Post I: Discourse Surrounding the Essay.

“For me, the ideal essay is not an assignment, to be dispatched efficiently and intelligently, but an exploration, a questioning, an introspection…The facts are important, but never enough. An essay, for me, must go past the facts, an essay must travel and move. Even the facts of the essayist’s own history, the personal memoir, are insufficient alone.”
-Alan Lightman in “The Ideal Essay”

Often, it seems in an education setting the most important part of any piece of writing is the mechanics and the facts inside the essay itself. It is pounded into us and drilled into our minds every time a new assignment comes along. It seems interesting, though, that when we re-read these essays later we are surprised to hear how wooden and shallow the essays actually are. Lightman’s opinion is that the essay must go beyond mere recitation of the facts into some other realm entirely. The added ingredient, so Lightman seems to indicate, is the human element.
Without the human element, meaning that part of the essay usually described as “the voice”, the essay would never move out of the sphere of the likes of junior high book reports. It would definitely make the classification of what a “good” essay is much simpler if there was a uniform essay example, but, because there is as wide a variety of essays as there are people, the essay itself eludes any litmus test. Still, it seems for grading purposes, many junior high educators still apply this “standardized essay”. At first, the fact-ridden, ultra-rigid essay does seem to have its place in learning. It lays the foundation for what an essay is supposed to get across. You can’t explore, examine, or question if you can’t even communicate using the written word.
This way of learning, however, is very apt to backfire upon the writer. Because the grading system is based upon the mechanics and construction of the essay, most students will give just what is required. This ends up to be a piece of writing that ends up very rigid and hollow. The realization that the essay can be something far different from what is normally taught can have a very freeing effect, which, instead of replacing what was previously learned, can partner with it and utilize what was learned to produce of piece of writing that escapes the standard definition.