RE: Big Yes for Formulaic Writing

[Profsteven@aol.com]

I agree that elevating Bacon's concept of the essay's function and structure
to the point of exclusive model short circuits students'writing.

One of the powerful pedagological aspects of teaching students to write
personal essays is that it frees students from 5-¶ structure and from
assumptions that every essay must be thesis-driven or highlight the thesis in
¶1.

The perceived (I should say the "misperceived") problem of teaching personal
essay writing is that "it's only personal" and most of us talk about personal
essays as the starting place for learning how to write academically.  But I'm
convinced that writing personal essays are a positive force throughout writing
instruction. We need to teach students to read published personal essays with
as much analytical thought and with as much questioning of artistic merit as
they do poems and fiction.  I'm convinced that writing personal essays that
reach beyond "what happened to me" or "what I think"--i.e., personal essays
taht establish the global significance of the experience or thought, that
incorporate the student's readings and musing from other courses as well as
from our classes--such writing illustrates in a most powerful and productive
way the allure of reading and writing essays, the "exploring" that essays are
based on originally.

Do other colleges teach whole courses on personal writing and personal essays?
What have you discovered about students' ability to structure material etc.?
In my classes, I've found that students at first flounder and feel totally
insecure that a prescribed form doesn't exist for personal essays, then most
of them feel liberated and some actually explore new structures.  

The question some of my colleagues ask is, "But how does writing a personal
essay help students write academic papers?"  The answer, I think, is that
writing personal essays that are crafted essays filled with artistic decisions
and selections and amplification is the best training possible for finding the
structure inherent in a topic (rather than imposed from outside) and learning
to value one's sense of a topic.  I must also add that I require students to
move beyond the merely personal--to lose forever the idea that a personal
essay is merely a typed journal entry--and to discover the essence of the
experience, idea, etc.

What experiences have you had with the form?

Steve Strang
MIT