In this week’s extra reading, Paul Graham’s launches all out war on the educational essay.

And he makes a number of fine points.

Essays are a constant presence through all of our education after primary school, and Graham argues that this form of the essay has made writing “boring and pointless”, and result in a “miserable high school experience”.

He quite accurately claims that writing an essay is, most of the time, writing an imitation of an imitation of an imitation. An essay will hardly ever tell a tutor or a lecturer anything that they don’t already know or believe, and this is exactly what they want to read.

Graham states that a ‘real’ essay should convince the reader due to it having the right answers, not because the rhetoric and argument is strong. In your typical high school or university essy, we are given are set topic, a set argument, that we have to base the whole essay on, and we obviously don’t have the chance to alter the question.

Graham says that instead of opening with an argumentative assertion, as we have been taught for countless years in education, an essay should begin with a question, and uses the metaphor of noticing an ajar door, and opening it to see inside. An essay should start with an interesting question that we don’t actually know the answer to, and the actually writing should involve us trying to find this answer, or something close to it.

I found this quote most applicable to our Networked Media course:

In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you’re writing for yourself. You’re thinking out loud.

Graham also acknowledges that we write differently when we know there will be someone reading it, this forces us to write better.

We should, then, be writing essays not because we have to to pass a subject, but to form our ideas and thoughts into a cohesive whole, and allow us to expand on this ideas.

I think this serves to justify the heavy emphasis of blogging in the course, and it could be argued that we’re constantly writing this ‘true’ essays of sorts in our blog posts. We aren’t told exactly what to write about, and the blogs give us a chance to express ourselves and our thoughts on the subject as a whole. Having it as the primary assessment also forces us to actively engage with the content: in other subjects I may do all the reading, but not actually take much in or interpret it for myself, but in this course, I have to do the readings properly and actually somehow make an interesting blog post out of them.

I also found the second-to-final sentence interesting and thought provoking:

The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay.