October 2004As E. B. White said, "good writing is rewriting." I didn'trealize this when I was in school. In writing, as in math and science, they only show you the finished product.You don't see all the false starts. This gives students amisleading view of how things get made.Part of the reason it happens is that writers don't want people to see their mistakes. But I'm willing to let peoplesee an early draft if it will show how much you haveto rewrite to beat an essay into shape.Below is the oldest version I can find ofThe Age of the Essay (probably the second or third day), withtext that ultimately survived in red and text that latergot deleted in gray.There seem to be several categories of cuts: things I got wrong,things that seem like bragging, flames,digressions, stretches of awkward prose, and unnecessary words.I discarded more from the beginning. That'snot surprising; it takes a while to hit your stride. Thereare more digressions at the start, because I'm not sure whereI'm heading.The amount of cutting is about average. I probably writethree to four words for every one that appears in the finalversion of an essay.(Before anyone gets mad at me for opinions expressed here, rememberthat anything you see here that's not in the final version is obviouslysomething I chose not to publish, often because I disagreewith it.)Recently a friend said that what he liked aboutmy essays was that they weren't written the waywe'd been taught to write essays in school. Youremember: topic sentence, introductory paragraph,supporting paragraphs, conclusion. It hadn'toccurred to me till then that those horrible thingswe had to write in school were even connected towhat I was doing now. But sure enough, I thought,they did call them "essays," didn't they?Well, they're not. Those things you have to writein school are not only not essays, they're one of themost pointless of all the pointless hoops you haveto jump through in school. And I worry that theynot only teach students the wrong things about writing,but put them off writing entirely.So I'm going to give the other side of the story: whatan essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least,how I write one. Students be forewarned: if you actually writethe kind of essay I describe, you'll probably get badgrades. But knowing how it's really done shouldat least help you to understand the feeling of futilityyou have when you're writing the things they tell you to.The most obvious difference between real essays andthe things one has to write in school is that realessays are not exclusively about English literature.It's a fine thing for schools toteach students how towrite. But for some bizarre reason (actually, a very specific bizarrereason that I'll explain in a moment),the teaching ofwriting has gotten mixed together with the studyof literature. And so all over the country, students arewriting not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color infashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but aboutsymbolism in Dickens.With obvious results. Only a few people reallycare aboutsymbolism in Dickens. The teacher doesn't.The students don't. Most of the people who've had to write PhDdisserations about Dickens don't. And certainlyDickens himself would be more interested in an essayabout color or baseball.How did things get this way? To answer that we have to go backalmost a thousand years. Between about 500 and 1000, life wasnot very good in Europe. The term "dark ages" is presentlyout of fashion as too judgemental (the period wasn't dark; it was just different), but if this label didn't alreadyexist, it would seem an inspired metaphor. What littleoriginal thought there was took place in lulls betweenconstant wars and had something of the character ofthe thoughts of parents with a new baby.The most amusing thing written during thisperiod, Liudprand of Cremona's Embassy to Constantinople, is,I suspect, mostly inadvertantly so.Around 1000 Europe began to catch its breath.And once theyhad the luxury of curiosity, one of the first things they discoveredwas what we call "the classics."Imagine if we were visited by aliens. If they could even get here they'd presumably know afew things we don't. Immediately Alien Studies would becomethe most dynamic field of scholarship: instead of painstakinglydiscovering things for ourselves, we could simply suck upeverything they'd discovered. So it was in Europe in 1200.When classical texts began to circulate in Europe, they containednot just new answers, but new questions. (If anyone proveda theorem in christian Europe before 1200, for example, thereis no record of it.)For a couple centuries, some of the most important workbeing done was intellectual archaelogy. Those were alsothe centuries during which schools were first established.And since reading ancient texts was the essence of whatscholars did then, it became the basis of the curriculum.By 1700, someone who wanted to learn aboutphysics didn't need to start by mastering Greek in order to read Aristotle. But schoolschange slower than scholarship: the study ofancient textshad such prestige that it remained the backbone of educationuntil the late 19th century. By then it was merely a tradition.It did serve some purposes: reading a foreign language was difficult,and thus taught discipline, or at least, kept students busy;it introduced students tocultures quite different from their own; and its very uselessnessmade it function (like white gloves) as a social bulwark.But it certainly wasn'ttrue, and hadn't been true for centuries, that students wereserving apprenticeships in the hottest area of scholarship.Classical scholarship had also changed. In the early era, philologyactually mattered. The texts that filtered into Europe wereall corrupted to some degree by the errors of translators andcopyists. Scholars had to figure out what Aristotle saidbefore they could figure out what he meant. But by the modernera such questions were answered as well as they were evergoing to be. And so the study of ancient texts became lessabout ancientness and more about texts.The time was then ripe for the question: if the study ofancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not moderntexts? The answer, of course, is that the raison d'etreof classical scholarship was a kind of intellectual archaelogy thatdoes not need to be done in the case of contemporary authors.But for obvious reasons no one wanted to give that answer.The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied thatthe people studying the classics were, if not wasting theirtime, at least working on problems of minor importance.And so began the study of modern literature. There was someinitial resistance, but it didn't last long.The limitingreagent in the growth of university departments is whatparents will let undergraduates study. If parents will lettheir children major in x, the rest follows straightforwardly.There will be jobs teaching x, and professors to fill them.The professors will establish scholarly journals and publishone another's papers. Universities with x departments willsubscribe to the journals. Graduate students who want jobsas professors of x will write dissertations about it. It maytake a good long while for the more prestigious universitiesto cave in and establish departments in cheesier xes, butat the other end of the scale there are so many universitiescompeting to attract students that the mere establishment ofa discipline requires little more than the desire to do it.High schools imitate universities.And so once universityEnglish departments were established in the late nineteenth century,the 'riting component of the 3 Rs was morphed into English.With the bizarre consequence that high school students nowhad to write about English literature-- to write, withouteven realizing it, imitations of whateverEnglish professors had been publishing in their journals afew decades before. It's no wonder if this seems to thestudent a pointless exercise, because we're now three stepsremoved from real work: the students are imitating Englishprofessors, who are imitating classical scholars, who aremerely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of whatwas, 700 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work.Perhaps high schools should drop English and just teach writing.The valuable part of English classes is learning to write, andthat could be taught better by itself. Students learn betterwhen they're interested in what they're doing, and it's hardto imagine a topic less interesting than symbolism in Dickens.Most of the people who write about that sort of thing professionallyare not really interested in it. (Though indeed, it's been awhile since they were writing about symbolism; now they'rewriting about gender.)I have no illusions about how eagerly this suggestion will be adopted. Public schools probably couldn't stop teachingEnglish even if they wanted to; they're probably required to bylaw. But here's a related suggestion that goes with the graininstead of against it: that universities establish awriting major. Many of the students who now major in Englishwould major in writing if they could, and most wouldbe better off.It will be argued that it is a good thing for students to beexposed to their literary heritage. Certainly. But is thatmore important than that they learn to write well? And areEnglish classes even the place to do it? After all,the average public high school student gets zero exposure to his artistic heritage. No disaster results.The people who are interested in art learn about it forthemselves, and those who aren't don't. I find that Americanadults are no better or worse informed about literature thanart, despite the fact that they spent years studying literaturein high school and no time at all studying art. Which presumablymeans that what they're taught in school is rounding error compared to what they pick up on their own.Indeed, English classes may even be harmful. In my case theywere effectively aversion therapy. Want to make someone dislikea book? Force him to read it and write an essay about it.And make the topic so intellectually bogus that youcould not, if asked, explain why one ought to write about it.I love to read more than anything, but by the end of high schoolI never read the books we were assigned. I was so disgusted withwhat we were doing that it became a point of honorwith me to write nonsense at least as good at the other students'without having more than glanced over the book to learn the namesof the characters and a few random events in it.I hoped this might be fixed in college, but I found the sameproblem there. It was not the teachers. It was English. We were supposed to read novels and write essays about them.About what, and why? That no one seemed to be able to explain.Eventually by trial and error I found that what the teacher wanted us to do was pretend that the story had really takenplace, and to analyze based on what the characters said and did (thesubtler clues, the better) what their motives must have been.One got extra credit for motives having to do with class,as I suspect one must now for those involving gender and sexuality. I learned how to churn out such stuff well enoughto get an A, but I never took another English class.And the books we did these disgusting things to, like thosewe mishandled in high school, I find still have black marksagainst them in my mind. The one saving grace was that English courses tend to favor pompous, dull writers likeHenry James, who deserve black marks against their names anyway.One of the principles the IRS uses in deciding whether toallow deductions is that, if something is fun, it isn't work.Fields that are intellectually unsure of themselves rely ona similar principle. Reading P.G. Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh orRaymond Chandler is too obviously pleasing to seem likeserious work, as reading Shakespeare would have been before English evolved enough to make it an effort to understand him. [sh]And so good writers (just you wait and see who's still inprint in 300 years) are less likely to have readers turned against them by clumsy, self-appointed tour guides.The other big difference between a real essay and the thingsthey make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it. That principle,like the idea that we ought to be writing about literature, turns out to be another intellectual hangover of longforgotten origins. It's often mistakenly believed thatmedieval universities were mostly seminaries. In fact theywere more law schools. And at least in our traditionlawyers are advocates: they aretrained to be able totakeeither side of an argument and make as good a case for it as they can. Whether or not this is a good idea (in the case of prosecutors,it probably isn't), it tended to pervadethe atmosphere ofearly universities. After the lecture the most common formof discussion was the disputation. This ideais at leastnominally preserved in our present-day thesis defense-- indeed,in the very word thesis. Most people treat the words thesisand dissertation as interchangeable, but originally, at least,a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation wasthe argument by which one defended it.I'm not complaining that we blur these two words together.As far as I'm concerned, the sooner we lose the originalsense of the word thesis, the better. For many, perhaps most, graduate students, it is stuffing a square peg into a roundhole to try to recast one's work as a single thesis. Andas for the disputation, that seems clearly a net lose.Arguing two sides of a case may be a necessary evil in alegal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth,as I think lawyers would be the first to admit.And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the essaysthey teach you to write in high school. The topicsentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and theconclusion--- uh, what it the conclusion? I was never sure about that in high school. If your thesis was well expressed,what need was there to restate it? In theory it seemed thatthe conclusion of a really good essay ought not to need to say any more than QED.But when you understand the originsof this sort of "essay", you can see where theconclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the jury.What other alternative is there? To answer thatwe have toreach back into history again, though this time not so far.To Michel de Montaigne, inventor of the essay.He wasdoing something quite different from what alawyer does,andthe difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the Frenchverb meaning "to try" (the cousin of our word assay),and an "essai" is an effort.An essay is something youwrite in orderto figure something out.Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with athesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position anddefend it. You see a door that's ajar, and you open it andwalk in to see what's inside.If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you needto write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well,there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressingideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak aword. 90%of what ends up in my essays was stuffI onlythought of when I sat down to write them. That's why Iwrite them.So there's another difference between essays andthe thingsyou have to write in school. In schoolyou are, in theory,explaining yourself to someone else. In the best case---ifyou're really organized---you're just writing it down.In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You'rethinking out loud.But not quite. Just as inviting people over forces you toclean up your apartment, writing something that you knowother people will read forces you to think well. So itdoes matter to have an audience. The things I've writtenjust for myself are no good. Indeed, they're bad ina particular way:they tend to peter out. When I run intodifficulties, I notice that Itend to conclude with a few vaguequestions and then drift off to get a cup of tea.This seems a common problem.It's practically the standardending in blog entries--- with the addition of a "heh" or an emoticon, prompted by the all too accurate sense thatsomething is missing.And indeed, a lot ofpublished essays peter out in thissame way.Particularly the sort written by the staff writers of newsmagazines. Outside writers tend to supplyeditorials of the defend-a-position variety, whichmake a beeline toward a rousing (andforeordained) conclusion. But the staff writers feelobliged to write something morebalanced, which inpractice ends up meaning blurry.Since they'rewriting for a popular magazine, they start with themost radioactively controversial questions, from which(because they're writing for a popular magazine)they then proceed to recoil fromin terror.Gay marriage, for oragainst? This group says one thing. That group saysanother. One thing is certain: the question is acomplex one. (But don't get mad at us. We didn'tdraw any conclusions.)Questions aren't enough. An essay has to come up with answers.They don't always, of course. Sometimes you start with a promising question and get nowhere. But those you don'tpublish. Those are like experiments that get inconclusiveresults. Something you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know.But what you tell him doesn't matter, so long as it's interesting. I'm sometimes accused of meandering.In defend-a-position writing that would be a flaw.There you're not concerned with truth. You alreadyknow where you're going, and you want to go straight there,blustering through obstacles, and hand-wavingyour way across swampy ground. But that's not whatyou're trying to do in an essay. An essay is supposed tobe a search for truth. It would be suspicious if it didn'tmeander.The Meander is a river in Asia Minor (akaTurkey).As you might expect, it winds all over the place.But does itdo this out of frivolity? Quite the opposite.Like all rivers, it's rigorously following the laws of physics.The path it has discovered,winding as it is, representsthe most economical route to the sea.The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down.For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting.Of all the places to go next, choosewhichever seemsmost interesting.I'm pushing this metaphor a bit. An essayistcan't havequite as little foresight as a river. In fact what you do(or what I do) is somewhere between a river and a romanroad-builder. I have a general idea of the directionI want to go in, andI choose the next topic with that in mind. This essay isabout writing, so I do occasionally yank it back in thatdirection, but it is not all the sort of essay Ithought I was going to write about writing.Note too that hill-climbing (which is what this algorithm iscalled) can get you in trouble.Sometimes, justlike a river,yourun up against a blank wall. WhatI do then is just what the river does: backtrack.At one point in this essayI found that after following a certain thread I ran outof ideas. I had to go back nparagraphs and start overin another direction. For illustrative purposes I've leftthe abandoned branch as a footnote.Err on the side of the river. An essay is not a referencework. It's not something you read looking for a specificanswer, and feel cheated if you don't find it. I'd muchrather read an essay that went off in an unexpected butinteresting direction than one that plodded dutifully alonga prescribed course.So what's interesting? For me, interesting means surprise.Design, as Matzhas said, should follow the principle ofleast surprise.A button that looks like it will make amachine stop should make it stop, not speed up. Essaysshould do the opposite. Essays should aim for maximumsurprise.I was afraid of flying for a long time and could only travelvicariously. When friends came back from faraway places,it wasn't just out of politeness that I asked them abouttheir trip.I really wanted to know. And I found thatthe best way to get information out of them was to askwhat surprised them. How was the place different from whatthey expected? This is an extremely useful question.You can ask it of eventhe most unobservant people, and it willextract information they didn't even know they wererecording. Indeed, you can ask it in real time. Now when I go somewherenew, I make a note of what surprises me about it. Sometimes Ieven make a conscious effort to visualize the place beforehand,so I'll have a detailed image to diff with reality.Surprises are factsyou didn't already know.But they'remore than that. They're factsthat contradict things youthought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort offact you can get. They're like a food that's not merelyhealthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of thingsyou've already eaten.How do you find surprises? Well, therein lies halfthe work of essay writing. (The other half is expressingyourself well.) You can at leastuse yourself as aproxy for the reader. You should only write about thingsyou've thought about a lot. And anything you come acrossthat surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot,will probably surprise most readers.For example, in a recent essay I pointed out that becauseyou can only judge computer programmers by working withthem, no one knows in programming who the heroes shouldbe.Icertainlydidn't realize this when I started writingthe essay, and even now I find it kind of weird. That'swhat you're looking for.So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients:you needa few topics that you think about a lot, and youneed some ability to ferret out the unexpected.What should you think about? My guess is that itdoesn't matter. Almost everything isinteresting if you get deeplyenough into it. The one possible exceptionarethingslike working in fast food, whichhave deliberately had allthe variation sucked out of them.In retrospect, was thereanything interesting about working in Baskin-Robbins?Well, it was interesting to noticehow important color wasto the customers. Kids a certain age would point intothe case and say that they wanted yellow. Did they wantFrench Vanilla or Lemon? They would just look at youblankly. They wanted yellow. And then there was themystery of why the perennial favorite Pralines n' Creamwas so appealing. I'm inclined now tothink it was the salt.And the mystery of why Passion Fruit tasted so disgusting.People would order it because of the name, and were alwaysdisappointed. It should have been called In-sink-eratorFruit.And there wasthe difference in the way fathers andmothers bought ice cream for their kids.Fathers tended toadopt the attitude ofbenevolent kings bestowing largesse,and mothers that ofharried bureaucrats,giving in topressure against their better judgement.So, yes, there does seem to be material, even infast food.What about the other half, ferreting out the unexpected?That may require some natural ability. I've noticed fora long time that I'm pathologically observant. ....[That was as far as I'd gotten at the time.]Notes[sh] In Shakespeare's own time, serious writing meant theologicaldiscourses, not the bawdy plays acted over on the other side of the river among the bear gardens and whorehouses.The other extreme, the work that seems formidable from the momentit's created (indeed, is deliberately intended to be)is represented by Milton. Like the Aeneid, Paradise Lost is arock imitating a butterfly that happened to get fossilized.Even Samuel Johnson seems to have balked at this, on the one hand paying Milton the compliment of an extensive biography,and on the other writing of Paradise Lost that "none who read itever wished it longer."
