The discursive essay.
I announce it to the class like some foul beast that lurks in the peeling paint on our classroom rafters. Feet shuffle. Eyes avert. But I still start my usual spiel.
The discursive essay is the best type of writing that I will be allowed to teach you during the entire HSC. But, I won’t give you a scaffold. I won’t give you letters like PEEL or PETAL or TEEL to clutch like a life-raft. Instead I will give you freedom.
Sure, you’ll have a prompt. But you can interpret it any way that you want. You can use any techniques. You can discuss anything that interests you. You can have an entire paragraph made up of rhetorical questions and still get a band 6. (Trust me, I’ve seen it)
You can write imaginatively, add in some poetry. Experiment with spacing. Use your punctuation for effect. If you want to write about anxiety (or maybe you’re just overthinking it. Again) you certainly can.
It’s your opportunity to throw away the rules and use your voice. Make allusions to the things you know. The things you care about. Link them to your studies. Make me want to keep reading.
Were Machiavelli’s observations of Florentine society and politics decidedly Lady Whistledown’ish. Maybe you want to see if your reader can decipher the difference between a Taylor Swift lyric and a Shakespeare quote.
Make links between your texts and current events. Maybe it is stupid that you sit in a classroom while the person next to you complains that we have no air conditioning so they won’t do their work, but children are being bombed in Gaza and their schools are now empty mouths in the ground and empty mouths not being fed because of the blockade.
Maybe we taught you too well to follow the rules.
To use your scaffolds.
To tie together your five paragraph essays with overly crafted thesis statements.
To use connectives for your ideas
To analyse the techniques.
To repeat what you’ve been taught.
So much that freedom feels overwhelming. It feels dangerous. This unknown text-type that lurks in the shadows and does not get the love it deserves.
But,
Once you start looking. It’s everywhere. It’s the opinion editorial, it’s the recent personal essay written by Lizzo and published on Tumblr (Go read it, it’s fantastic), it’s blog posts, and travel guides and anywhere that someone is sharing their ideas and their story however they want without trying to persuade you.
It’s the antithesis to AI. It’s the combinations and connections and personal style and voice that only you have. It’s uniquely human, and like the dragon in Shrek. You do not need to be afraid of it.
