"America Ruined by Personal Essays"

Recently while browsing the web, I stumbled across this article by faux online news agency (or is it more a news-ish blog?) wonkette.com. The conservative and the delicate should reconsider simply browsing through this site mentally unprepared. It's called "America Ruined by Personal Essays." I briefly considered typing a response in the comments, but any serious response would have been most unwelcome; it simply isn't in the spirit of wonkette. So I chose to write out a brief response here instead.


In the article and in the comments, the authors and readers express disgust for the "diaryland bullshit" that this "sick spinoff from that 'write what you know trope of the 70s" encourages. One commenter recalls, "in grad school I was required to teach people how to write these shits as some kind of preparation for academic writing," dubbing the exercise "pointless." The problem, says another commenter, is "your life just isn’t that interesting."

It is apparent that these readers all have a keen if jaded understanding for the inadequacies of the expressivist movement that people like Peter Elbow align themselves with which believes that knowledge and truth lie within the individual writer (Moving Beyond Academic Discourse, page 16). It sort of emphasizes the usefulness of giving students a real reason for writing. Of course we know that the public turn goes beyond just giving students any old purpose.*

But what they don't know is that there are not only some legitimately good reasons, or at least an understandable historical arc that goes along with expressivism. It developed out of a criticism of the current-traditional method, which is also still prevalent in high schools I think, because it impeded creativity (Moving Beyond Academic Discourse, page 17). More than that, expressivists "hoped to rid classrooms of the negative influences of dominant social, political, and economic factors" (19). And the commenters seem unaware of the myriad other attempts in the teaching of writing to bring meaning to students and their works that we've read about this semester.

And more than that, the authors of the post and the commenters appear to be evaluating the writing they've experienced in college and high school from a curriculum-based, standardized, canonical point of view. Their sense of purposelessness is well founded, but they conflate purpose with "academic writing", and they assume, as academic writing often demands, that that what is interesting to the writer must be interesting to whoever evaluates the article.

So I guess what I'd like to say to the readers and writers of wonkette is don't let your cynicism get in the way of seeing the value of expressivist teaching, and maybe let this blog show you that there is so much more to the teaching of writing than that. Not that they'll read this, but that is what I would say.

*I think that giving students a purpose of any sort, like allowing me to do this blog, for instance, probably increases student motivation, produces texts worthy of evaluation, and helps students learn about writing, as long as they have an audience. I have been struggling with this blog between my desire to create it for my own understanding and an occasional lack of motivation from not getting any feedback from my possibly non-existent audience. So for me personally, I would say writing with a real world purpose and audience is what I would recommend to help teach writing.