“ In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside”.

^ If I had read this statement, my English life in year 12 would have been a hellll of a lot easier.  I regrettably presume however, that my results would have been drastically worse.

“So mrs…in the conclusion… do I kind of sum up what I already said in the introduction… but in… different words…?” was my question throughout my entire English VCE experience.; The question to which I received a general “ yes”, as though it were textbook to say so. It was blunt answers like this that left me in an endless state of confusion. I won’t lie, half the things I wrote about I was unsure of, because I was prompted to focus all my attention on the dreaded ‘persuasive devices’. In maturing a little I’ve begun to speculate over these ideas and realized how banal my writing essays was if all I ever focused on was persuasion, especially since, according to Paul Grahams ‘The age of the essay’, “writing that attempts to persuade may be a valid form, but it’s historically inaccurate to call it an essay”.

So if I’m not trying to persuade, nor am I defending an argument, what is it that I ought to put into an essay? Well, Michel de Montaigne answered that question in 1580: Expressing ideas helps to form them. I know, this concept completely shakes the entire school institutions’ English subjects curriculum to the core. I can hear English teachers now.. ‘ ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!’ as they go nuts , scrunching up essays whilst crying at the thought of not having some type of criteria to abide by when marking.

But I love this idea that an essay should come up with answers. I love that you can start out with nothing- just a pencil, a piece of paper and your thoughts- and result in an answer to something neither you nor the reader had previously known. That’s the way to progress, to evolve.

I know this is super philosophical but hey… If I take this concept further, even beyond the realms of  essay writing: perhaps humanity is deviating away from the ultimate truth because we’ve stopped trying to find it, rather, we use up all our energy trying to convince people that our opinion is the right one.

Maybe… just maybe… we could reunite humanity if we all stopped being so hardheaded and opened our minds to the possibility of an ultimate truth that we ourselves have not discovered. That’s truly what I admire so much about my course; it’s about speculation and questioning what you thought the truth was.