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 9^th 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.