Well, to begin with writing is always a situation. In capitalism, writing is often a prescribed task. We write for reasons. Teaching “the essay” presents teachers and students a problem. For any essay, any number of many rhetorical modes will be implemented to fulfill the writer’s task, which is conveying something meaningful to an intended audience. I teach “the essay” differently than I teach argumentation and research. The publishing industry and a very privileged, elite group of business people posing as academics has made a fortune branding ways to teach “the essay” and various rhetorical modes that are important to writers. Books anthologizing model essays and instructing students how to write autobiography, observation, reflection, exploration, explanation, proposal, argument, evaluation, etc., are plentiful. Many students come away from English classes believing these are types of essays, which is a conceptual error.Many of us have worked in departments that have an arrangement to teach a specific book and method. This makes norming grading essays a much easier task because every teacher teaches the same methods and so can much more easily determine the difference between excellent, good, average, and poor essays. Administrating teaching is often much more about grade assignation, which means being able to insure grades have meaning across sections to discourage students grieving evaluations, in the end than it is about the shaping what happens in the classroom.I teach students using model essays. We read for meaning and as writers. I work on sentence clarity, paragraph coherence, organizing ideas. I model various approaches to preparing to write and to composing. Students have writing partners and our classroom has concise direct instruction and workshops. We share experiences from invention and brainstorming to drafting to revision. For 200 minutes a week, we’re all writers talking about writing. At the moment, my composition students (high school seniors) are writing personal essays. They have to choose to write about an important person or a significant event. At this time, they are inventing and exploring. They will compose 300-400 word essays that they do not revise or bother with composing introductions and conclusions. They will move from their own invention and brainstorming work into writing sentences and paragraphs to see where they want to go in the following weeks. Their objective is to learn what significance they wish to convey to their intended audience.They have read three, short essays about events and people that I chose because the models illustrate different approaches to autobiographical writing that creatively and powerfully convey significance in a manner that readers can apply to their own lives, whether or not they’ve had similar experiences. So, the writers in my class have a good idea what their objective is but I’ve given them a difficult task. They are not to compose “rough drafts” because I know they will fall back on the poor structuralist approach to composition they’ve memorized. They will compose a page and a half of writing that seeks expression of significance they may have yet to fully realize. They are writing towards clearly and vividly communicating their purpose. They’ve been asked to take risks, to be creative, to be bold, and to trust their readers to be willing to listen to their demands. I’ve asked them not to write about something they’ve addressed in writing for other assignments. (I usually get most students to comply.) This first assignment is difficult for them for two reasons: 1) they are actually creatively writing and 2) they have to trust their discourse community.Next week, they’ll turn in their compositions to me and read their partners’ work. They’ll address what they like after reading and then begin a conversation about what their works communicate and how significance is conveyed. We will talk about words, phrases, sentences and punctuation, parallel structure, and repetition, and we will address ideas in general. We’ll begin to talk about purpose and direction. End of the week, students will begin writing their essays. They’ll have to show up the following week with a 600-900 word draft. That week, they’ll work on revision strategies and craft useful introductions and conclusions in workshop. This semester, the writers in my class will compose four essays. The first is a personal essay focusing on a person or event, the second is an observational essay focusing on an event, the third is a reflection to convey understanding of a complex situation, the fourth will explain an interesting concept. So, I’m teaching specific skills their future profs and employers will expect them to possess but also we’re developing habits of mind that recognize the social significance writing plays in our daily lives, always with an eye on a writer’s relationship to their readers, with an eye on communicating in a manner that encourages consensus that permits social difference.
