Oct.2015
Engl 101
Professor Begert
Literature
Narrative: My Struggle and Triumph with Essays
Ælfhild
Wiklund
“The golden sun, as
honey, poured upon the silver maple boughs, gilding the deep green
leaves that cast the cool shade upon the forest floor. Rich as
butter the tangy scent of fall leaves permeated the air beneath the
maple tree. Barren of leaves the branches rattled, chattering frost
in the frigid winter's air, through which the hardy eagles soar. The
revolution of earth in relation to the sun is matched by the dance of
the leaves of the fair maple tree.” As fine a poem as many I have
written, but not perhaps an ideal essay introduction, and there was a
time I wrote my essays like that. That time has passed, but it
didn't go quietly, nor was the change instantaneous, I despised
essays for years as I struggled with them. In high-school that
changed. I learned how to write real essays and I grew to appreciate
them. I share with you now the tale of how this came about. How I,
a poet with a heartfelt hatred of essays, learned to create
essays, instead of merely filling in the format of the 5-paragraph
essay structure. But first, we must return to a time before my
attitude towards essays changed, when my loathing of them ran deep in
my heart.
My middle-school
English teacher, Jan, taught me the 5-paragraph essay format. A
friendly woman, with short gray hair and dark-rimmed glasses, she
started her classes by having the students form a circle, and we
spent most of our time, perhaps 95% of it in that circle talking,
some about books and each others' writing but mostly personal
anecdotes, (the other 5% being in-class writing and drama exercises).
I can not honestly say that she taught me how to write essays but
she did give me a foundation, albeit perhaps too solid, as she
taught us the 5-paragraph essay form. She used the white board
behind her place in the circle and taught us the “monster with
three hairy legs” outline. First she wrote and circled the essay
topic. Then she drew three legs upon which the three main ideas were
written. Lastly, she drew three hairs on each leg, and each hair got
a supporting detail for the associated idea. Now I am more
scientifically minded and this sprawling system didn't suit me,
eventually I organized the essay outline into something resembling a
flowchart, but with the last tier containing three columns with three
supporting details each. Now comes the tricky part, I had to write
it, I have always had a talent for wording and free writing, this
writing wasn't free, so I struggled to make the fragments of my
outline cohere and flow. Now Jan had told us to repeat our main
ideas in the introduction and conclusion, on one memorable occasion I
took this a bit too literally, unfortunately...
I was curled up on the couch, where I often do my homework in the
living room, crying over my essay. I swear I spent more tears on
that one essay than I ever have for my dog's death and I loved that
dog, (I will admit that I wasn't tired when the dog died but still,
it's ridiculous). I spent 5-hours on a basic 5-paragraph essay,
barely one handwritten page long, writing and revising, and revising
some more. I read it to my parents and they told me that I should
use some different words, because I was repeating the same phrases,
(“elegant Northern Pintail ducks” and things like that) in the
introduction, appropriate body paragraph and the conclusion. I
retorted that Jan had told me to repeat things. My parents failed
to make me understand and I felt even worse. By now I realize that
it was probably partially low-blood sugar, which never mixes well
with my homework, that doesn't make it any less annoying though.
I can't blame Jan for all
of that, I was taking things too literally, not just by repeating
myself word for word but when she told us that good essay writers
could change the format I think I misinterpreted that as meaning that
until we were good we couldn't change the format, that said my
writing certainly never flourished in her class. I still remember to
this day that I once wrote in an assignment that my hatred for essays
was such that I “cursed them to the depths of Mt. Beerenberg (the
northernmost subaerial volcano)”.
It wasn't until
high-school that I realized how poorly prepared I had been in Jan's
class. My high-school English teacher was a nice lady named Nancy,
shoulder-length blond hair and glasses perched in front of stormy
blue eyes, she looked and dressed like a poet or an English teacher,
to me. Now I don't know if she wrote poetry in her spare time but
she was most definitely an English teacher, and it was in her classes
that I learned to write essays. Now think back to the beginning of
this essay if you will, and the opening lines which may have confused
you, I turned in an essay to Nancy written like that in the beginning
of my high-school experience...
I frowned slightly at the 90 something percent grade, good
enough I suppose since no one really taught me where commas go
(to this day I am still working of that) and maybe my writing will
improve with a teacher who actually grades on conventions. But
what's this? In bold ink, dark on the pale handwritten paper, a
comment. My teacher had written that, while she enjoyed my writing,
the poetic style and rhymes made it difficult to understand my point.
But that is how I write, I am a poet! I think to myself and
stow it in the brightly lit classroom to go on with my day. At home
in the soothing pool of sunlight on the couch with fresh air in my
nose I take out my essay and consider the comment. I am a poet,
poetry is not meant to be clear! It is supposed to sound good. I
wail internally. But essays
are supposed to be understood. I don't care! But I do. I care
about my writing, I want to do well, but I fear, I fear that if I
forsake poetry in my essays, if I seek to write in a different form,
that the ease of poetry will never return. Then make sure you
continue writing poetry outside
of your essays. But... You don't forget how to bicycle when you
walk do you? No, of course not. So? I'm a poet! Be more. Branch
out. Learn. My internal debate waged war over essays, no longer
could I simmer idly in rage, I must conquer! And one essay at a
time, I did.
Somehow, I am unsure
if it is just timing, or that Nancy was a real teacher, or something
else completely, but essays clicked for me in 9th grade.
I no longer attempted to piece together essays from the standard
format. I wrote with the number of paragraphs suited to the topic
and the paragraphs were real, sometimes quite substantial, I no
longer took a paltry pre-thought “three supporting details”,
rather I found things that supported my topic sentence, and
elaborated. That allowed my true writer's nature to shine, the flow
of elaborations, the flourishes of descriptive detail, that, while I
am sure Jan would have loved, I never wrote in my middle-school
essays when I constrained them, choking my essays with the prison
format of the basic 5-paragraph essay form. Don't get me wrong,
5-paragraph essay form is a fine learning tool, but it is not the
one-true-way of essay writing. My mother introduced me to a much
more logical and flexible format which may have had something to do
with my development, she explained essay outlines to me as a logical
progression of details, that used a multitude of labels, capital and
lowercase italics, letters and numbers, each set marking individual
details in support of a single idea of the previous set. Except
written out in one column down a page with increasing indents for
each more specific idea. It makes a lot more sense to me than the
“monster with three hairy legs” system.
By my second year in
high-school essays were simply a convenient conventional format. A
tool for getting my point across. Nancy taught a combined English
and History class and we wrote essays based off a graphic organizer
that simply required two supporting excerpts from the text with
explanations of our interpretations of them, per paragraph. It was
easy. Not something my middle-school self would have ever thought to
think about essays. Do you see now? The path I took from the throes
of rage to the content of an academic success. The triumph of
sought-out change. The proof that I can change, and that even the
most unexpected blocks can be overcome. Perhaps strangest of all is
that this challenge came in the field of my talent, or perhaps not so
strange as formats must be learned while talent runs free, and an
explored talent is sure to turn up all manner of things. It should
be noted that while my language has been definite I am by no means
adept at essays, they are not the hellish thing I once loathed but
they are far from the beauty and allure of poetry. I, as with us
all, continue to learn. And learn I shall.
