The Art of the Essay

"The continuous movement back and forth from the specific instance to general  significance, from fact to meaning, from sensory and emotional to the intellectual  —such is the art of the essay." 

—Carol Burke and Molly Best Tinsley 

All of us have terrific stories to tell and insights to share, and they usually come straight from our own experiences, big or small. One of the best ways to begin sharing these stories and insights is through the essay, a genre of writing that includes everything from memoir to literary journalism and which is currently experiencing a boom in  popularity. In this course you will learn everything you need to know to develop your  experiences and insights into publishable pieces that entertain, challenge, and enlighten your audience. You will learn, for example, how to organize your material, choose an effective structure, blend dramatization and reflection, ground insights in concrete scenes, create a strong narrative arc, and manage elements such as characterization, description, and dialogue. Throughout, we will explore different forms of the essay  (personal, travel, biographical, analytic, etc.) and keep track of tricks of the trade—how to defeat writer's block, work with motifs and telling details, enliven prose, and the like.  

This course is a workshop rather than a lecture, so the emphasis will be on helping you  acquire skills rather than knowledge—skills that you can use to analyze and write  fabulous essays. We will divide our time between analyzing what makes accomplished  essays effective and applying these lessons to our own writing. Each day we will look closely at 3 or 4 essays and then try out at least one or two techniques we find in them.  We will also look briefly at short pieces of writing by students in the class. In addition to this reading and writing, we will generate a number of lists—typical essays structures, principles of effective dramatization, modes of description, things to look for while revising, etc. These lists can become a kind of personal reference book that you can use  whenever you sit down in the future to analyze a text or write an essay. 

Instructor: Jonah Willihnganz.