She sprinkles little bits of humor throughout the essay which makes this very heavy topic enjoyable to read. It keeps the reader hopeful and engaged. 

Mairs says in the essay “First, the matter of semantics. I am a cripple. I choose this word to name me. I choose from among several possibilities, the most common of which are “handicapped” and “disabled.” I made the choice a number of years ago, without thinking, unaware of my motives for doing so. Even now, I’m not sure what those motives are, but I recognize that they are complex and not entirely flattering. People–crippled or not–wince at the word “cripple,” as they do not at “handicapped” or “disabled.” Perhaps I want them to wince. I want them to see me as a tough customer, one to whom the fates /gods /viruses have not been kind, but who can face the brutal truth of her existence squarely. As a cripple, I swagger.” This line is very powerful as it gives you a sense of direction of where the essay is going. First she calls herself a cripple, and then says she swaggers. Showing that she has embraced her situation and would try to make the best of it and with great confidence using a word like “swagger”. She takes the reader on the up and downs that is her life with MS, and leaves them feeling inspired.