Response to Graham

I was overjoyed by the fact that someone shared my feelings for the overuse of literature based essays in high school. I always that we spent too much time analyzing literature and not enough time on real world problems and doing formal research. I understand that it is necessary to read and analyze the greatest works of all time, but that should never the exclusive topic of student’s essays.

I agreed with Graham in his thinking that most essays in high school and college are based too much on whether or not the paper argues well versus whether or not they are right. This is because of the origin of the modern essay stemming from legal documents created by lawyers. The biggest difference between the essays we write today and the way essays are supposed to be written, according to Graham, is that modern essays are written to another reader to convince them of something, whereas a true essay is written for the sake of oneself, in an effort to answer a question. The reason that a person would write an essay rather than simply think about their ideas is because ideas are formulated by writing. Writing forces a person to sit down and think about how to logically express ideas, and that is how one comes about the answer to a question.

I’m excited to put this concept into practice in my next work. I want to find a question that I really don’t know the answer to, and try to discover the answer by writing rather than using clever writing to convince a reader that my opinion is the correct one.