To Essay is to Journey

Continued from yesterday's blip, where I have given a bit of explanation ~ ~ ~

I've never known the author's name--sorry.
This is for all who love to write or to read:


The Essay Part 2

To write an essay is to ask questions, test ideas, show the workings of your mind, tentatively, lurching, slight, like the spider thread flying out behind the spider as it bounces from ground to post to chair. The web gains substance as we converse with other learners, listen, respond, reverberate. It is only in communicating with others that we learn where to land next and where to go after that. The strands must be fixed surely, assertively. Writers must have faith that what they compose has value. That faith comes from honesty. We must use genuine voices, write what we need to say rather than what we suppose an audience expects. An assertive voice in an essay is as important as the words it speaks. The essay implies freedom: we can make a mistake and assert again.

Although essays leave room for contradictions and mistakes, we must be conscious of certain limitations. Words can be a bridge; silence, also. Yet those same bricks and timber build walls. We must be careful that what we build is what we intended to build.

Yes, silence too has its place. Just as in conversation we do not tell our listeners everything, we leave some things out of an essay. A listener is insulted when we tell him what he already knows. And sometimes not telling something expresses it more powerfully than saying it. In spite of its similarity to conversation, however, every word used in an essay must tell. Knowing what to say when, comes from our certainty of audience.


Tomorrow -- Part 3 of The Essay -- Until then, grading papers continues and prepping for tomorrow's classes! I'll look and comment on your blips later. I just cannot tonight (I'm convincing myself).

Good night from Southern California.
Rosie (& Mr. Fun), aka Carol