Alright, I think I’ve clicked in the right text box.
The main target audience for this blog is going to be first-year college student writers. That said, I think the things I want to talk about might be interesting to others as well, at least in a passing sense. Generally speaking, though, this blog is a place for me to write down all the things I want to say to first-year writers that I don’t think they often hear enough. To be clear, my hope is to make your lives as essay writers easier, not harder.
For what it’s worth, this is a sort of list of credentials, just to clarify that I know at least a little about what I’m talking about. This isn’t to say I’m an expert, but should at least give you a sense of where I’m coming from:
- I worked as a writing tutor in undergrad.
- I taught High School English for one year (9th and 10th grade) after graduating from college.
- I was a writing tutor in various positions after college.
- I’m currently in an English MA program, where they make you write a lot of big essays.
- I’m working as a writing tutor at my grad school, too.
- Right now (Spring 2020), I’m teaching my second semester of a mandatory introductory writing course for first-year students.
- I’ve tutored writing for the Higher Education Opportunity Program in New York.
- For my MA thesis, I’m researching composition pedagogy (translation: I’m researching how to teach writing).
- I’ve really done an awful lot of writing tutoring…just an unreasonable amount of it.
Anyway.
If you’re an undergraduate student who finds essay writing to be A) terrible, B) vaguely interesting, or C) a thing your instructors keep telling you to do, you’ve come to the right place. Or maybe the wrong place. Maybe this is traumatizing you. Well, too late, I guess.
Oddly, I think the very best thing I can do off the bat is to point you to someone else’s blog. If you Google “Paul Graham The Age of the Essay,” you should find what I think is one of the most important and useful essays on essays out there. Really, it’s great; it’s nice and short, it’s easy to read, and it has repeatedly blown my first-year students’ minds with how immediately useful it is. I read it in my third year of undergrad and immediately thought, “Well, wouldn’t it have been nice to know all this two years ago?”
So go. Right now. Go.
…
I suppose the fact that you’re reading this probably means you did not go check out that other blog like I told you to, and that you are therefore bad at following directions. As such, I am curious as to why you are still here looking for advice, given that you obviously won’t follow it.
But putting aside your obstinance for the moment, here is a short list of topics this blog will (probably) cover at some point:
- Common problems with first-year writing and where I think they come from
- Writing to perform versus writing to communicate (and why you should do the second one, and not the first)
- How to actually care about essays, or at least not be totally miserable while writing them
- (Maybe something about writing satire?)
- Writing honestly (definitely going to happen at some point)
- Reading in college, and how not to drown in it
- The point of writing essays (also definitely going to happen)
- Statements of Purpose (because I don’t see many good guides on this out there)
- On keeping an open mind while writing
- The point and principles of grammar (as in, why grammar is the way it is)
- Rough drafts versus final drafts
- Writing as conversation
As you can probably tell, this isn’t going to be a blog about a lot of finer points of writing, like how to indent a block quote. If you’re looking for something like that, you can google pretty much any American university’s writing center website, and they’ll have all sorts of helpful online handouts for you. I think UNC Chapel Hill has a particularly good set of resources.
This blog is going to be more about…the philosophy of essay writing in college? Maybe the purpose of it? You might boil it down to being about why you’re asked to write thousands upon thousands of words, what your school expects you to get out of it, and what you can actually do (in a practical sense) about all of that.
Maybe the best way to give you a sense of what I mean is by giving a sort of teaser for one of the posts I really want to do about writing honestly.
There’s a plaque at the University of Virginia, sitting in an archway above what I think is the original entrance to the school (or at least, it was put up a long time ago). The plaque says this:
Enter by this gateway
And seek
The way of honor
The light of truth
The will to work for men
I want to pay attention for a moment to that fourth line: “The light of truth.” It sounds a bit aphoristic, like something you’d find inside a Hallmark card in the back of a CVS. On the other hand, somebody a long time ago thought that those words were important enough to literally set them in stone, so that long after he was dead and gone, the students walking into the school for the first time would see them.
The reason I bring this up is that there are, in a basic sense, two ways of doing college writing.
The first is one the cynical way. Pretty much everyone is familiar with it. You hate that you have to write an essay. It’s a boring topic. You just want to get it done, so you try to figure out what the instructor wants or what will get you a good grade. You write that even though you don’t believe it or care about it. It’s miserable while you do it, and you’re not even that proud of what you turn in. The sense of relief that comes when you finish is the kind of relief that comes when you stop hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. It’s not that you feel good about it. It’s just that you don’t feel bad anymore.
I would be lying to you if I said it’s impossible to get through college writing that way. I watched my sophomore year roommate get away with it too much to tell you it’s not possible. It’s difficult, probably more difficult than you think, and you probably won’t be happy while you’re doing it or after you’ve done it. But it’s possible.
Or, if you want, you can do college writing in the second way. You can take the words on the plaque at UVA seriously, and consider that seeking the “light of truth” isn’t just a real, possible thing, but actually your job.
Instead of only needing to get by, maybe you have a job as a student, every time you put pen to paper, to seek the light of truth, to try and figure out something you think is actually true (to the best of your ability). Maybe part of being a student is exercising your truth-seeking faculties, and maybe, just maybe, the essay-writing process is one of the most tried and true ways of thinking through your ideas very, very thoroughly.
(And, as a convenient corollary, maybe writing like this makes things easier, not harder. Maybe it will take less time, not more. Maybe I’ll find another excuse to say “maybe” before I close out this post. Who knows?)
There’s more to say on this topic, and plenty other topics besides. It’s also worth noting, here at the end of this first post, that the ideas I want to talk about aren’t really mine, in a fair sense. I’ve benefitted from having plenty of great teachers (including my parents) to whom I owe quite a lot, and I’ve benefitted from reading plenty of great writers who said much of what I’m saying now long before I was born. Something something something shoulders of giants.
But even if I’m just repeating what others have said, I figure it can’t hurt having one more person saying it–even if that person barely knows how to operate a WordPress blog.