Reading for Writing: Modeling the Modern Essay

Content Background

Good or Quality Writing

“Good.” Funny that an adjective that we constantly advise our students to avoid should be such an elusive, desirable descriptor for our most coveted examples of writing.  Maybe it is the word’s humble Germanic origin which somehow makes it a heartfelt honor.  Maybe we subconsciously prefer it to the highbrow Latinate word “quality” because we want to know what is important down at the bare bones level.  Consider, one of the greatest compliments we can give someone is that he or she is a “Good Person.”

So, back to the burning question, “What makes it good writing?”

Pre-Common Core era, my district like many others followed a writing framework based on writing traits, such as Six Traits⁵ and Six plus One Traits.⁶ These programs utilized rubrics to specifically assess qualities of good writing.  With the adoption of Common Core, these writing programs were widely set aside as lacking a sufficient research base and limited inclusion of nonfiction writing instruction.  My district adopted a program called “Explorations in Nonfiction Writing.” which specifically calls for the use of Mentor Texts, models of writing that are explicitly shared with students as examples.  This was not really a new concept, just a formal label for something many teachers already did.  The bigger shift here was the emphasis on the nonfiction.  But teachers need to think about nonfiction in a larger context than just informational text or biographies.  Enter the Modern Essay.

The Modern Essay.

In her presentation Politics and The Modern Essay Jessica Brantley who heads the Yale English Department clarifies that the term “modern” here should not be confused with “contemporary.”⁷ Most writings associated with Modern Essays are from the late 1800’s to the present.⁸ This is when writing and literary circles began to form and expand to include not just the established authors but the rise of unknown and would be authors.  There was a movement away from writing belonging only to the privileged but also to the working man.  Here, too, we begin to see the growing force of women writers.  These writing circles were the forerunners of today’s writers’ workshop.

The Modern Essay is “a forum for writers to investigate and present their opinions, concerns, and interests from a personal point of view using a variety of forms, including letters, reviews, criticism, memoirs, nature and travel writing, philosophical and ethical meditations, and newspaper and magazine columns.”⁹ This nonfiction writing allows students “to write about what they know or can observe or can find out…about subjects that touch their own lives or that they have an aptitude for.”¹⁰

Essay Qualities

Unlike larger works of writing, essays seek to convey their key information in a shorter, tighter format.  Essays are snapshots as opposed to full length feature films.  A perfect example is memoir which focuses on specific life events, or time frames, in comparison to autobiography which tells a whole life story.  Memoirs in a published book are typically a collection of snapshot essays and aren’t even necessarily in chronological order.

Essays exemplify clear choices writers make involving words.  The words they choose, how they use them, their sentence structure and tone all culminate in the style of both the writer and the piece.  The use of dialogue that draws the reader in and a public point that reaches out are two other defining points found in these essays.

Always I heard Mother’s emotional voice asking Amy and me the same few  questions: Is that your own idea? Or somebody else’s? “Giant is a good movie,” I pronounced to the family at dinner.  “Oh, really?” Mother warmed to these occasions.  She all but rolled up her sleeves.  She knew I hadn’t seen it.  “Is that your considered opinion?”¹¹

In this example and the opening quote, the author uses highly detailed descriptions and dialogue to introduce us to her mother’s wit.  Throughout her essay, what may initially appear as a random collection of humorous anecdotes is a finely crafted vehicle for telling us about life shaping lessons imparted by her mother.  What she chooses to include gives us a balanced view of her mother that doesn’t seek to make her heroine or villain, but simply human.  We, the readers, can connect with her humanity, and by extension the life lesson.  The author isn’t simply sitting around fondly recalling her mother; she has something else to say, a public point. 

Public Point: This is not a straightforward, find it in the dictionary (or writing handbook for that matter) kind of point.  A public point is slightly more nuanced than that.  We used it to discuss every essay we studied during our Yale Seminar and settled on a descriptor rather than a definition. 

A “public point” is a quality in a written piece that makes it of value to others besides the author.  This quality is what differentiates writing that has value purely for ourselves and writing that serves to connect with a greater audience.  If I mess up as a mother and journal about my overwhelming feelings of guilt, my writing serves to relieve my own inner turmoil, a worthwhile and desirable outcome.  That doesn’t mean anyone else would want to read my journal.  If, however, I hope my writing might help other mothers not feel so miserable about their own mistakes I must craft an essay to which they may relate, one that is both personal and universal, simultaneously.

I would ask her later about the transmission of fear. She would answer honestly but gently, not wanting to hurt my feelings, watching all my micro expressions to see when and how much to modify her reaction…all while I watched hers.  Ours was a dance of empathy, navigating our evolving relationship from traditional mother/daughter to empowering, uplifting female friendship.  She inherited her father’s quick wit and sharp humor, noticing everything about others, while also inheriting my penchant for considering the unseen factors that motivate others’ actions.  It makes her wonderfully insightful.  Unfortunately, she also inherited every possible anxiety both her father and I possess. I supposed she and I would have a philosophical discussion on “nature vs.  nurture”, did she inherit the worries, or did we transmit them with our overprotective parenting.  The conversation would invariably dabble into “first child syndrome” and gender bias takes, as well.  It would not be the first of these conversations.¹²

Public point can be shaped by many other aspects of writing such as: audience, purpose, point of view, bias, culture, voice, word choice, style and so on.  There may also be more than one public point in a written piece but not in such a way as to detract from the central point.  A public point may be implicit or explicit, open for authors’ expression and readers’ interpretation.  Lastly, public point transcends genre.¹³

In the following excerpt from “The Year of Magical Thinking” author Joan Didion shows us the importance of word choice both explicitly and by example.

Life changes fast.  Life changes in the instant.  You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.  The question of self-pity. 

Those were the first words I wrote after it happened.  The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file (“Notes on change.doc”) reads “May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.,” but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it.  I had made no changes to that file in May.  I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.  For a long time I wrote nothing else.

Life changes in the instant.  The ordinary instant. 

At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, “the ordinary instant.” I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word “ordinary,” because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind.  It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.¹⁴

It is not just individual word choice but the way in which we put them together.  In his famous essay, “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell states:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?¹⁵

One of my favorite sayings has always been “If I had more time, I would have made this shorter” which I originally learned was from Benjamin Franklin but since discovered that it has been used repeatedly, in various forms and languages, tracing back to the 1600s.¹⁶ Regardless who said it first, it has been well worth repeating; good writing shows an economy of language. 

Concise writing is not necessarily sparse.  If words and sentences are the goods of language’s economy, then style, voice and ideas must be the demands.  A call for brevity however can seem counterproductive to teachers who are typically having to beseech their students to “write more.” We still want students to develop their ideas.

In the following excerpt from Zora’s Hurston’s “How it Feels to be Colored Me” written in 1928, the author’s use of long listing sentences followed with shorter ones draw the reader into her contrasting childhood experiences.

During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there.  They liked to hear me “speak pieces” and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop.  Only they didn’t know it.  The colored people gave no dimes.  They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless.  I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county— everybody’s Zora. 

We can feel the performance nature of her brief interactions with white people, and the quick jolt back to her colored reality, but she doesn’t feel jaded because she still feels treasured in her own community, “everybody’s Zora.” As we continue through this essay, Zora’s perspective becomes increasingly informed and mature, but she maintains her style.  The author’s voice and style make it clear that she never loses her sense of worth and ends by inviting readers into a well-developed metaphor to reassess our own perspectives.  The metaphor is so clearly constructed that I developed a related writing lesson in the Classroom Activities section.

But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall.  Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow.  Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless.  A first- water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant.  In your hand is the brown bag.  On the ground before you is the jumble it held— so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly.  A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter.  Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place— who knows?¹⁷