Post I: Discourse Surrounding the Essay

In reading Atwan’s quotations from many different writers and essayist, I began to question the methods of teachers in our high schools.

I found myself agreeing with the thought process of Kathleen Norris(p. 32-3), as she explained the importance of an essay as a dialogue between the writer and the audience. This was a subject repeated throughout the reading by several different writers. In fact, it was the main point of my journal entry in Thursday’s discussion. It seemed imperative to the “new age essay” that this form of writing would and should change from a repetitive regurgitation of facts into a blend of such fact and human nature. Perhaps this is what resonated so strongly with Norris’ piece. She claims that a reader should feel, after reading a excellent essay, that the thoughts and direction of the author had “ told me something about the world, that I didn’t know before. Something I sensed but could not articulate”. As a reader I felt that the word sense is central to the idea. There is no passion or drive for knowledge without the sense of need. There is no connection without feeling or emotion, and without connection there is no exchange of information, which in most cases is the entire point of the essay.

This left me wondering why in the world our educators would push informative yet dry pieces on students. I seemed to be a minority in the fact that I was often pushed to write thought and feeling along with fact. While most of my other classmates seemed to only have seen the homework, repetitive forms. Is it that high school administration doesn’t believe we can handle such emotional and cognitive thought processes or is it that they consider it a training experience in which college is the real competition? On one hand I understand the process that school systems often go through. The basic grammar, the sentence structure; so on and so forth through the educational cookie cutter. But at the same time they should encourage thought from within of the subject. Not only in AP classes or honor systems but in all levels. Students have been taught to hate essays for their bland quality but that is what they are taught to write. And is that not what the point of this article is, that we should, as a population learn to communicate more effectively? That our writing should, as Norris states, “resonate” and “ give back to the reader a thought, a memory, an emotion made richer by the experience of another”(32). Why then is this the last point of focus for students?