Tips on writing an essay

Many scholars find it useful to classify writers as either reporters or essayists. Like most categories, these two overlap. But let's try to think of them as distinct for a moment. A reporter collects information and presents it much as one does a news story on a big city newspaper. The reporter's point of view is in large measure limited to the choice of data, and we all know that that choice is important and can be dishonest. But on the surface, at least, the reporter is not personally wrestling with an idea that he or she wants readers to accept in opposition to the ideas of others. Newspaper readers do not read the reporter's story to see what the reporter thinks: they read to see what has happened.

When the reporter writes an interpretation, it is usually a quotation or summary of the opinion of an authority. For example: Movies are less violent than they used to be, J. C. Flack of Hollywood Pictures, Inc., hold a meeting of the National Council of Parents and Teachers last night. "In the last Clint Eastwood movie, Clint gunned down only eight men, and there were only six other violent murders in the film. The woman whose face was slashed by a cowboy did not die from her wounds. Yes, you saw a lot of blood," Flack admitted. "But, hey," he said, "we all have blood in us, and that's natural." Flack said that most of the people in a Clint Eastwood movie deserve to die anyway. Here the reporter is quoting another authority; she is not giving an opinion of her own. In an essay, the writer is the interpreter, thinker, explainer, the authority. The essay inevitably has about it the scent of argument. It may not present forensic argument against a sharply expressed point of view (although some essays do just that), but in one way or another the essay informs us that the writer has studied the issue or experienced it intimately enough to interpret it.

The essay involves a line of reasoning, beginning with commonly accepted assumptions and proceeding to consequences that are not self-evident. Some people mistakenly believe that the essay must be about the writer's experience that essays have to be autobiographical. Some teachers now say that student writers should shape essays around some image out of the writer's personal experience. Then a woman's suffering with anorexia might give her a new insight into standards of beauty represented in nudes painted by male artists; a young man's recollections of an abusive father might help him interpret some of the stories in James Joyce's collection called Dubliners.

Many examples of such essays seem self-indulgent and narrow, and teachers who give assignments that call forth such essays seem often to think that young writers cannot think about anything other than their most intimate experiences. In over thirty years of teaching in three schools -a small private college, a large Southern state university, and a large northeastern private university -my best papers have come from students who became excited about books, ideas, paintings, architecture, science, history, and a whole world of other topics that did not require them to make explicit reference to their own experiences. Yes, writers like Richard Selzer, Annie Dillard, Loren Eiseley, Maxine Hong Kingston, and many others have written personal autobiographical essays popular among many readers.

Mark Twain's autobiographical narratives Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, and Life on the Mississippi are classics of American literature. But the demand in most college courses and in life beyond college is for writing that makes sense of texts outside ourselves. And unexperienced writers writing personal essays seem easily to me to fall into misplaced passion, sentimentality, and even dishonesty in a mistaken effort to make themselves interesting by displaying their feelings rather than their knowledge or understanding. Although we can never free ourselves entirely from the influences of our own experiences, part of becoming educated is learning how to stand off somewhat from ourselves and bring a certain detachment to the subjects we write about. Certainly it is no part of the definition of die essay that it be autobiographical or "familiar," as some writers now call the autobiographical essay.