September 2004Remember the essays you had to write in high school?Topic sentence, introductory paragraph,supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being,say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure.Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of thestory: what an essay really is, and how you write one.Or at least, how I write one.ModsThe most obvious difference between real essays andthe things one has to write in school is that realessays are not exclusively about English literature.Certainly schools should teach students how towrite. But due to a series of historical accidentsthe 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 budgetmight compete with the Yankees, or the role of color infashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but aboutsymbolism in Dickens.With the result that writing is made to seem boring andpointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens?Dickens 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. Around 1100, Europe at last began tocatch its breath after centuries of chaos, and once theyhad the luxury of curiosity they rediscoveredwhat we call "the classics." The effect was rather as ifwe were visited by beings from another solar system.These earlier civilizations were so much more sophisticatedthat for the next several centuries the main work ofEuropean scholars, in almost every field, was to assimilatewhat they knew.During this period the study of ancient texts acquired greatprestige. It seemed the essence of what scholars did. AsEuropean scholarship gained momentum it became less and less important;by 1350someone who wanted to learn about science could find betterteachers than Aristotle in his own era. [1]But schools change slower than scholarship. In the19th century the study of ancient texts was still the backboneof the curriculum.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 original raison d'etreof classical scholarship was a kind of intellectual archaeology 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 thatthose 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 a gooddeal of resistance at first.The first courses in English literatureseem to have been offered by the newer colleges, particularlyAmerican ones. Dartmouth, the University of Vermont, Amherst,and University College, Londontaught English literature in the 1820s.But Harvard didn't have a professor of English literature until1876, and Oxford not till 1885. (Oxford had a chair of Chinese beforeit had one of English.) [2]What tipped the scales, at least in the US, seems to havebeen the idea that professors should do research as wellas teach. This idea (along with the PhD, the department, andindeed the whole concept of the modern university) was importedfrom Germany in the late 19th century. Beginning atJohns Hopkins in 1876, the new model spread rapidly.Writing was one of the casualties. Colleges had long taughtEnglish composition. But how do you do research on composition?The professors who taught math could be required to do originalmath, the professors who taught history could be required towrite scholarly articles about history, but what about the professors who taught rhetoric or composition? What should theydo research on? The closest thing seemed to be English literature. [3]And so in the late 19th century the teaching of writing was inheritedby English professors. This had two drawbacks:(a) an expert on literature need not himself be a good writer,any more than an art historian has to be a good painter, and (b)the subject of writing now tends to be literature, since that'swhat the professor is interested in.High schools imitate universities. The seeds of our miserablehigh school experiences were sown in 1892, whenthe National Education Association"formally recommended that literatureand composition be unified in the high school course." [4]The 'riting component of the 3 Rs then 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 a few 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.No DefenseThe other big difference between a real essay and the thingsthey make you write in school is that a real essay doesn'ttake 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, trained to takeeither side of an argument and make as good a case for itas they can.Whether cause or effect, this spirit pervadedearly universities. The study of rhetoric, the art of arguingpersuasively, was a third of the undergraduate curriculum. [5]And after the lecture the most common formof discussion was the disputation. This is at leastnominally preserved in our present-day thesis defense: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.Defending a position 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. It's notjust that you miss subtleties this way.The real problem is that you can't change the question.And yet this principle is built into the very structure ofthe things they teach you to write in high school. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supportingparagraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and theconclusion-- uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sureabout that in high school. It seemed as if we were justsupposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph,but in different enough words that no one could tell.Why bother?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.Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but itshould be convincing because you got the right answers,not because you did a good job of arguing. When I give a draft of an essay to friends, there are two thingsI want to know: which parts bore them, and which seem unconvincing. The boring bits can usually be fixed by cutting. But I don't try to fix the unconvincing bits byarguing more cleverly. I need to talk the matter over.At the very least I must have explained something badly. Inthat case, in the course of the conversation I'll be forcedto come up a with a clearer explanation, which I can justincorporate in the essay. More often than not I haveto change what I was saying as well.But the aim is never to be convincing per se.As the reader gets smarter, convincing and true become identical,so if I can convince smart readers I must be near the truth.The sort of writing that attempts to persuade may bea valid (or at least inevitable) form, but it's historicallyinaccurate to call it an essay. An essay is something else.TryingTo understand what a real essay is, we have toreach back into history again, though this time not so far.To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book ofwhat he called "essais." He wasdoing something quite different from what lawyers do, andthe difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the Frenchverb meaning "to try"and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something youwrite to try to 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 haveone. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with aquestion. In a real essay, you don't take a position anddefend it. You notice 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. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak aword. Most of what ends up in my essays I onlythought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.In the things you write in school you are, in theory,merely explaining yourself to the reader.In a real essay you're writing for yourself.You're thinking out loud.But not quite.Just as inviting people over forces you toclean up your apartment, writing something thatother 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.They tend to peter out. When I run intodifficulties, I find I conclude with a few vaguequestions and then drift off to get a cup of tea.Many published essays peter out in the same 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 "balanced."Since they're writing for a popular magazine, they start with themost radioactively controversial questions, from which-- becausethey're writing for a popular magazine-- theythen proceed to recoil in terror.Abortion, for or against?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.)The RiverQuestions aren't enough. An essay has to come up with answers.They don't always, of course. Sometimes you start with apromising question and get nowhere. But those you don't publish. Those are like experiments that get inconclusiveresults. An essay 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 (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey.As you might expect, it winds all over the place.But it doesn't do this out of frivolity.The path it has discovered is the mosteconomical route to the sea. [6]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, choose the most interesting.One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. I alwaysknow generally what I want to write about.But not thespecific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph toparagraph I let the ideas take their course.This doesn't always work. Sometimes, like a river,one runs up against a wall. Then I do the same thing 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 seven paragraphs and start overin another direction.Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-uptrain of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation.Real thought, like real conversation, is full of false starts.It would be exhausting to read. You need to cut and fill toemphasize the central thread, like anillustrator inking over a pencil drawing. But don'tchange so much that you lose the spontaneity of the original.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.SurpriseSo what's interesting? For me, interesting means surprise.Interfaces, as Geoffrey James has said, should follow the principle ofleast astonishment. A button that looks like it will make amachine stop should make it stop, not speed up. Essays should 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 askedwhat they saw. I really wanted to know. And I foundthe 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 the most unobservant people, and it will extract information they didn't even know they wererecording.Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but thatcontradict 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.) The trick is to use 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 who the best programmers are overall.I didn't realize this when I beganthat 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:a few topics you've thought about a lot, andsome ability to ferret out the unexpected.What should you think about? My guess is that itdoesn't matter-- that anything can be interesting if you get deeplyenough into it. One possible exception might be thingsthat have deliberately had all the variation sucked out of them,like working in fast food. In retrospect, was thereanything interesting about working at Baskin-Robbins?Well, it was interesting how important color wasto the customers. Kids a certain age would point intothe case and say that they wanted yellow. Did they want French Vanilla or Lemon? They would just look at you blankly. They wanted yellow. And then there was the mystery of why the perennial favorite Pralines 'n' Cream was so appealing. (I think now it was the salt.)And the difference in the way fathers andmothers bought ice cream for their kids: the fatherslike benevolent kings bestowing largesse, the mothersharried, giving in to pressure.So, yes, there does seem to be some material even infast food.I didn't notice those things at the time, though. At sixteenI was about as observant as a lump of rock. I can see more now inthe fragments of memory I preserve of that age than I could seeat the time from having it all happening live, right in front of me.ObservationSo the ability to ferret out the unexpected must not merely be aninborn one. It must be something you can learn.How do you learn it?To some extent it's like learning history.When you first readhistory, it's just a whirl of namesand dates. Nothing seems to stick. But the more you learn, the more hooks you havefor new facts to stick onto-- which meansyou accumulate knowledge at an exponential rate. Once youremember that Normans conqueredEngland in 1066, it will catch your attention when you hearthat other Normans conquered southern Italy at about the same time.Which will make you wonder about Normandy, and take notewhen a third book mentions that Normanswere not, like most of what is nowcalled France, tribes that flowed in as the Roman empire collapsed,but Vikings (norman = north man) who arrivedfour centuries later in 911. Which makesit easier to remember that Dublin was also established byVikings in the 840s. Etc, etc squared.Collecting surprises is a similar process.The more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll noticenew ones. Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older,life should become more and more surprising. When I was akid, I used to think adults had it all figured out.I had it backwards. Kids are the ones who have it all figured out. They're just mistaken.When it comes to surprises, the rich get richer. But(as with wealth) theremay be habits of mind that will help the process along. It'sgood to have a habit of asking questions, especially questionsbeginning with Why.But not in the random way that three yearolds ask why. There are an infinite number of questions.How do you find the fruitful ones?I find it especiallyuseful to ask why about things that seem wrong.For example, why should there be a connection betweenhumor and misfortune? Why do we find it funny when acharacter, even one we like, slips on a banana peel?There's a whole essay's worth of surprises there for sure.If you want to notice things that seem wrong, you'll find adegree of skepticism helpful. I take it as an axiomthat we're only achieving 1% of what we could.This helps counteract the rule that gets beaten into ourheads as children: that things are the way they are becausethat is how things have to be.For example, everyone I've talked to while writing this essay felt the same aboutEnglish classes-- that the whole process seemed pointless.But none of us had the balls at the time to hypothesize thatit was, in fact, all a mistake.We all thought there was just something we weren't getting.I have a hunch you want to pay attention not just to thingsthat seem wrong, but things that seem wrong in a humorous way. I'm always pleased when I see someone laugh as theyread a draft of an essay. But why should I be? I'm aimingfor good ideas. Why should good ideas be funny?The connection may be surprise.Surprises make us laugh, and surprises are whatone wants to deliver.I write down things that surprise me in notebooks. I neveractually get around to reading them and usingwhat I've written, but I do tend toreproduce the same thoughts later. So the main valueof notebooks may be what writing things down leaves in yourhead.People trying to be cool will find themselves at a disadvantagewhen collecting surprises. To be surprised is to be mistaken.And the essence of cool, as any fourteen year old could tellyou, is nil admirari. When you're mistaken, don'tdwell on it; just act like nothing's wrong and maybe no onewill notice.One of the keys to coolness is to avoid situations whereinexperience may make you look foolish. If you want to find surprises you should do the opposite.Study lots of different things,because some of the most interesting surprises are unexpectedconnections between different fields. For example, jam, bacon, pickles, and cheese, which are among the most pleasingof foods, were all originally intended as methods of preservation.And so were books and paintings.Whatever you study, include history-- but social and economichistory, not political history. History seems to me so importantthat it's misleading to treat it as a mere field of study.Another way to describe it is all the data we have so far.Among other things, studying history gives one confidence thatthere are good ideas waiting to be discovered right under our noses.Swords evolved during the Bronze Age out of daggers, which(like their flint predecessors) had a hilt separate from theblade. Because swords are longerthe hilts kept breaking off. But it took five hundred yearsbefore someone thought of casting hilt and blade as onepiece.DisobedienceAbove all, make a habit of payingattention to things you're not supposed to, either because they're "inappropriate," or not important, or not what you'resupposed to be working on. If you're curious about something,trust your instincts.Follow the threads that attract yourattention. If there's something you're really interestedin, you'll find they have an uncanny way of leading back toit anyway, just as the conversation of people who are especiallyproud of something always tends to lead back to it.For example, I've always been fascinated by comb-overs, especiallythe extreme sort thatmake a man look as if he's wearing a beret made of his own hair.Surely this is a lowly sort of thing to be interested in-- thesort of superficial quizzingbest left to teenage girls. And yet there is something underneath.The key question, I realized, is how does the comber-over notsee how odd he looks?And the answer is that he got to look that way incrementally.What began as combing his hair a little carefully over athin patch has gradually, over 20 years, grown into a monstrosity.Gradualness is very powerful. And that power can beused for constructive purposes too: just as you can trickyourself into looking like a freak, you can trick yourself intocreating something so grand that you would never have dared toplan such a thing. Indeed, this is just how most goodsoftware gets created. You start by writing a stripped-downkernel (how hard can it be?) and gradually it growsinto a complete operating system. Hence the next leap: couldyou do the same thing in painting, or in a novel?See what you can extract from a frivolous question?If there's one piece of advice I would give about writing essays,it would be: don't do as you're told.Don't believe what you're supposed to.Don't write theessay readers expect; one learns nothing fromwhat one expects.Anddon't write the way they taught you to in school.The most important sort of disobedience is to writeessays at all. Fortunately, this sort of disobedience showssigns of becoming rampant. It used to be that only a tinynumber of officially approved writers were allowed towrite essays. Magazines published few of them, and judgedthem less by what they said than who wrote them;a magazine might publish a story by anunknown writer if it was good enough, but if they publishedan essay on x it had to be by someone who was at leastforty and whose job title had x in it. Which is a problem,because there are a lot of things insiders can't say preciselybecause they're insiders.The Internet is changing that.Anyone can publish an essay on the Web, and it gets judged, as anywriting should, by what it says, not who wrote it.Who are you to write about x? You are whatever you wrote.Popular magazines made the period between the spreadof literacy and the arrival of TV the golden age of theshort story.The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay.And that's certainly not something I realized whenI started writing this.Notes[1] I'm thinking of Oresme (c. 1323-82). But it's hard to picka date, because there was a sudden drop-off in scholarshipjust as Europeans finished assimilating classical science.The cause may have been the plague of 1347; the trend inscientific progress matches the population curve.[2] Parker, William R. "Where Do College English DepartmentsCome From?" College English 28 (1966-67), pp. 339-351.Reprinted in Gray, Donald J. (ed). The Department ofEnglish at Indiana University Bloomington 1868-1970. IndianaUniversity Publications.Daniels, Robert V. The University of Vermont: The FirstTwo Hundred Years. University of Vermont, 1991.Mueller, Friedrich M. Letter to the Pall MallGazette. 1886/87. Reprinted in Bacon, Alan (ed).The Nineteenth-CenturyHistory of English Studies. Ashgate, 1998.[3] I'm compressing the story a bit.At firstliterature took a back seat to philology, which (a) seemed more serious and (b) was popular in Germany, where many of theleading scholars of that generation had been trained.In some cases the writing teachers were transformedin situ into English professors.Francis James Child, who had been Boylston Professorof Rhetoric at Harvard since 1851,became in 1876 the university's first professor of English.[4] Parker, op. cit., p. 25.[5] The undergraduate curriculum or trivium (whence"trivial") consisted of Latin grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Candidates for masters' degrees went on to study thequadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.Together these were the seven liberal arts.The study of rhetoric was inherited directly from Rome, whereit was considered the most importantsubject. It would not be far from the truth to say that education in the classical worldmeant training landowners' sonsto speak well enough to defend their interestsin political and legal disputes.[6] Trevor Blackwell points out that thisisn't strictly true, because the outside edges of curves erode faster.Thanks to Ken Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, JessicaLivingston, Jackie McDonough, and Robert Morris for reading drafts ofthis.
