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September 2004  
  
Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence,
introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion
being, say, that Ahab in _Moby Dick_ was a Christ-like figure.  
  
Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay
really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one.  
  
**Mods**  
  
The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to
write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English
literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a
series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed
together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students
are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete
with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good
dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens.  
  
With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless. Who cares
about symbolism in Dickens? Dickens himself would be more interested in an
essay about color or baseball.  
  
How did things get this way? To answer that we have to go back almost a
thousand years. Around 1100, Europe at last began to catch its breath after
centuries of chaos, and once they had the luxury of curiosity they
rediscovered what we call "the classics." The effect was rather as if we were
visited by beings from another solar system. These earlier civilizations were
so much more sophisticated that for the next several centuries the main work
of European scholars, in almost every field, was to assimilate what they knew.  
  
During this period the study of ancient texts acquired great prestige. It
seemed the essence of what scholars did. As European scholarship gained
momentum it became less and less important; by 1350 someone who wanted to
learn about science could find better teachers than Aristotle in his own era.
 But schools change slower than scholarship. In the 19th century the study
of ancient texts was still the backbone of the curriculum.  
  
The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of ancient texts is a
valid field for scholarship, why not modern texts? The answer, of course, is
that the original raison d'etre of classical scholarship was a kind of
intellectual archaeology that does not need to be done in the case of
contemporary authors. But for obvious reasons no one wanted to give that
answer. The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that those
studying the classics were, if not wasting their time, at least working on
problems of minor importance.  
  
And so began the study of modern literature. There was a good deal of
resistance at first. The first courses in English literature seem to have been
offered by the newer colleges, particularly American ones. Dartmouth, the
University of Vermont, Amherst, and University College, London taught English
literature in the 1820s.  But Harvard didn't have a professor of English
literature until 1876, and Oxford not till 1885. (Oxford had a chair of
Chinese before it had one of English.)   
  
What tipped the scales, at least in the US, seems to have been the idea that
professors should do research as well as teach. This idea (along with the PhD,
the department, and indeed the whole concept of the modern university) was
imported from Germany in the late 19th century. Beginning at Johns Hopkins in
1876, the new model spread rapidly.  
  
Writing was one of the casualties. Colleges had long taught English
composition. But how do you do research on composition? The professors who
taught math could be required to do original math, the professors who taught
history could be required to write scholarly articles about history, but what
about the professors who taught rhetoric or composition? What should they do
research on? The closest thing seemed to be English literature.   
  
And so in the late 19th century the teaching of writing was inherited by
English professors. This had two drawbacks: (a) an expert on literature need
not himself be a good writer, any more than an art historian has to be a good
painter, and (b) the subject of writing now tends to be literature, since
that's what the professor is interested in.  
  
High schools imitate universities. The seeds of our miserable high school
experiences were sown in 1892, when the National Education Association
"formally recommended that literature and composition be unified in the high
school course."  The 'riting component of the 3 Rs then morphed into
English, with the bizarre consequence that high school students now had to
write about English literature-- to write, without even realizing it,
imitations of whatever English professors had been publishing in their
journals a few decades before.  
  
It's no wonder if this seems to the student a pointless exercise, because
we're now three steps removed from real work: the students are imitating
English professors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are merely the
inheritors of a tradition growing out of what was, 700 years ago, fascinating
and urgently needed work.  
  
**No Defense**  
  
The other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you
write in school is that a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend
it. That principle, like the idea that we ought to be writing about
literature, turns out to be another intellectual hangover of long forgotten
origins.  
  
It's often mistakenly believed that medieval universities were mostly
seminaries. In fact they were more law schools. And at least in our tradition
lawyers are advocates, trained to take either side of an argument and make as
good a case for it as they can. Whether cause or effect, this spirit pervaded
early universities. The study of rhetoric, the art of arguing persuasively,
was a third of the undergraduate curriculum.  And after the lecture the
most common form of discussion was the disputation. This is at least nominally
preserved in our present-day thesis defense: most people treat the words
thesis and dissertation as interchangeable, but originally, at least, a thesis
was a position one took and the dissertation was the argument by which one
defended it.  
  
Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it's not
the best way to get at the truth, as I think lawyers would be the first to
admit. It's not just that you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is
that you can't change the question.  
  
And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the things they
teach you to write in high school. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen
in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict,
and the conclusion-- uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure about that
in high school. It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said
in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell.
Why bother? But when you understand the origins of this sort of "essay," you
can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the
jury.  
  
Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing
because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing.
When I give a draft of an essay to friends, there are two things I want to
know: which parts bore them, and which seem unconvincing. The boring bits can
usually be fixed by cutting. But I don't try to fix the unconvincing bits by
arguing more cleverly. I need to talk the matter over.  
  
At the very least I must have explained something badly. In that case, in the
course of the conversation I'll be forced to come up a with a clearer
explanation, which I can just incorporate in the essay. More often than not I
have to change what I was saying as well. But the aim is never to be
convincing per se. As the reader gets smarter, convincing and true become
identical, so if I can convince smart readers I must be near the truth.  
  
The sort of writing that attempts to persuade may be a valid (or at least
inevitable) form, but it's historically inaccurate to call it an essay. An
essay is something else.  
  
**Trying**  
  
To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again,
though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a
book of what he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from
what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. _Essayer_ is the
French verb meaning "to try" and an _essai_ is an attempt. An essay is
something you write to try to figure something out.  
  
Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis,
because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin
with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a
position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and
walk in to see what's inside.  
  
If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything,
though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great
discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak
a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to
write them. That's why I write them.  
  
In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining
yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You're
thinking out loud.  
  
But not quite. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your
apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think
well. So it does matter to have an audience. The things I've written just for
myself are no good. They tend to peter out. When I run into difficulties, I
find I conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a cup of
tea.  
  
Many published essays peter out in the same way. Particularly the sort written
by the staff writers of newsmagazines. Outside writers tend to supply
editorials of the defend-a-position variety, which make a beeline toward a
rousing (and foreordained) conclusion. But the staff writers feel obliged to
write something "balanced." Since they're writing for a popular magazine, they
start with the most radioactively controversial questions, from which--
because they're writing for a popular magazine-- they then proceed to recoil
in terror. Abortion, for or against? This group says one thing. That group
says another. One thing is certain: the question is a complex one. (But don't
get mad at us. We didn't draw any conclusions.)  
  
**The River**  
  
Questions aren't enough. An essay has to come up with answers. They don't
always, of course. Sometimes you start with a promising question and get
nowhere. But those you don't publish. Those are like experiments that get
inconclusive results. An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something
he didn't already know.  
  
But _what_ you tell him doesn't matter, so long as it's interesting. I'm
sometimes accused of meandering. In defend-a-position writing that would be a
flaw. There you're not concerned with truth. You already know where you're
going, and you want to go straight there, blustering through obstacles, and
hand-waving your way across swampy ground. But that's not what you're trying
to do in an essay. An essay is supposed to be a search for truth. It would be
suspicious if it didn't meander.  
  
The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds
all over the place. But it doesn't do this out of frivolity. The path it has
discovered is the most economical route to the sea.   
  
The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist
this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the
most interesting. One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. I
always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific
conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take
their course.  
  
This doesn't always work. Sometimes, like a river, one runs up against a wall.
Then I do the same thing the river does: backtrack. At one point in this essay
I found that after following a certain thread I ran out of ideas. I had to go
back seven paragraphs and start over in another direction.  
  
Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-up train of
thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation. Real thought, like real
conversation, is full of false starts. It would be exhausting to read. You
need to cut and fill to emphasize the central thread, like an illustrator
inking over a pencil drawing. But don't change so much that you lose the
spontaneity of the original.  
  
Err on the side of the river. An essay is not a reference work. It's not
something you read looking for a specific answer, and feel cheated if you
don't find it. I'd much rather read an essay that went off in an unexpected
but interesting direction than one that plodded dutifully along a prescribed
course.  
  
**Surprise**  
  
So what's interesting? For me, interesting means surprise. Interfaces, as
Geoffrey James has said, should follow the principle of least astonishment. A
button that looks like it will make a machine stop should make it stop, not
speed up. Essays should do the opposite. Essays should aim for maximum
surprise.  
  
I was afraid of flying for a long time and could only travel vicariously. When
friends came back from faraway places, it wasn't just out of politeness that I
asked what they saw. I really wanted to know. And I found the best way to get
information out of them was to ask what surprised them. How was the place
different from what they expected? This is an extremely useful question. You
can ask it of the most unobservant people, and it will extract information
they didn't even know they were recording.  
  
Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things
you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can
get. They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the
unhealthy effects of things you've already eaten.  
  
How do you find surprises? Well, therein lies half the work of essay writing.
(The other half is expressing yourself well.) The trick is to use yourself as
a proxy for the reader. You should only write about things you've thought
about a lot. And anything you come across that surprises you, who've thought
about the topic a lot, will probably surprise most readers.  
  
For example, in a recent essay I pointed out that because you can only judge
computer programmers by working with them, no one knows who the best
programmers are overall. I didn't realize this when I began that essay, and
even now I find it kind of weird. That's what you're looking for.  
  
So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients: a few topics you've
thought about a lot, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected.  
  
What should you think about? My guess is that it doesn't matter-- that
anything can be interesting if you get deeply enough into it. One possible
exception might be things that have deliberately had all the variation sucked
out of them, like working in fast food. In retrospect, was there anything
interesting about working at Baskin-Robbins? Well, it was interesting how
important color was to the customers. Kids a certain age would point into the
case and say that they wanted yellow. Did they want French Vanilla or Lemon?
They would just look at you blankly. They wanted yellow. And then there was
the mystery of why the perennial favorite Pralines 'n' Cream was so appealing.
(I think now it was the salt.)  And the difference in the way fathers and
mothers bought ice cream for their kids: the fathers like benevolent kings
bestowing largesse, the mothers harried, giving in to pressure. So, yes, there
does seem to be some material even in fast food.  
  
I didn't notice those things at the time, though. At sixteen I was about as
observant as a lump of rock. I can see more now in the fragments of memory I
preserve of that age than I could see at the time from having it all happening
live, right in front of me.  
  
**Observation**  
  
So the ability to ferret out the unexpected must not merely be an inborn one.
It must be something you can learn. How do you learn it?  
  
To some extent it's like learning history. When you first read history, it's
just a whirl of names and dates. Nothing seems to stick. But the more you
learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto-- which means you
accumulate knowledge at an exponential rate. Once you remember that Normans
conquered England in 1066, it will catch your attention when you hear that
other Normans conquered southern Italy at about the same time. Which will make
you wonder about Normandy, and take note when a third book mentions that
Normans were not, like most of what is now called France, tribes that flowed
in as the Roman empire collapsed, but Vikings (norman = north man) who arrived
four centuries later in 911. Which makes it easier to remember that Dublin was
also established by Vikings in the 840s. Etc, etc squared.  
  
Collecting surprises is a similar process. The more anomalies you've seen, the
more easily you'll notice new ones. Which means, oddly enough, that as you
grow older, life should become more and more surprising. When I was a kid, I
used to think adults had it all figured out. I had it backwards. Kids are the
ones who have it all figured out. They're just mistaken.  
  
When it comes to surprises, the rich get richer. But (as with wealth) there
may be habits of mind that will help the process along. It's good to have a
habit of asking questions, especially questions beginning with Why. But not in
the random way that three year olds ask why. There are an infinite number of
questions. How do you find the fruitful ones?  
  
I find it especially useful to ask why about things that seem wrong. For
example, why should there be a connection between humor and misfortune? Why do
we find it funny when a character, even one we like, slips on a banana peel?
There's a whole essay's worth of surprises there for sure.  
  
If you want to notice things that seem wrong, you'll find a degree of
skepticism helpful. I take it as an axiom that we're only achieving 1% of what
we could. This helps counteract the rule that gets beaten into our heads as
children: that things are the way they are because that is how things have to
be. For example, everyone I've talked to while writing this essay felt the
same about English classes-- that the whole process seemed pointless. But none
of us had the balls at the time to hypothesize that it was, in fact, all a
mistake. We all thought there was just something we weren't getting.  
  
I have a hunch you want to pay attention not just to things that seem wrong,
but things that seem wrong in a humorous way. I'm always pleased when I see
someone laugh as they read a draft of an essay. But why should I be? I'm
aiming for good ideas. Why should good ideas be funny? The connection may be
surprise. Surprises make us laugh, and surprises are what one wants to
deliver.  
  
I write down things that surprise me in notebooks. I never actually get around
to reading them and using what I've written, but I do tend to reproduce the
same thoughts later. So the main value of notebooks may be what writing things
down leaves in your head.  
  
People trying to be cool will find themselves at a disadvantage when
collecting surprises. To be surprised is to be mistaken. And the essence of
cool, as any fourteen year old could tell you, is _nil admirari._ When you're
mistaken, don't dwell on it; just act like nothing's wrong and maybe no one
will notice.  
  
One of the keys to coolness is to avoid situations where inexperience may make
you look foolish. If you want to find surprises you should do the opposite.
Study lots of different things, because some of the most interesting surprises
are unexpected connections between different fields. For example, jam, bacon,
pickles, and cheese, which are among the most pleasing of foods, were all
originally intended as methods of preservation. And so were books and
paintings.  
  
Whatever you study, include history-- but social and economic history, not
political history. History seems to me so important that it's misleading to
treat it as a mere field of study. Another way to describe it is _all the data
we have so far._  
  
Among other things, studying history gives one confidence that there are good
ideas waiting to be discovered right under our noses. Swords evolved during
the Bronze Age out of daggers, which (like their flint predecessors) had a
hilt separate from the blade. Because swords are longer the hilts kept
breaking off. But it took five hundred years before someone thought of casting
hilt and blade as one piece.  
  
**Disobedience**  
  
Above all, make a habit of paying attention to things you're not supposed to,
either because they're "inappropriate," or not important, or not what you're
supposed to be working on. If you're curious about something, trust your
instincts. Follow the threads that attract your attention. If there's
something you're really interested in, you'll find they have an uncanny way of
leading back to it anyway, just as the conversation of people who are
especially proud of something always tends to lead back to it.  
  
For example, I've always been fascinated by comb-overs, especially the extreme
sort that make a man look as if he's wearing a beret made of his own hair.
Surely this is a lowly sort of thing to be interested in-- the sort of
superficial quizzing best left to teenage girls. And yet there is something
underneath. The key question, I realized, is how does the comber-over not see
how odd he looks? And the answer is that he got to look that way
_incrementally._ What began as combing his hair a little carefully over a thin
patch has gradually, over 20 years, grown into a monstrosity. Gradualness is
very powerful. And that power can be used for constructive purposes too: just
as you can trick yourself into looking like a freak, you can trick yourself
into creating something so grand that you would never have dared to _plan_
such a thing. Indeed, this is just how most good software gets created. You
start by writing a stripped-down kernel (how hard can it be?) and gradually it
grows into a complete operating system. Hence the next leap: could you do the
same thing in painting, or in a novel?  
  
See what you can extract from a frivolous question? If there's one piece of
advice I would give about writing essays, it would be: don't do as you're
told. Don't believe what you're supposed to. Don't write the essay readers
expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. And don't write the way they
taught you to in school.  
  
The most important sort of disobedience is to write essays at all.
Fortunately, this sort of disobedience shows signs of becoming rampant. It
used to be that only a tiny number of officially approved writers were allowed
to write essays. Magazines published few of them, and judged them less by what
they said than who wrote them; a magazine might publish a story by an unknown
writer if it was good enough, but if they published an essay on x it had to be
by someone who was at least forty and whose job title had x in it. Which is a
problem, because there are a lot of things insiders can't say precisely
because they're insiders.  
  
The Internet is changing that. Anyone can publish an essay on the Web, and it
gets judged, as any writing should, by what it says, not who wrote it. Who are
you to write about x? You are whatever you wrote.  
  
Popular magazines made the period between the spread of literacy and the
arrival of TV the golden age of the short story. The Web may well make this
the golden age of the essay. And that's certainly not something I realized
when I started writing this.  
  
  
  
**