UWP 018: Style in the what?
I have taught UWP 018: Style in the Essay once, in Fall 2014, and am looking forward to having it again. As you can see from the official course description, it's pretty poorly defined, both in general (so many goals!) and in specific parts (e.g. "Students should be familiar with the general principles of good writing upon entry into the course," whatever that means). Even the topics are hard to pin down, especially "the essay." It's vague enough that Phillip Lopate's anthology The Art of the Personal Essay covers 2000 years (starting with Seneca) and several countries and languages (with translations from Latin, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, and Chinese).
Given this range, I thought for a long time about what the essay is before teaching UWP 018 for the first time. I thought back to what I read during my MFA in nonfiction writing, not only essays but also books and articles about the various forms of nonfiction prose. I also read and re-read the parts of Lopate's introduction that attempt to define the personal essay (as compared to the academic essay). Lopate says:
As I noted in my original comment, I think the class went well in many ways, but there's room for improvement.
For one thing, I won't use Lopate's book again; it's suitable for MFA students, but not, as I learned the hard way, terribly appealing to UWP 18 students. They did their damnedest to appreciate it (well, some of them did), but without my providing a lot more context than there's time for, they were mostly lost and often frustrated.
Also, last time I left the choice of topics open but this time I will focus on a shared topic, for two reasons.
First, it should be more interesting. In 2014, I had students write ten short pieces about topics that interest them -- ten because that way I knew they would push themselves beyond the most obvious 2-3 -- and then choose one to focus on all quarter. This worked great for students' staying interested in their own writing; it was less great for students' being interested in each others' writing.
Second, like many people who teach writing, I have been struggling make my writing assignments more relevant to my students' lives since higher relevance leads to greater learning. Choosing their own topics helps, but unless they chose to publish their blogs, the writing they did never had any relevance beyond the classroom.
Round 1 (2014)
Given this range, I thought for a long time about what the essay is before teaching UWP 018 for the first time. I thought back to what I read during my MFA in nonfiction writing, not only essays but also books and articles about the various forms of nonfiction prose. I also read and re-read the parts of Lopate's introduction that attempt to define the personal essay (as compared to the academic essay). Lopate says:
The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom. Through sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsies, the personal essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue -- a friendship, if you will, based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship.
At the core of the personal essay is the supposition that there is a certain unity to human experience. [...] The personal essay has an implicitly democratic bent, in the value it places on experience rather than status distinctions. (xxiii)So far, so good: This kind of essay is personal, but not solipsistic; the writer shares aspects of themself* in order to forge a connection with readers. It's not a display but an invitation to interact.
*[This is not a typo. I have decided to use this generic form instead of the more grammatical but also more awkward "him- or herself" as part of my effort to make gender-neutral language habitual for me.]Lopate also describes characteristics of personal essays. They are conversational, and
The personal essay has historically sought to puncture the stiffness of formal discourse with language that is casual, everyday, demotic, direct. (xxv)Personal essays are honest:
Let us say that the writer has caught the reader's attention with a frank, conversational manner. In effect, a contract between writer and reader has been drawn up: the essayist must then make good on it by delivering, or discovering, as much honesty as possible. (xxv)
The personal essayist must above all be a reliable narrator; we must trust his or her core of sincerity. (xxvi)Additionally, Lopate says, personal essays zoom in to the mundane, and out to the grand scheme of things, and they also acknowledge contradictions and conflicts and ambiguity. In fact, the "essay's capacity for processing doubt is part of what makes it so stimulating and tonic" (xliv).
So, to recap again, we have a personal genre in which one seeks to connect with readers by being honest, even when that means revealing conflict, confusion, doubt, or uncertainty.
The next question is, why? Why do people write them? Why do people read them? And how should I frame essay writing for students in a lower-division elective class?
Here, in a nutshell, is what I came up with (as described in a comment on Irv Peckham's fine blog, slightly revised here):
Last year I taught I course on "Style in the Essay," a lower division elective. I was bothered by the the definite article -- THE essay?! -- and spent a lot of time thinking about what "essays" have been and meant through time and across cultures. I pulled out my old copy of Lopate's The Art of the Personal Essay and thought about how he chose pieces from around the world and across two thousand years. Drawing on what I learned in an MFA on nonfiction writing, and what I later learned about genres as social action*, I asked myself again and again, What does the essay DO? What is it that makes each of these pieces in Lopate an essay? What, if any, is the common denominator, the shared aim? (This view does not mean form is irrelevant. Rather, texts in a given genre tend to have a similar form -- length, format, style, etc. -- not because there are rules that say they must be , but because that form suits the needs being met by the genre.)
*[For more detail on this view of genre, see Carolyn Miller's 1984 article "Genre as Social Action" (PDF here).]
What I finally came to is that we use the label "essay" to describe personal writing about matters of public interest. Topics may range from intimate matters (Montaigne's headaches) to highly social issues (as in Addison and Steele's publications), but the common thread is how the writer articulates her or his subjective experience in a way that invites identification and connection from others who do not personally know the writer. (It's the latter angle that makes some letters "essays" while others remain merely personal correspondence.)
Having reached that understanding of what "essays" have historically done, I next asked myself, "What serves this function today? Is it published essays, or something else?" I rejected published essays pretty quickly, because I don't think they have broad public appeal (another characteristic that I think it essential to the social function I had settled on); they are a genre by and for the hyper-literate, the readers of The New Yorker and of literary journals.
What I finally settled on was blogs. I think blogs are the essays of today: subjective experience and perspective presented in such a way as to engage public readers, inviting them to relate, to think, even to respond. They offer writers a chance to decide whom they want to engage, in ways that academic or literary essays do not, and they ask writers to make the difficult move of presenting their own perceptions or experiences in a way that is both true to themselves and to their readers.In 2014, students wrote a series of blog posts, visible to the class but with the option to publish them more broadly.
Round 2 (2016)
As I noted in my original comment, I think the class went well in many ways, but there's room for improvement.
For one thing, I won't use Lopate's book again; it's suitable for MFA students, but not, as I learned the hard way, terribly appealing to UWP 18 students. They did their damnedest to appreciate it (well, some of them did), but without my providing a lot more context than there's time for, they were mostly lost and often frustrated.
Also, last time I left the choice of topics open but this time I will focus on a shared topic, for two reasons.
First, it should be more interesting. In 2014, I had students write ten short pieces about topics that interest them -- ten because that way I knew they would push themselves beyond the most obvious 2-3 -- and then choose one to focus on all quarter. This worked great for students' staying interested in their own writing; it was less great for students' being interested in each others' writing.
Second, like many people who teach writing, I have been struggling make my writing assignments more relevant to my students' lives since higher relevance leads to greater learning. Choosing their own topics helps, but unless they chose to publish their blogs, the writing they did never had any relevance beyond the classroom.
So, this year we're going to focus on professional online identities. Students will do a "digital audit" to find out what's out there about them already, then plan and create a blog series in which they present their professional selves. They'll define what a successful product will do, but I am thinking its functions will include things like demonstrating that they understand how their field works. showing their familiarity with confusing or controversial issues in that field, and taking a thoughtful position on those issues. This will almost certainly require them to learn more about their current or potential areas of work, and to grapple with where they stand and how they want to be seen by people at jobs or in graduate programs where they plan to apply.
This should be relevant to all students in a course that enrolls all levels (first year through senior) from all areas of campus (design, engineering, human development, history, economics, biology, etc.).
As for how this all fits with "the essay," maybe the connects are clear? If not, or even if so, let me know what you think. The comments button is live. Operators are standing by.
This should be relevant to all students in a course that enrolls all levels (first year through senior) from all areas of campus (design, engineering, human development, history, economics, biology, etc.).
As for how this all fits with "the essay," maybe the connects are clear? If not, or even if so, let me know what you think. The comments button is live. Operators are standing by.
Hi, Sarah. Thanks so much for the nod to my blog. I very much appreciate what you're doing here. I'm just going to make a couple of comments that may or may not be very helpful--I'm thinking as I'm writing.
ReplyDeleteOne: over on the right hand side of my blog is a book my students wrote: Writing Ourselves into Each Others' Lives. I have had subsequent classes read from that book--the response is always good. Look at the chapter on Voice; or Kaytlyn's essay at the end of the book; Hope's; there are several others students love to read and links back to their own writing. In sum, I almost always have students read other students rather than anything published. By reading what others have written, they get ideas about their own writing.
I don't mean to make this too long. I might think more about the reasons for having them write a certain kind of essay--even something as amorphous as the personal essay. My take: they don't need to learn how to do this or that; what they need are good experiences in writing (I get criticized a lot for this), but what the hell--you want them to be writing what they will enjoy reading--I mean reading and responding to what others have written. There are no end of topics that students will automatically start writing about (when they know they are writing primarily for their classmates (and the teacher--who is NOT grading but is reading as the other students are reading).
Leading to another topic: we can perhaps move away from thinking that students need to produce completed pieces-- x number of essays. I have lately moved away from revision--kind of letting students do it on their own. When they know that the primary readers are the other students, they revise on their own. It's automatic. In this vein, we need to think about all the writing they do as writing. That includes the responses they make to each other (and the responses back). What I'm getting at here: the flow, the continuous flow of writing--as is happening right now, me with you. That's writing.
When students are writing like this, there is all sorts of room to have some in between sessions on ways in which they can improve their styles, and little structural problems that most students seem to make. I also like to have students read "Correctness" by Joe Williams. Then we can have these interesting discussions about what's right: He don't know how to tie his shoes backwards-- or-- He doesn't know how to tie his shoes backwards (and of course what "right" means). Then we can have discussions about whether the comma goes inside or outside the quote marks and whether it matters and why some people think it might and others don't give a shit.
:-).
I just looked at the course description: looks as if people threw in everything but the kitchen sink. Notable that nothing is in there that aligns with attitude toward writing, the experience of writing. It's almost as if we're teaching students how to write nothing to no one--but pretend that it's something to someone. Really awful course description.
DeleteI have a lot of thoughts about that course description, which predates my being at UCD, and also predates the writing program's (nominal) independence from literature. "Really awful" is a politer response than what I think of it.
DeleteI should mention that the course was recently revised, though I was not involved in the changes and am not sure what the rationale was. The proposed new version has exactly the same expanded course description, but the short description now also states "development of effective paragraphs and essays."
Also, thanks for your replies. Your thoughts, here or on your blog, are always helpful.
DeleteI downloaded your and your students' book and will read the suggested sections (and more, no doubt). It looks fantastic, and I can already imagine ways to use it in 18 this fall.
To clarify my aims, they will not be writing "personal essays," but instead a series of blog posts. I think that blogging today fills the niche that the essay has traditionally filled -- a space for private individuals to write as public intellectuals, using their own lives and experiences and reactions as the basis for what they share.
I shared my musing about how blogging aligns with the tradition of "the essay" for two reasons.
First, I am intrigued by how blogging has made the role of the public intellectual much more widely available than it has been in the past.
Second, and more mundanely, I need to be able to demonstrate how my course design aligns with the official (and, as noted, awful) course description. I feel confident about my approach, but still need to show that I am coloring inside the lines.
As for this year's focus on "self as online professional," I hope it will offer students as chance to do a few things:
Delete- Reflect on their professional aims. I think they are often pushed to say what they want to do/be but not to really dig into WHY.
- Learn more about the communities they are joining or hope to join.
- Learn more about how professional selves are constructed in those communities, and become more deliberate in how they construct their own professional personas.
Overall, I think this focus will ask/allow them to grapple with questions that they care about. That grappling with ideas is important to their growing as writers, though at the moment I can't quite articulate why. Probably this is something you have addressed in a post that I missed or don't remember at the moment. :-)