ARTICLE: What Makes an Essay American?

[Ryan Goble]

Page-Turner What Makes an Essay American  Despite our fetish for individuality and personal freedom, we are a... BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM

[Shirley Durr]

"those first tentative movements away from the safety of the text and into the wilds of exegesis and analysis need to be friendly, kind, “relatable.” Any hope of sneaking in some bold or challenging theological notion, or moral proposition, rests on the benignity of this initial encounter."'

This makes an essay sound like the "untended baggage" left on the platform at the rail station -- harmless looking but BOOM! Attack!

When I teach essay writing, all the texts say to start with an "attention grabber" before getting to the point. I never liked that and don't emphasize it when I teach. I always tell my students that the attention grabber is optional. What they need to do first is give readers a reason to keep reading, to challenge readers to stay to the end. Am I teaching wrong?

I prefer directness, not seduction, in an essay. Even before I read one, I've opened my mind for receiving new ideas to mull over and make decisions about my own ideas. This essay definitely made me ponder my own teaching and writing.

The attention grabber of this article does not feel like artifice; therefore, it's the kind of attention grabber I don't mind. But how to teach my students this art? I usually save it for another lesson because time is ticking and the state writing test will be upon us soon and they don't care about art. Once my students have learned how to bake the pie, I teach them how to put the whipped cream on top. The cream is not essential to the pie but it is aesthetically pleasing and it takes the pie from tasty to delicious.

Of course, the author is not speaking to high school students who struggle towards proficiency in the rudiments of writing. My students' "attention grabbers" are like jokes from a bad speaker. Now that I've given you this entertainment, let me switch to what I really want to say. Because they've been previously taught that the attention grabber is essential, they usually fall back on ask a question (from the list of ways to grab attention). Their introductions tend to ask endless rhetorical questions so that they fulfill the required number of sentences to check off the list. (Along with attention grabbing, they've been taught that a paragraph is five sentences. I shudder and try to explain content over quantity.)

I don't want my students to be terrorist essayists shocking readers with deceptive benign beginnings so they can attack  readers with a zinger in the end. However, I could use this article, with a little editing, as one of my exemplars to show students how their attention grabbers can artfully connect to the content of their essays. Many of my students can relate to the dj and T.D. Jakes. I have several examples of (student) essays that are less artfully constructed.

Still pondering.