Imogen wonders about all that she learnt in high school being wrong. Not all, but the essay is turned into a dead thing. The essay is a living thing. Hypertext is a living thing because it lets you write and read by following and making rivers (just read the Nelson again as an ideas stream trying to be literally realised on a book), one reason I did the work on teaching was to make this something present to everyone. Now I’m doing it with what we think writing is. Hypertext does the same with what we think narrative is. Denham joins the Graham reading on the essay with the role of the blog, which is one of the reasons Graham might speculate that the web could see a golden age of the essay (though now we have Medium where there is some very high quality essaying going on), in particular the importance of the essay as a form of thinking where you think out loud. This is a writing where you do the thinking in the writing, not somewhere else and then report on what you thunked. Daniel provides the crib reading notes of key takeaways. Which reminds me, the form of the subject, its shape and style, is essayist in the way that Graham describes in the reading. It is following some ideas, not necessarily defending positions, which is perhaps why it is difficult for students, used to being trained to defend positions and therefore told the positions that matter, to get a hold on. Ideas are always slippery, particularly if you bother to listen to them.

Torika picks up some points, that other forms of writing might matter too. Perhaps, but language is the stuff we have to think with, so the essay becomes the place where thinking can and does happen. So it matters simply for that. On other hand, while the ‘traditional’ essay might help develop organised thinking for me this is precisely the problem. Why is organised thinking important? This becomes a tautological argument because it turns out organised thinking is useful if you need to write organised essays. But if you think that connection, complexity and how thickly things join is important, which you really can’t ‘organise’ (which is one of the ways in which creativity and innovation happens – they’re its ingredients if you like) then being organised isn’t so useful anymore. This matters simply because high school and then university privileges this idea of being able to ‘order’ and so those who are very smart, but have highly cluttered minds, struggle. As Einstein said (a famously disorganised thinker) “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”