WHY STUDY PERSONAL ESSAY WRITING?

These should be the results of taking such a course:

•    You will have grown to enjoy the process of writing so as to express and explain yourself—to yourself and to others.

•    You will have found that you can think more clearly and fully while engaged in contemplative exposition, pressing your emerging thoughts into considered sentences and paragraphs; whereas merely sitting and mulling without getting linear, as writing does, won’t let your mind progress to clearer sense or to more complete conclusions.

•    And when you’ve written, you’ll have a record of how your thoughts have proceeded and of what you may have discovered, a draft that can then be revised and refined later on, if need be.

•    Although for other occasions you may wish to write stories or poems or plays (“creative writing”), the discursive prose you’ll practice in this course—essay writing—is an attempt (which is the etymological meaning of essay) an attempt to figure out, sentence by sentence, what’s on your mind and what you have to say about one or another topic—and then to revise and polish your writing for the good of other readers, whom you hope to impress.

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