Today in my Composition class we talked about the essay. I asked students to tell me what the first words that came into their heads were when they thought of the word “essay.” They said things like “torture,” “suffering,” and “research.” I told them that the word that first comes into my head is “boring,” and that my goal in this class is to help them learn to write essays that are NOT boring.
So how do you write an essay that is not boring?
First, you should write about something interesting TO YOU, THE WRITER. I stress that second part because your readers might have no idea how interested they are in what you are writing about, but if you as a writer can’t find why your topic is interesting you will have no hope of helping your reader to do so. On the flip side, if you write with passion about something you are passionate about, you will find that many people become interested in your topic.
Second, you should write something that is mechanically sound. This comes with getting a zero-draft out early and working it until it is clean. I am having my students hand write two drafts of their 1500 word essays before they turn in their final draft to me.
Third, you should have a good structure. I talked about visually planning out the essay by breaking it into 250-300 word chunks. If you can write 300 well-constructed, concise words, you can string those ideas into a paper that is much longer than 300 words. If you can’t write 300 words well, there is no way that 1500 or 15,000 will ever turn out for you.
Finally (and perhaps most importantly), I taught my students that every good essay tells a story. We watched the first few minutes of this talk by Jane McGonnigal and then discussed how she captures everyones attention because she is able to tell a great story. The way to get your reader’s attention, I tell my students, is not by making these huge blanket universal statements about how you are going to solve the world’s problems in 1500 words. You get their attention by telling a great story.
I’m excited to see what these kids come up with over the next few weeks.