on essays literature's most misunderstood form

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On Essays: Literature’s Most Misunderstood Form

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Highly Reflective Human

Tuesday, september 22, 2015, lessons from on essays: literature's most misunderstood form, no comments:, post a comment.

Reading Notes

Wednesday September 28

Aldous Huxley, from “ The Preface to Collected Essays” (1960), 88-90

• “There are the predominantly personal essayists, who write fragments of reflective autobiography and who look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description. There are the predominantly objective essayists who do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme.” This is a great description of different types of essayists. This is one of my favorite ways of describing different writers, because it sounds very beautiful and poetic to me. I referenced this excerpt in my essay because I thought it was a great way to pull my essay together.
• “The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of all three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist.” I would be interested in having this excerpt explained to me, as I don’t know if I’m quite understanding what it is saying. However, I have to assume it’s talking about the way the essayist uses description to pull you into the world of the essay, whichever one it may lie within.

 Michael Hamburger, “An Essay on the Essay” (1965), 91-93

• “Even that isn’t quite right: an essay really ought not to be on anything, to deal with anything, to define anything. An essay is a walk, an excursion, not a business trip.” The entire first passage of this, describes essays beautifully. In the excerpt it’s saying that every reader will get different things from the essays they read and one person may not interpret it the exact same way. I think that depending on the writer, the essay will also be written the way that the writer will think, no matter the topic, which is what makes essays so unique and is the appeal of reading or writing essays.
• “The point of an essay, like its justification and its style, always lies in the author’s personality and always leads back to it. The essayist is as little concerned with pure, impersonal art as with his subject. Since the vast majority of so-called critical essays attach primary importance to subjects, that is, to answers and judgements, the perpetuation of that genre does not prove that the essay has survived.” I think that this is referencing personal essays where there is much freedom for the author to write what they please and as they have experienced. The second part of this describes how it is common that when essays aren’t heavily revolved around their subjects, their essays may be judged more intensely because the essayist may be expected to stick to a certain form on the essay depending on the subject.
• “The spirit of essay-writing walks on irresistibly, even over the corpse of the essay, and is glimpsed now here, now there, in novels, stories, poems, or articles, from time to time in the very parkland of philosophy, for midably walled and strictly guarded though it may seem, the parkland from which it escaped centuries ago to wander about in the wild meadow.” I interpret this as essays having no rules. Even with past essays, even with seeing pieces of essays in everything we read every day, they don’t have to adhere to any strict form, which is the magic of the essay.

   Cynthia Ozick, “She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body” (2000), 151-58

• “A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play. Though it is written in prose, it is closer in kind to poetry than to any other form. Like a poem, a genuine essay is made out of language and character and mood and temperament and pluck and chance.” The essay is methodically put together to create an informational flow, which is why I think it’s compared to poetry in this passage. In poetry, the flow is important, so the comparison to prose makes sense because it’s also the purpose in both.

 Sara Levine, from “The Self on the Shelf” (2000), 159-66

• “The worst thing an essayist can do is fail to make an impression.” This sentence is a powerful one because how else is the reader’s attention supposed to be grabbed?

Jia Tolentino, The Personal Essay B oom is Over

• I think it’s interesting that women were the ones writing essays. I think this goes back to the stereotype that men weren’t supposed to talk about what they were going through, or what was bothering them.
• Or it could just be that women didn’t see a problem with sharing information that could be classified as “too personal.”
• I also think it’s interesting that the essays written by women seemed to be hated. I have a feeling this is a sexisum issue. (Grace)
• “Attention flows naturally to the outrageous, the harrowing, the intimate, and the recognizable, and the online personal essay began to harden into a form defined by identity and adversity—not in spite of how tricky it is to negotiate those matters in front of a crowd but precisely because of that fact.” Most of this essay focused on women’s issues being written out and given to the public. These issues were often seen as taboo or “disgusting” to the people who didn’t go through them. When talking about essays that men wrote, it was usually about their political views or opinions on controversial ideas. (Riley) I remember back around the 2016 presidential elections how many personal essays were being written, especially on websites such as Buzzfeed. They always had intimate titles such as the ones referenced in this piece. I find it interesting how the personal essay has been phased out from most websites and most readers like myself never noticed. It appears to have something to do with just how personal these essays are. (Riley)
• “Personal essays cry out for identification and connection; what their authors often got was distancing and shame.” Most of the writers who submitted these essays were often looking to have readers connect with the personal issues they were having or to inform them of something that felt almost confessional. When I used to read a lot of these essays when I was younger, a lot of them would feel as if the writer wanted to tell people about an awful thing or experience that happen to them or someone close to them. Then readers would often take to social media on the more well-known essays and either shame them for what happened or congratulate them for going through it. (Riley)

 Michael Depp, On Essays: Literature’s Most Misunderstood Form

• This could be true with any writing, but especially with personal or narrative essays. You can use hundreds of descriptive words to talk about your life, and make it a technical essay. But I think it’s more important to have a meaning behind why you are writing that specific story. Your writing should always have a purpose, and I want to be told that through the writing. (Grace)
• I think this is so important. Essays are a universal form of writing. Especially with personal essays, there isn’t really a right or wrong way to write them. There can always be new ways to write and share our ideas and experiences. (Grace)
• “Which is why it’s so ironic that for many readers, the introduction to the form begins with a high school homework assignment to write a five-paragraph essay, with its standard introduction, three body paragraphs, and conclusion. Robert Atwan, founding editor of the annual Best American Essays (Houghton Mifflin), points out that this is a perverse inversion of the form. In his foreword to the 1998 edition of the series, which began in 1986, he writes, “It not only paraded relentlessly to its conclusion; it began with its conclusion. Its structure permitted no change of direction, no reconsideration, no wrestling with ideas.””

I find this very interesting because I came from a high school where deviating from this form wasn’t okay. It took me a long time to learn how to write essays in different forms. I have to agree, the high school structure leaves no room for “wrestling with ideas” and pushes the writer to start with the conclusion. (Riley)

Laura Bennett, The First-Person Industrial Complex

• “She recalled being so wracked by disgust and shame after the second time they had oral sex that she dry-heaved over the toilet in his bathroom. “He lay on his bed looking aloof during those episodes,” she wrote, “spouting empty assurances like, ‘You’ll be fine.’”
• The fact that this woman wrote about such a sensitive topic shows an immense amount of strength and bravery. She was willing to risk everything, just so her story and experience got told. (Grace)
• Yes! Just yes! (Grace)

Wednesday September 21, 2022

Some Thoughts on Mercy (2013) by Ross Gay

• “I wasn’t perturbed by the cop. I had made a decision in the recent past no longer to be afraid of the police. With their costumes, their hats, the boots worn by the “troopers,” police are meant to make us feel scared, guilty, criminal (some of us more than others). There’s a way in which they take up residence in our bodies (some of us more than others). When they appear behind us or in our line of sight, our heart rate accelerates, our breathing quickens, our muscles contract. We become acutely aware not only of what we were doing but also of what the cop might think we were doing”.

I think this paragraph gives an interesting viewpoint on police. Of course, they’re purpose is to uphold the law and such, but I’d never considered the fact that they are presented the way they are specifically to intimidate. I just kind of assumed the knowledge of what they existed to do, and what they had the power to do, was enough to be intimidating. (Aidan)

I think that this passage gives us some incredibly interesting, insight into Gay’s mindset regarding the police. The way in which he describes the different ways in which the uniform of an officer is meant to intimate you brings insight into why he and many others react the way they do to police officers. I really like the way he brings physical reactions up, and describes the physical impact a meeting with a cop can have, as I feel in lots of writing, it is mainly the mental toll which is focused on. (Zach)

• “But I had decided I’d try not to feel guilty when I next encountered the police. Why? First, because I am thirty-eight years old and generally law-abiding. Second, because it had occurred to me that when I paid my taxes, I was helping to pay police officers’ salaries, and therefore this cop was actually my employee — though I wouldn’t have said so to him. Third, I was tired of being afraid. So I’d decided to imagine the police in general — and this cop pulling me over in particular — as doing what I imagine a policeman should spend his time doing: making our community safer”.

I have a similarly positive reaction to this quotation as well. I really like the way in which Gay describes having to imagine that a policeman is actually trying to improve the community. I think it really is a testament to the way in which Gay must live his life compared to myself and my background. I really like that he includes that detail as for me and my background, I never had to worry about the intentions of a cop, while Gay has. (Zach)

• Having grown up in a largely white, working-class suburb of Philadelphia, I’m rarely shocked by racism. I’ve heard it all: “He’s a nigger lover.” “That nigger jumps real high.” “You’re not like those other niggers.” “That girl’s as tan as a nigger.” In fact, when I meet people who say they haven’t been around racism or anti-Semitism, I usually don’t believe them.

This is an interesting comment on how racism is such an issue to the extent that some people don’t even realize that they have had some kind of experience with it. (Aidan)

• My teammates took the occasion to explain to me the difference between a “black person” and a “nigger.” They categorized Sanders as the latter — mostly, it seemed, because of his clothes and his swagger. A “black person,” in their minds, was someone like the Detroit Lions’ Barry Sanders, whose humble attitude on the field appealed to them.

I just think this is interesting because I can’t tell if it was meant to come across as a joke, or if it was a sincere example of such minute classification. (Aidan)

• “PROBABLY ANY of you who are black or brown have a version of this story, if not a worse one. One friend of color, when I mentioned it to him, said, “I thought he was going to go toss the car and make you clean it up.” Another friend’s black father said, “Any time you meet the cops and don’t go to jail is a good time.”

It is a pretty sobering detail that comes from Gay’s friend’s father. The idea that the bar is so low that anything that doesn’t result in jail time is a success is a somewhat depressing detail. The implication being that any other forms of harassment or violence, so long as they don’t end with an arrest, would be considered a success. (Zach)

• “The African American comedy duo Key and Peele have a skit in which President Obama is teaching his daughter Malia to drive. When she runs a stop sign, a cop pulls them over. Astonished and a bit embarrassed at having detained the president of the United States, the cop tells them they can go. But Obama, earnest as ever, says, “No, I want you to go ahead and treat us the way you would if I weren’t the president.” In the next shot we see Obama getting slammed on the hood of the car and handcuffed. It’s funny. And not only black people laugh at such jokes. Everyone does, because everyone knows”.

This is another very well written detail. The emphasis that “everyone knows” is a detail that depresses as much as it rings true. I, along with most readers, read “everyone knows” and agree. I am well aware, despite the fact that I am not a member of the oppressed group, but I’m still aware of the open secret as far as their mistreatment goes. (Zach)

• “I recently realized that I’ve never, as an adult, driven past a car that’s been pulled over without looking to see the race of its occupants. Part of every black child’s education includes learning how to deal with the police so he or she won’t be locked up or hurt or even killed. Despite my advanced degrees and my light-brown skin, I’ve had police take me out of my vehicle, threaten to bring in the dogs, and summon another two or three cars. But I’ve never been thrown facedown in the street or physically brutalized by the cops, as some of my black friends have. I’ve never been taken away for a few hours or days on account of “mistaken identity.” All in all, this traffic stop the other night amounted to nothing. It was so nothing, in fact — so everyday, so known, so agreed upon, so understood — that I am embarrassed, ashamed even, by the scale of my upset, by the way this nonevent took up residence in my body and wrung me out like a rag. I didn’t even get a ticket, after all. He just asked me some questions — questions I knew (we all knew, didn’t we?) he had before he pulled me over. We say, “Yeah, that’s just how it goes.” Given what could’ve happened, I ought to be glad, right? I ought to get over it”.

I think this is a great detail. The fact that the author looks at the race of every single person who he sees get pulled over, says a lot about what he fears may happen to them depending on what their race is.

• “as a result of this, I’ve developed the habit of buying something in stores whether I want to or not, to put such possibly suspicious white people at ease. I’m behaving in response to what I imagine other people are thinking. After all, the janitor and the antique-shop clerk didn’t say anything to me about the color of my skin. Just as the cop didn’t say, “Since you appear to be of some African extraction, I would like to ask you if you have any drugs or weapons in the car.” He just asked if I had any drugs or weapons in the car”.

This is such an interesting look into the psyche of the author. The idea that you need to act in a certain way in order to dismiss the potential worries you interpret from someone you don’t even know. It really helps show the reader the anxiety that went into his daily life. (Zach)

• “I’ve had to struggle not to absorb those stares and questions and traffic stops and newscasts and TV shows and movies and what they imply. I’ve been afraid walking through the alarm gate at the store that maybe something’s fallen into my pockets, or that I’ve unconsciously stuffed something in them; I’ve felt panic that the light-skinned black man who mugged our elderly former neighbors was actually me, and I worried that my parents, with whom I watched the newscast, suspected the same; and nearly every time I’ve been pulled over, I’ve prayed there were no drugs in my car, despite the fact that I don’t use drugs; I don’t even smoke pot. That’s to say, the story I have all my life heard about black people — criminal, criminal, criminal — I have started to suspect of myself”.

This passage really emphasizes the mental toll that societal racism has put on the author. He isn’t even completely convinced of his own good nature, solely because of the society in which he lives. (Zach)

• That’s to say, the story I have all my life heard about black people — criminal, criminal, criminal — I have started to suspect of myself.

Just interesting how stories that we hear about other people start to make us look inward, and begin to examine how we view ourselves. (Aidan)

• It seems to me that part of my reason for writing this — for revealing my own fear and sorrow, my own paranoia and self-incrimination and shame — is to say, Look how I’ve been made by this. To have, perhaps, mercy on myself.

Something I find a little interesting in any essay is when the author has a moment of self-reflection, when they become more open on the inspiration for writing their essay. (Aidan)

Forever Gone by J. Drew Lanham

• “There are few creatures that we can tag with exact departure dates, but with the Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis) we probably can. It all ended on February 21, 1918, in the same year World War I came to a close and not quite four years after the passenger pigeon’s own exit from existence. Incas died that day. He had been housed for some years at the Cincinnati Zoo aviary, and was the last Carolina parakeet anyone would ever see with certainty”.

This is such an interesting concept. I’ve never thought about when a species goes extinct. Especially a species in captivity. (Zach)

• “The passenger pigeon’s extinction was sadly predictable. People had blasted at flocks that once darkened the sky until the birds became scarcer and scarcer, and then were finally gone. But how the Carolina parakeets’ population dwindled down to Incas is a mystery that plagues conservation scientists to this day. It wasn’t for lack of the species’ range. Despite their name, Carolina parakeets were found across most of the eastern half of the lower forty-eight states. Recent science shows that there were two subspecies — a southeastern population, Conuropsis carolinensis carolinensis, that dwelled in the Southeast Atlantic, Gulf coastal plains, and all of Florida; and another, Conuropsis carolinensis ludovicianus, found west to Texas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. In some years, birds from the western groups wandered widely and could end up in the Northeast. Wherever they occurred—north, south, east, or midwest—mature floodplain bottomland forests lying along great rivers were the parakeets’ preferredhaunts”.

I think that this paragraph does a great job presenting information to the reader that they likely weren’t aware of beforehand. With a topic as niche as this one, I believe the author was aware of the fact that the majority of readers would be unfamiliar with the life and death of the species of bird, and knew that they needed to work a lot of information into the essay in an easily digestible format. (Zach)

• “The Maroons shared the Carolina parakeets’ requisite for freedom. They found sustenance in the wilderness, but also made nocturnal forays back onto the plantations to secure food, tools, and sometimes weapons. They traced the same paths as the parakeets, but worked the night shift. It was a life on the edge with constant threats of persecution, capture, and death. But it was a free life and that matters most. The land was flush with grain and fruit that only existed because of black hands. What Maroons took was just reclamation for work done”.

I think this passage does a good job of giving readers, who may not be overly interested in animal conservation, a reason to be invested. By drawing parallels between the fleeing birds and fleeing Maroons, readers who may not necessarily be interested in that of the birds, may gravitate towards the plight of the Maroons. (Zach)

• Society at large has certain boxes I’m supposed to fit into, and most of the labels on those boxes aren’t good. Birders have a profile as well, a much more positively perceived one. Being a birder in the United States means that you’re probably a middle-aged, middle-class, well-educated white man. While most of the labels apply to me, I am a black man and therefore a birding anomaly.

This was kind of touched on in the previous essay, but this one also explains that some things become such social norms that they almost become expected, and when something deviates from it, it becomes a stand-out. The fact that this sort of thing is mentioned in two essays only exemplifies how prevalent in society it is. (Aidan)

• On one of my first jobs with the Department of Natural Resources, I thought my color would cost me my life.
• I’d heard that people in the mountains didn’t like strangers of any color. I was a strange stranger, and maybe not the person locals would think should be working with a white woman. Kate was a super-observant naturalist, who noticed the slightest nuances in tooth pattern or fur color—but was, I think, oblivious to the threat I perceived.

I put these two passages together because they, along with the next few paragraphs, are an interesting insight into the mind of someone who has experienced an incredible amount of bigotry. It gets to a point where someone genuinely fears for their life over something that should be so inconsequential. Using this perspective in the essay makes it stand out because it isn’t the kind of situation that every single reader would be able to relate to. (Aidan)

• I’d had to do this a couple of years earlier, too, when a white supremacist group “organized” in the mountains of western North Carolina, near the places I was supposed to do a research project. They’d made the national news in stories that showed them worshipping Hitler and shooting at targets that looked like Martin Luther King Jr. Someone at the university joked about my degree being awarded posthumously. So though the proposal had been written and the project was well on its way to being funded—and as potentially groundbreaking the research on rose-breasted grosbeaks, golden-winged warblers, and forest management in the Southern Appalachians might be—I had abandoned the whole thing.

It’s just a sad state of affairs when the reason the author has to abandon a project that could have worked out really well because of a white supremacist group. If the reason had been due to some kind of natural or wildlife issue, that would be one thing. But the fact that it’s due to human actions just makes it feel worse. (Aidan)

• “Even still, as I sat in my office, surrounded by my facsimiles and replicas of the Gone Birds, the parakeet left me longing for something I can’t quite explain. I wanted, in my own way, to see the bird live again, to feel its animated, flying, screeching, and squawking for myself. There’s a bit of a god complex in most ecologists. Most of us aren’t just watchers and data miners, we’re also wannabe creators”.

I really like this ending paragraph. It helps neatly tie up the personal anecdotes throughout the essay and help lend personality to an essay that may have struggled to have some. (Zach)

Birding While Black by J Drew Lanham

• “It’s only 9:06 a.m. and I think I might get hanged today”.

What a great hook for the essay, I’m already invested. (Zach)

• “The mountain morning, which started out cool, is rapidly heating into the June swoon. I grip the clipboard tighter with sweaty hands, ignoring as best I can the stars and bars flapping menacingly in the yard across the road. The next three minutes will seem much longer”.

I think this passage does a really good job at highlighting the physical toll that anxiety can result in. I think it’s important for the reader to know just how badly this moment ate at the author, in order to fully understand his plight. (Zach)

• “Over the years I’ve listed hundreds of species in hundreds of places, from coast to coast and abroad, too. I’ve seen a shit-ton of birds from sea level to alpine tundra. But as a black man in America I’ve grown up with a profile. Society at large has certain boxes I’m supposed to fit into, and most of the labels on those boxes aren’t good. Birders have a profile as well, a much more positively perceived one. Being a birder in the United States means that you’re probably a middle-aged, middle-class, well-educated white man. While most of the labels apply to me, I am a black man and therefore a birding anomaly. The chances of seeing someone who looks like me while on the trail are only slightly greater than those of sighting an ivory-billed woodpecker. In my lifetime I’ve encountered fewer than ten black birders. We’re true rarities in our own right”.

I think this passage is particularly interesting. I love the way in which the author draws parallels between the way we treat animals, with the way in which African Americans are viewed in society. The author is able to link the two central purposes of the article, in a way which enriches the reader’s understanding. (Zach)

• Mourning Gone Birds isn’t just a dive into a worry hole, it’s a dirty crawl into a deep and sandy pit. For each species that is somehow recovered from oblivion — a bald eagle, for instance — more seem to tumble back in. Whooping cranes, Kirtland’s warblers, Gunnison sage grouse, California condors, and many more teeter on the crater’s edge of Almost Glone. Beyond the birds, I mourn the loss of places too, because landscapes degrade and fall into the pit along with the birds. Longleaf pine forests, tallgrass prairies, and salt marshes shrink daily to mere fragments of once expansive swaths.

While not entirely on the same topic as the essay, I still find this passage a little bit interesting. It’s mostly just a reminder of how much of the planet humans have corrupted and destroyed. It’s something not a lot of us think about daily because we are usually surrounded by nature that is left relatively intact. (Aidan)

• “In the midst of ticking off species the thoughts begin to filter through my head again. Maybe these folks are the “heritage, not hate” type. I don’t see any black lawn jockeys, wheelless cars hoisted up on cinder blocks, or rabid pit bulls in the yard. The only irritant beyond the flag is a persistently yapping Chihuahua, announcing my presence to anyone within earshot”.

I like the way in which the author uses this passage to highlight how he forces himself to try and rationalize the flag. Even though he is personally offended by it, society has forced him into a position where he must try to live with it. (Zach)

• As an ecologist of color, the restorative thinking is a bittersweet exercise. I’ve been steeped in the training (or brainwashing) of the “bring-back-the-natives-undam-the-rivers-pull-up-the-privet-and-release-the-bison” paradigm. It’s a wistful conjuring to make North America great again — in an ecologically good way, I suppose. But beyond the uncomfortable verbiage about casting out exotics and eliminating aliens, there is the question of who — beyond the largely homogenous choir of restoration ecologists and wistful wishers for the good old days of yore — gets to say what wild nature is.

I can see why the author would find something like this a bit disconcerting, and I think it’s some interesting wording; “bring-back-the-natives-undam-the-rivers-pull-up-the-privet-and-release-the-bison” (Aidan)

• The birds aren’t alone in the refuge. There are humans in the shadows, too. Torches lit from knots of fatwood throw long shadows onto the hollow trunks where the parakeets roost. The dark forms are Maroons, self-liberated slaves who once worked the same plantations that the parakeets frequent. They were once chattel, bound to the land at the cruel behest of white planters, but who have escaped terror and freed themselves from the very fields over which the birds have flown and fed. As the Carolina parakeets find security in wooded wetlands, so too do the Maroons — slave chasers and the “law” hesitate to pursue them into the swamps. Free from the plight of overseers and forced labor, they have lived for decades in thriving communities within mere miles of the plantations they had fled.

I think the authors comparison to birds and plantation slaves is kind of intriguing, because he shows how both sought security and company, which they did by escaping to different places. (Aidan)

Monday September 19

William Dean Howell –Editor’s Easy Chair (1902)

“Wandering airs of thought strayed through it, owning no allegiance stricter than that which bound the wild chords to a central motive.” (36)

(Mia) It’s typically phrases like these that continue to surprise me about the essay, even if Howell is mentioning an “old-fashioned essay.”

(Mia) Growing up, the essay was seen as structural and strict for me. Phrases like this surprise me since it’s how I would describe writing a fiction piece. As someone who writes creatively and always in fiction, this is how I would describe the kind of writing I do, but I would never expect it in terms of an essay, even if it’s implied that this was an older way of writing one.

“That gave them their charm, and kept them lyrical, far from the dread perhaps of turning out a sermon, when the only duty they had was to churn out a song.” (37)

(Mia) To me, Howell seems to be lamenting about the very thing I grew up with, which were the strictly structured school assignments whose only purpose was to inform and drop the entertainment. To me, it certainly does seem like a loss that that way of essay writing was left behind by the majority. To have something be as equally entertaining as it is informative feels like a very important quality to have in writing.

“Often, there was apparently no central motive in the essay; it seemed to begin where it would, and end where it liked… That gave them their charm, and kept them lyrical, far from the dread perhaps of turning out a sermon, when the only duty they had was to turn out a song.” (36-37) 

(Ian) This speaks to a style of essay that feels very different from the ones I’ve spend most of my life writing. School assignments always mandate some form of fixed length for the sake of practical structure, but the concept of “practical structure” itself is anathema to the free lyrical style of essay that Howells extolls here. 

Jose Ortega Y Gasset–To The Reader (1914)

“Even books of an exclusively scientific intention are beginning to be written in a less didactic style…” (38)

(Mia) Didactic-intended to teach, particularly in having moral instruction as an ulterior motive

“I only offer modi considerandi , possible new way of looking at things.”

(Mia) Looking at essays now, I, for the majority, see them as the step before a full-blown text book. The essay doesn’t ask you to accept claims as fact by presenting a crushing amount of evidence like a textbook would. The essay gives readers a bit of room to question or deny. To at least hear a claim and decide consciously whether to refute it or not. It gives readers a bit more freedom. There is less pressure on them to be told that the words in front of them are, undeniably correct and indisputable. There is a freedom in which they don’t feel they are undoubtedly meant to accept it and maybe that incites them to want to read it more.

            “The essay is science, minus the explicit proof.” (38) 

(Ian) This seems to sum up the more formal analytical style also popularized by Bacon. A form that seems to be much rarer nowadays, or at least one I’ve had little exposure to. 

“It is my intention that these ideas serve a function much less serious than a scientific one: they will not stubbornly insist on being adopted by others, but merely wish to awaken in kindred minds kindred thoughts… They are only a pretext and an appeal for a wide ideological collaboration on national themes, and nothing else.” (39) 

(Ian) Even in essays more rigorous and stiffer then what I’m used to, there’s an acknowledgment of the inherent lack of absolutism inherent to the essay. It’s an interesting contrast. 

William Carlos Williams–An Essay On Virginia (1925)

“’The only thing that changes is man’, it is said. This falsehood is true. It’s vitality is the same as that of fashions: changelessness. Without one there is not the other… The rigidity of the essay is itself human.” (49) 

(Ian) Williams’s ideas on the essay I found the most obtuse and hard to parse. In the first half he explains them matter of fact with wording like this that sometimes contradicts itself. But in the latter half, he explains by example, making his point organically through the nature of the medium itself. 

“The essay must stand while passion and interest pass through.”

(Mia) To me, it seemed as though he was saying that the essay must hold strong in the face of those who read it, regardless of interest in the subjects it may present. It seems, to me, that even if a reader does not care for the subject, a strong essay would at least let them grapple what it’s about and provide a decent amount of information.

“But ability in an essay is multiplicity, infinite fracture, the intercrossing of opposed forces establishing any number of opposed centres of stillness.”

Multiplicity –a large number

(Mia) This seemed to me like a fancy way of saying that no essay is going to be perfect. There will always be something that is amiss. Misunderstood, misinterpreted, misinformed. I think that’s a good human quality to have in writing. Not that it’s a good thing, but it lets you know whoever wrote it is a humanlike you. Since no human being is perfect and there is comfort in that knowledge.

Katherine Fullerton Gerould–An Essay On Essays (1935)

“These modern essays of ours may be compared to conversation… which is ever diverse… and which finds in the unending multiplicity of the of the world unending matter for discussion and contemplation.” (52) 

(Ian) This passage implies a shift in the modern essay. A greater emphasis on more direct engagement between the writer and reader. A style, as evidenced by this very essay, I find much more engaging. 

“An essay, to some extent thinks aloud; though not in the loose and pointless way to which the ‘stream of consciousness’ addicts have accustomed us.” (61)

(Mia) The opening before the essay did describe Gerould’s essays as “provocative”, which is defined as “causing annoyance, anger, or another strong reaction, especially deliberately.” In this, I can appreciate her voice. The piece certainly does carry a professional tone, but also a “bluntly speak my mind” aura as well. I feel like an essay that directly challenges or immediately says something you may disagree with, is a sure-fire way to capture a reader’s attention, perhaps to see if they end up saying “she’s wrong” or if she can successfully convince them with her claim.

“But we are talking of the essay itself; not of those bits of whimsical prose which are to the true essay what expanded anecdote is to the short story.”

Anecdote-a short amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person

(Mia) Gerould seems to be against Howell’s (Editor’s Easy Chair) lamenting tone for the old-fashioned essay that held poem-like phrases. Gerould seems to want essays to be straight to the point, though I think she knows that those bits of prose are still somewhat necessary to the essay. It seems to me that she appreciates less fluffing up around the topic and would prefer it just a little bit more cut-and-dry.

“The essay then, having persuasion for it’s object, states a proposition; it’s method is meditation; it is subjective rather than objective, critical rather then creative. It can never be a mere marshaling of facts; for it struggles… for truth; and truth is something one arrives at by the help of facts, not the facts themselves.” (63) 

(Ian) Gerould here seems to propose an ideal of the essay not as a form of expression, but as a means of conveying a message. Interestingly, though this perspective is aligned closer to the modern argumentative essay more then what’s come before, it’s conception of it is still entirely different. It considers the process meditative rather than argumentative. 

German Arciniegas–The Essay In Our America (1956)

“The essay in the United States becomes an optimistic synthesis of its own progress; it is a philosophy in which one sees the complacency of a healthy organism that develops industries, cities, farms, and ranches across the width of a republic unburdened by the green infernos of our furious and deadly geography.” (81) 

(Ian) A great demonstration of the way culture will inevitably shape the nature of the essays produced within it. 

“One cannot find as a theme for the essay anything more rich of contrasts, with more melancholy shadows, recondite secrets, and sharper crises–and with more hymns of hope and life.” (81)

Recondite -(of a subject or knowledge) little known; abstruse

(Mia) One of the few things I could understand from this essay is the author’s presumed awe at the functioning of America. In this essay, about America, it has been as he said. America, itself, is full of contrasts. He calls America anarchic and chaotic, but he also goes on to say that, for three centuries, there was a peace that Europe is not accustomed to. That any fighting America has done with other countries is still less than that among Europe, even if it seems that America is unstable among itself. His voice really comes through in the essay, seeming to say

“I don’t know how you’ve made it this far for so long, but you have” to the whole of America itself.

Hillaire Beloc –An Essay Upon Essays Upon Essays (1929)

“The enemies of the modern essay go on to say that it cannot possibly find sufficient subject matter for so excessive in output. And so on.”

“It would be better for literature, no doubt, and for the casual reader (who reads a great deal too much),if the output were less.”

“It would certainly be better for the writer if he could afford to restrict that output.”

(Mia) I wasn’t expecting an essay that actually states that there are too many essays. I can’t say I could ever agree with the first quote because there is always something to write about. You could be trapped in a white room with nothing, but pen and paper and you could find a way to write. From what I understand, this comes off as lamenting about the old days, when essays were seen as more of a rarity, and therefore, seen as much more valuable. But, from what I interpreted, is that there is now too much of any one subject, there is too much for a reader to casually enjoy and finally, there is an expectation of the author to add to the essay output when they are able. Another note just from the essay as a whole is that the opening to his essay was right in describing his voice as that “of a man shouting through a megaphone to a crowd on a windy day.” There are repetitions meant to snag and hold your reader/listener’s attention and there are italics that make a word as emphasized as possible. There is an undertone of urgency and enough interesting words/phrases that if I heard this man reading this essay on the street as loud as he could, I would just have to stop for a moment.

Wednesday September 14

Toward a Collective Poetics of the Essay  – Carl H. Klaus (xv-xxvi)

“Likewise, they typically conceive of the essay as a mode of trying out ideas, of exploration rather than persuasion, of reflection rather than conviction” (xv-xvi).

This reminds me of the idea that the essay is a lot of self-reflection, of stepping back from something to take in more of it. In one of Hazlitt’s essays, when describing Montaigne, he says, “He was, in a word, the first author who was not a book-maker, and who wrote not to make converts of others to establish creeds and prejudices, but to satisfy his own mine of the truth of things,” going along with he exploration of writing essays (17). From this quote, I feel that writing essays are more about the self than about the people who will read them, although you need to keep in mind how to catch and retain your audience’s attention.

“Anything ‘written with Regularity and Method,’ as [Addison] indicates elsewhere, he considered to be ‘a set Discourse’ […] in contrast with ‘the Looseness and Freedom of an Essay’” (xvi).

I find it really interesting the ways that Addison has described his different works. Before learning that the essays we’ll be writing in this class are not like the normal academic essays, I would have fought Addison on claiming that essays are loose and wrought with freedom for the writer.

“They have no pretences to much clearness or precision in their ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their intellectual wardrobe (to confess clearly) has few whole pieces in it. They are content with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth” (xvii).

I’m currently taking an Ethics class and we just finished talking about Socrates and his Apology. In it, he claimed he wasn’t the wisest person ever because he claimed his ignorance and wasn’t ashamed to say he didn’t know something fully. This passage reminds me of that sentiment where essayists are perfectly fine with

not knowing things but writing about things they do know, things they’re passionate about.

“So it might be said that above all else essayists conceive of the essay as a place of intellectual refuge, a domain sacred to the freedom of the mind itself” (xxi). I feel like this can be said about a lot of other genres of writing. Writing, in general, can be a great way to find solace and have your mind wander off. Even reading can be “a place of intellectual refuge”.

“Given this view of coherence, the essay evidently requires a delicate set of mental adjustments, attuned both to giving the mind free rein and to twining it in, so that the form of an essay will appear to reflect the process of a mind in action, but a mind that is always in control of itself no matter how wayward it may seem to be” (xxii-xxiii).

Looking forward to actually writing essays, I’m intrigued to see how difficult, in my opinion, this process of letting the mind free but still slightly caged will be. It has always been one or the other with writing for me: either I had to completely cage off my mind and focus on this one thing or I had let my brain run wild and think up the most unimaginable things to write about.

Can One Define The Essay?  – Jean Starobinski (110-115)

“But another meaning of examen designates a swarm of bees, a flock of birds. The common etymology would be the verb exigo, to push out, to chase, then to demand. How enticing if the nuclear meaning of today’s words had to result from their meanings in a distant past!” (111).

The etymology of words has always interested me, and it seems that the word essay has an infinitely deep well of meanings. Even just in this paragraph, four entirely separate meanings span from the same word, which opens interesting avenues to bring meaning to an oft-ignored word

“The essay might as well be the demanding weighing, the thoughtful examination, but also the verbal swarm from which one liberates development” (111).

I really like all of these different derivatives of the essay and believe they go back to what we were talking about in class on Monday. The “thoughtful examination” can be attributed to the process of the essay, the ruminating or meditating, and the motion of the essay, the exploration. It helps to have these processes, terms, and motions of the essay to better understand what each essayist is talking about when describing how they feel about the essay.

“This humility, entirely visible, is nothing but a show. Montaigne knows very well that one calls essay the use of a touchstone that allows a determination without fail of the nature and the name of a metal” (113).

The main draw to this quote for me is the addition of the word “touchstone” which seems to be used, in this context, to describe an object storing memories.bEssay as an idea being a touchstone would indicate connection to the term itself, which I find to be an interesting concept. By this method, Montaigne was drawing upon the influence of essayists past, even in his writing.

What Happened to the Personal Essay?  – Phillip Lopate (127-136)

“Essays are usually taught all wrong, they are harnessed to rhetoric and composition, in a two-birds-with-one-stone approach designed to sharpen freshman students’ skills at argumentation. While it is true that historically the essay is related to rhetoric, it in fact seeks to persuade more by the delights of literary style than anything else” (128).

This quote makes me look back to my teachings across the years, and how I’ve learned the “essay”. I agree with the quote- I think I’ve been taught the essay wrong, though how this is I haven’t yet found out. The essay, it seems, is much more freeform than I was taught- the essays I learned to write were bound by scaffolding and rigid, for better or for worse.

“Montaigne understood that, in an essay, the track of a person’s thoughts struggling to achieve some understanding of a problem is the plot” (128).

Going back to the idea of searching for the truth when writing an essay, I believe this quote goes well with it. It’s an interesting thing to think about: while writing the essay, although you have the idea or topic in mind, you still are learning more about it, finding out the truths, as you write.

“Particularly in Montaigne’s magnificent late essays, free-falls that sometimes go on for a hundred pages or more, it is possible for the reader to lose all contact with the ostensible subject, bearings top, bottom, until there is nothing to do but surrender to this companionable voice, thinking alone in the dark” (128).

It’s such a shift from writing academically, where it is shunned and looked down upon to ramble and digress so as not to confuse the reader, to learning about the writings of essays, where the father of the essay was praised for going off on tangents and directing the reader in a completely different direction.

“A modern reader may come away thinking that the old fox (Montaigne) still kept a good deal of himself to himself. This is partly because we have upped the ante on autobiographical revelation, but also because Montaigne was writing essays, not confessional memories, and in an essay it is as permissible, as honest, to chase down a reflection to its source as to admit some past shame” (129).

This quote feels rather sharp towards Montaigne, but also understood, as the essay is difficult to put a fence on. The fact that Montaigne kept much to himself is, in my opinion, inconsequential, as his donations to the style of essay should not be disregarded. However, it’s interesting to think- what would have become of his essays had he been more personal?

“I include this random and unfairly incomplete list merely to indicate the diversity and persistence of the form in American letters today. Against all odds, it continues to attract newcomers” (134).

I find it interesting that Lopate has explained previously that the essayist and the essay is a dying form because of all of these magazines and newspapers that don’t give the essayists the opportunity to let them do what they do. Simultaneously, we, as a class, are sitting here learning about the essay and how to properly write them, thus invigorating the form of the essay. It’s just a little funny to me.

Notes Towards the Definition of an Essay  – Robert Atwan (194-201)

“Anyone who has attempted to write about the essay knows how difficult the genre is to define. Yet essayists over the centuries have sought some sort of definition, despite the fact that the first modern essayist Montaigne, the writer who gave form its name, had the good sense to avoid defining the strange sort of prose he was in the process of inventing” (194).

I never considered, before this time, the essay as a “genre”. I (and many of my friends) had considered them to be a structure, but as Montaigne and the others would have it, it seems that the essay is much more of a blend of the two of them: a structure to write by, and a genre to abide thought by.

“Yet essayists over the centuries have sought some sort of definition, despite the fact thatthe first modern essayist, Montaigne, the writer who gave the form its name, had the good sense to avoid defining the strange sort of prose he was in the process of inventing” (194).

I find it funny that we have a whole book filled with essays dedicated to defining the essay and yet the guy who came up with it never gave a definition of it himself! The essayists in this book have done an amazing job of defining it without the actual definition from Montaigne. They’ve had to develop their own meaning of the essay which makes this genre such an interesting one to study.

Some Terms and Definitions from the Reading (from class discussion)

Unconventional, unmethodical, irregular (often defining by what it is not). Nature (“wild,” Addison), organic, open, loose, relaxed, lyrical, aphoristic; exploratory (both form and content); ruminative (undigested); meditative, “wandering airs of thought,” rambling, roaming; personal, conversational, genial, frank, generous, sincere, authentic

Monday September 12

Michael and Leah

• All on Hypothesis – Leah & Michael

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Semi-colons; or, learning to love literature’s most misunderstood punctuation

Kurt Vonnegut, Edgar Allan Poe and Gertrude Stein hated them. Should you too?

Kurt Vonnegut might find the headline on this essay too pretentious.

In 2005, the author of Slaughterhouse 5 and Welcome to the Monkey House wrote a vicious little line about the semi-colon that has since seemed to lodge itself into the brains of writers and grammarians everywhere: “Do not use semicolons,” wrote Vonnegut; “All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

Since it first appeared in the work of Italian scholar and printer Aldus Pius Manutius the Elder in 1494, the semi-colon has undergone wilder fluctuations in approval than perhaps any other punctuation mark. And it’s still widely misunderstood to this day; when I mentioned this essay to a peer, she remarked that she was “not going to pretend I know how to use it.”

For those who don’t: the semi-colon is commonly used to link together two independent yet related clauses, as in this sentence: “The line didn’t quite feel complete; it needed something else.” It’s particularly useful for juxtaposition, as in “I love jazz; my partner prefers folk.” They can also replace commas in lists where commas already exist to avoid complication (“On her holidays, she would visit Paris, France; Rome, Italy; and Berlin, Germany”), and in places where a comma would create a splice .

“Do not use semicolons,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut; “All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

Yet, long before Vonnegut saw to its modern humiliation, the semi-colon had scores of detractors. By the mid-19th Century, Edgar Allan Poe was already calling for the dash to dethrone it; in the 20th, Gertrude Stein found them showy, while George Orwell unkindly referred to them as “an unnecessary stop”. Cormac McCarthy joined the pile-on in the 21st Century by dismissing them as “idiocy”.

And in a 2017 study by Slate that measured semi-colon use by author, many of today’s bestselling authors, among them E.L. James , Agatha Christie , John Grisham , James Patterson and, yes, Vonnegut himself, were found to use scant numbers of semi-colons in comparison to other authors (less than 100 times per 100,000 words, all). The modern reading public, it seems, do not look favourably on the semi-colon.

That it is misunderstood is not an original notion. Just five sentences in, the Wikipedia page for the semi-colon refers to it as “likely the least understood of the standard marks”, and even Lynne Truss , the author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation , received a dressing-down by The New Yorker for what they referred to as “two misused semicolons” in the book’s preface.

But its value, when it is used correctly, feels obvious. In the Oxford Dictionary of English, which refers to it as “a punctuation mark indicating a pause, typically between two main clauses, that is more pronounced than that indicated by a comma”, we get closer to the semi-colon’s real value, and true beauty: the semi-colon, more elegantly than any other punctuation, expresses time .

The semi-colon, more elegantly than any other punctuation, expresses time

Here is a passage from Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway , itself a novel-length meditation on time:

Having lived in Westminster—how many years now? Over twenty—one feels even in the midst of traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.

Can you feel the “indescribable pause”, to borrow Woolf’s term, between the “warning, musical” and “the hour, irrevocable”? With what other punctuation might Woolf have achieved that effect? Certainly not with Poe’s dash. A full stop would feel rigid, militaristic; the semi-colon hangs, shimmering, in the air, just long enough to feel it.

Indeed, the 1737 guide Bibliotheca Technologica suggested that punctuation’s use was dictated by natural speech and thought pauses: “The comma (,) which stops the voice while you tell one. The Semicolon (;) pauseth while you tell two. The Colon (:) while you tell three; and then period, or full stop (.) while you tell four.”

At the other end of Slate ’s findings, some of the most respected authors of all time can be found: Charles Dickens , Mark Twain and, right at the very top, Jane Austen , who used a semi-colon with the impressive regularity of once every 1000 words. But it was perhaps the famous American President and orator Abraham Lincoln who cut most cleanly through the accusation of pretention that beleaguers the semi-colon when, in 1864, he admitted not just "I have a great respect for the semi-colon; it’s a very useful little chap”, but that: “With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me it is a matter of feeling.”

The Bibliotheca Technologica’s “pauseth”, Lincoln knew, was everything; it lent gravitas to language. Skilful orators like Lincoln and Martin Luther King use semi-colons with magnificent ease; so, in addition to Dickens, Twain, and Austen, do writers as varied as Raymond Chandler , Chinua Achebe , Salman Rushdie , and Rebecca Solnit . 

And, unlike its somehow more ‘whole’ cousin the colon, the semi-colon doesn’t subordinate; it balances. Equal parts poignant pause, an organiser of lists, and juxtaposer of thoughts, they are anything but pretentious. And the more you see them, the easier it becomes to incorporate them seamlessly into writing. Kurt Vonnegut hated semi-colons; you don’t have to.

Image: Alicia Fernandes / Penguin.

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What is Essay? Definition, Usage, and Literary Examples

Essay definition.

An essay (ES-ey) is a nonfiction composition that explores a concept, argument, idea, or opinion from the personal perspective of the writer. Essays are usually a few pages, but they can also be book-length. Unlike other forms of nonfiction writing, like textbooks or biographies, an essay doesn’t inherently require research. Literary essayists are conveying ideas in a more informal way.

The word essay comes from the Late Latin exigere , meaning “ascertain or weigh,” which later became essayer in Old French. The late-15th-century version came to mean “test the quality of.” It’s this latter derivation that French philosopher Michel de Montaigne first used to describe a composition.

History of the Essay

Michel de Montaigne first coined the term essayer to describe Plutarch’s Oeuvres Morales , which is now widely considered to be a collection of essays. Under the new term, Montaigne wrote the first official collection of essays, Essais , in 1580. Montaigne’s goal was to pen his personal ideas in prose . In 1597, a collection of Francis Bacon’s work appeared as the first essay collection written in English. The term essayist was first used by English playwright Ben Jonson in 1609.

Types of Essays

There are many ways to categorize essays. Aldous Huxley, a leading essayist, determined that there are three major groups: personal and autobiographical, objective and factual, and abstract and universal. Within these groups, several other types can exist, including the following:

• Academic Essays : Educators frequently assign essays to encourage students to think deeply about a given subject and to assess the student’s knowledge. As such, an academic essay employs a formal language and tone, and it may include references and a bibliography. It’s objective and factual, and it typically uses a five-paragraph model of an introduction, two or more body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Several other essay types, like descriptive, argumentative, and expository, can fall under the umbrella of an academic essay.
• Analytical Essays : An analytical essay breaks down and interprets something, like an event, piece of literature, or artwork. This type of essay combines abstraction and personal viewpoints. Professional reviews of movies, TV shows, and albums are likely the most common form of analytical essays that people encounter in everyday life.
• Argumentative/Persuasive Essays : In an argumentative or persuasive essay, the essayist offers their opinion on a debatable topic and refutes opposing views. Their goal is to get the reader to agree with them. Argumentative/persuasive essays can be personal, factual, and even both at the same time. They can also be humorous or satirical; Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is a satirical essay arguing that the best way for Irish people to get out of poverty is to sell their children to rich people as a food source.
• Descriptive Essays : In a descriptive essay, the essayist describes something, someone, or an event in great detail. The essay’s subject can be something concrete, meaning it can be experienced with any or all of the five senses, or abstract, meaning it can’t be interacted with in a physical sense.
• Expository Essay : An expository essay is a factual piece of writing that explains a particular concept or issue. Investigative journalists often write expository essays in their beat, and things like manuals or how-to guides are also written in an expository style.
• Narrative/Personal : In a narrative or personal essay, the essayist tells a story, which is usually a recounting of a personal event. Narrative and personal essays may attempt to support a moral or lesson. People are often most familiar with this category as many writers and celebrities frequently publish essay collections.

Notable Essayists

• James Baldwin, “ Notes of a Native Son ”
• Joan Didion, “ Goodbye To All That ”
• George Orwell, “ Shooting an Elephant ”
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, “ Self-Reliance ”
• Virginia Woolf, " Three Guineas "

Examples of Literary Essays

1. Michel De Montaigne, “Of Presumption”

De Montaigne’s essay explores multiple topics, including his reasons for writing essays, his dissatisfaction with contemporary education, and his own victories and failings. As the father of the essay, Montaigne details characteristics of what he thinks an essay should be. His writing has a stream-of-consciousness organization that doesn’t follow a structure, and he expresses the importance of looking inward at oneself, pointing to the essay’s personal nature.

2. Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”

Woolf’s feminist essay, written from the perspective of an unknown, fictional woman, argues that sexism keeps women from fully realizing their potential. Woolf posits that a woman needs only an income and a room of her own to express her creativity. The fictional persona Woolf uses is meant to teach the reader a greater truth: making both literal and metaphorical space for women in the world is integral to their success and wellbeing.

3. James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel”

In this essay, Baldwin argues that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin doesn’t serve the black community the way his contemporaries thought it did. He points out that it equates “goodness” with how well-assimilated the black characters are in white culture:

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality […] is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; […] and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.

This essay is both analytical and argumentative. Baldwin analyzes the novel and argues against those who champion it.

Further Resources on Essays

Top Writing Tips offers an in-depth history of the essay.

The Harvard Writing Center offers tips on outlining an essay.

We at SuperSummary have an excellent essay writing resource guide .

Related Terms

• Academic Essay
• Argumentative Essay
• Expository Essay
• Narrative Essay
• Persuasive Essay

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The most misread poem in america.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

Everyone knows Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”—and almost everyone gets it wrong.

Frost in 1913.

From The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong , a new book by David Orr.

A young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the path. He pauses, his hands in his pockets, and looks back and forth between his options. As he hesitates, images from possible futures flicker past: the young man wading into the ocean, hitchhiking, riding a bus, kissing a beautiful woman, working, laughing, eating, running, weeping. The series resolves at last into a view of a different young man, with his thumb out on the side of a road. As a car slows to pick him up, we realize the driver is the original man from the crossroads, only now he’s accompanied by a lovely woman and a child. The man smiles slightly, as if confident in the life he’s chosen and happy to lend that confidence to a fellow traveler. As the car pulls away and the screen is lit with gold—for it’s a commercial we’ve been watching—the emblem of the Ford Motor Company briefly appears.

The advertisement I’ve just described ran in New Zealand in 2008. And it is, in most respects, a normal piece of smartly assembled and quietly manipulative product promotion. But there is one very unusual aspect to this commercial. Here is what is read by a voice-over artist, in the distinctive vowels of New Zealand, as the young man ponders his choice:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

It is, of course, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. In the commercial, this fact is never announced; the audience is expected to recognize the poem unaided. For any mass audience to recognize any poem is (to put it mildly) unusual. For an audience of car buyers in New Zealand to recognize a hundred-year-old poem from a country eight thousand miles away is something else entirely.

Looking for something else to read? How about …

— Robert’s Frost’s Writers at Work interview — Lucy Scholes’s column about forgotten books — A short story by Anthony Veasna So

But this isn’t just any poem. It’s “The Road Not Taken,” and it plays a unique role not simply in American literature, but in American culture —and in world culture as well. Its signature phrases have become so ubiquitous, so much a part of everything from coffee mugs to refrigerator magnets to graduation speeches, that it’s almost possible to forget the poem is actually a poem. In addition to the Ford commercial, “The Road Not Taken” has been used in advertisements for Mentos, Nicorette, the multibillion-dollar insurance company AIG, and the job-search Web site Monster.com, which deployed the poem during Super Bowl XXXIV to great success. Its lines have been borrowed by musical performers including (among many others) Bruce Hornsby, Melissa Etheridge, George Strait, and Talib Kweli, and it’s provided episode titles for more than a dozen television series, including Taxi , The T w i l i g h t Zone , and B a t t le s t a r Galactica , as well as lending its name to at least one video game, Spry Fox’s Road Not Taken (“a rogue-like puzzle game about surviving life’s surprises”). As one might expect, the influence of “The Road Not Taken” is even greater on journalists and authors. Over the past thirty-five years alone, language from Frost’s poem has appeared in nearly two thousand news stories worldwide, which yields a rate of more than once a week. In addition, “The Road Not Taken” appears as a title, subtitle, or chapter heading in more than four hundred books by authors other than Robert Frost, on subjects ranging from political theory to the impending zombie apocalypse. At least one of these was a massive international best seller: M. Scott Peck’s self-help book The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth , which was originally published in 1978 and has sold more than seven million copies in the United States and Canada.

Given the pervasiveness of Frost’s lines, it should come as no surprise that the popularity of “The Road Not Taken” appears to exceed that of every other major twentieth-century American poem, including those often considered more central to the modern (and modernist) era. Admittedly, the popularity of poetry is difficult to judge. Poems that are attractive to educators may not be popular with readers, so the appearance of a given poem in anthologies and on syllabi doesn’t necessarily reveal much. And book sales indicate more about the popularity of a particular poet than of any individual poem. But there are at least two reasons to think that “The Road Not Taken” is the most widely read and recalled American poem of the past century (and perhaps the adjective “American” could be discarded). The first is the Favorite Poem Project, which was devised by former poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Pinsky used his public role to ask Americans to submit their favorite poem in various forms; the clear favorite among more than eighteen thousand entries was “The Road Not Taken.”

The second, more persuasive reason comes from Google. Until it was discontinued in late 2012, a tool called Google Insights for Search allowed anyone to see how frequently certain expressions were being searched by users worldwide over time and to compare expressions to one another. Google normalized the data to account for regional differences in population, converted it to a scale of one to one hundred, and displayed the results so that the relative differences in search volume would be obvious. Here is the result that Google provided when “The Road Not Taken” and “Frost” were compared with several of the best-known modern poems and their authors, all of which are often taught alongside Frost’s work in college courses on American poetry of the first half of the twentieth century:

SEARCH TERMS   |   SCALED WORLDWIDE SEARCH VOLUME

According to Google, then, “The Road Not Taken” was, as of mid-2012, at least four times as searched as the central text of the modernist era— The Waste Land —and at least twenty-four times as searched as the most anthologized poem by Ezra Pound. By comparison, this is even greater than the margin by which the term “college football ” beats “archery” and “water polo.” Given Frost’s typically prickly relationships with almost all of his peers (he once described Ezra Pound as trying to become original by “imitating somebody that hasn’t been imitated recently”), one can only imagine the pleasure this news would have brought him.

But as everyone knows, poetry itself isn’t especially widely read, so perhaps being the most popular poem is like being the most widely requested salad at a steak house. How did “The Road Not Taken” fare against slightly tougher competition? Better than you might think:

The results here are even more impressive when you consider that “The Road Not Taken” is routinely misidentified as “The Road Less Traveled,” thereby reducing the search volume under the poem’s actual title. (For instance, a search for “Frost’s poem the road less traveled” produces more than two hundred thousand results, none of which would have been counted above.) Frost once claimed his goal as a poet was “to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of ”; with “The Road Not Taken,” he appears to have lodged his lines in granite. On a word-for-word basis, it may be the most popular piece of literature ever written by an American.

Frost’s poem turns this expectation on its head. Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem’s speaker tells us he “shall be telling,” at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths “equally lay / In leaves” and “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.

According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

In this it strongly resembles its creator. Frost is the only major literary figure in American history with two distinct audiences, one of which regularly assumes that the other has been deceived. The first audience is relatively small and consists of poetry devotees, most of whom inhabit the art form’s academic subculture. For these readers, Frost is a mainstay of syllabi and seminars, and a regular subject of scholarly articles (though he falls well short of inspiring the interest that Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens enjoy). He’s considered bleak, dark, complex, and manipulative; a genuine poet’s poet, not a historical artifact like Longfellow or a folk balladeer like Carl Sandburg. While Frost isn’t the most esteemed of the early twentieth-century poets, very few dedicated poetry readers talk about him as if he wrote greeting card verse.

Then there is the other audience. This is the great mass of readers at all age levels who can conjure a few lines of “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and possibly “Mending Wall ” or “Birches,” and who think of Frost as quintessentially American in the way that “amber waves of grain” are quintessentially American. To these readers (or so the first audience often assumes), he isn’t bleak or sardonic but rather a symbol of Yankee stoicism and countrified wisdom. This audience is large. Indeed, the search patterns of Google users indicate that, in terms of popularity, Frost’s true peers aren’t Pound or Stevens or Eliot, but rather figures like Pablo Picasso and Winston Churchill. Frost is not simply that rare bird, a popular poet; he is one of the best-known personages of the past hundred years in any cultural arena. In all of American history, the only writers who can match or surpass him are Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe, and the only poet in the history of English-language verse who commands more attention is William Shakespeare.

This level of recognition makes poetry readers uncomfortable. Poets, we assume, are not popular—at least after 1910 or so. If one becomes popular, then either he must be a second-tier talent catering to mass taste (as Sandburg is often thought to be) or there must be some kind of confusion or deception going on. The latter explanation is generally applied to Frost’s celebrity. As Robert Lowell once put it, “Robert Frost at midnight, the audience gone / to vapor, the great act laid on the shelf in mothballs.” The “great act” is for “the audience” of ordinary readers, but his true admirers know better. He is really a wolf, we say, and it is only the sheep who are fooled. It’s an explanation that Frost himself sometimes encouraged, much as he used to boast about the trickiness of “The Road Not Taken” in private correspondence. (“I’ll bet not half a dozen people can tell who was hit and where he was hit by my Road Not Taken,” he wrote to his friend Louis Untermeyer.) In this sense, the poem is emblematic. Just as millions of people know its language about the road “less traveled” without understanding what that language is actually saying, millions of people recognize its author without understanding what that author was actually doing.

But is this view of “The Road Not Taken” and its creator entirely accurate? Poems, after all, aren’t arguments—they are to be interpreted, not proven, and that process of interpretation admits a range of possibilities, some supported by diction, some by tone, some by quirks of form and structure. Certainly it’s wrong to say that “The Road Not Taken” is a straightforward and sentimental celebration of individualism: this interpretation is contradicted by the poem’s own lines. Yet it’s also not quite right to say that the poem is merely a knowing literary joke disguised as shopworn magazine verse that has somehow managed to fool millions of readers for a hundred years. A role too artfully assumed ceases to become a role and instead becomes a species of identity—an observation equally true of Robert Frost himself. One of Frost’s greatest advocates, the scholar Richard Poirier, has written with regard to Frost’s recognition among ordinary readers that “there is no point trying to explain the popularity away, as if it were a misconception prompted by a pose.” By the same token, there is no point in trying to explain away the general misreadings of “The Road Not Taken,” as if they were a mistake encouraged by a fraud. The poem both is and isn’t about individualism, and it both is and isn’t about rationalization. It isn’t a wolf in sheep’s clothing so much as a wolf that is somehow also a sheep, or a sheep that is also a wolf. It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself—that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads.

From The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong by David Orr. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2015 by David Orr.

David Orr is the poetry columnist for the  New York Times Book Review . He is the winner of the Nona Balakian Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has appeared in  The New Yorker ,  Poetry , Slate , and  The Yale Review .

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25 Make Your “Move”: Writing in Genres

Brad Jacobson; Madelyn Pawlowski; and Christine M. Tardy

When approaching new genres, students often wonder what kind of information to include and how. [1] Rhetorical moves analysis, a type of genre analysis, offers a useful, practical approach for students to understand how writers achieve their goals in a genre through various writing strategies. In this chapter from Writing Spaces: Readings About Writing, Volume 4 , students are introduced to moves analysis, first describing what it is and then explaining various strategies for analyzing moves. The chapter walks students through moves analysis with both a familiar low-stakes genre (student absence emails) and a less familiar professional genre (grant proposals), demonstrating how such an analysis can be carried out. The goal of the chapter is to familiarize students with rhetorical moves analysis as a practical tool for understanding new genres and for identifying options that can help writers carry out their goals.

This reading is available below or as a PDF . The PDF includes additional appendices and teacher resources.

If you are like most students, you’ve probably had to miss a class at some point. Maybe you were sick, stayed up too late the night before, or just weren’t prepared. When you’ve found yourself in this situation, have you emailed your professor about your absence? If so, how much information did you share? Did you include an apology, or maybe an explanation of how you plan to make up any missed work? You may not realize it, but the email written to a teacher in this situation can be considered a genre . You’ve probably heard the term genre used in relation to music, film, art, or literature, but it is also used to describe non-literary writing, like the writing we do in our personal lives, at school, and at work. These genres can be thought of as categories of writing . These categories are based on what the writing is trying to do , as well as who it is written for and the context it is written in (Dirk; Miller). For instance, a condolence card or message carries out the action (or goal) of sharing your sympathy with someone. A student absence email lets a teacher know about an absence and might also request information for how to make up a missed class.

You encounter many genres every day. In your personal life, these might include to-do lists, menus, political ads, and text messages to schedule a get-together. In school, you may write in genres like proposals, lab reports, and university admission essays. People in professions often write in highly specialized genres: nurses write care plans; lawyers write legal briefs; scientists write research articles, and so on. (For a more in-depth introduction to the definition and functions of genre, check out Dirk’s “Navigating Genres” chapter in Writing Spaces Vol. 1.)

Texts within a genre category aren’t identical, but they often resemble each other in many ways. For example, they might use similar kinds of vocabulary and grammar, design features, content, and patterns for organizing their content. Because of these resemblances, we can often recognize texts as belonging to a particular genre—as in figure 1.

If you recognized this text as a consumer restaurant review, you likely have read similar reviews before, and you’ve started to get a sense of what they “look like.” This is how genres work: When we repeatedly encounter texts within a genre, we get a sense of the language and content they tend to use, as well as how they arrange that language and content. Successful writers have a good idea of how to write effectively in particular genres— this means satisfying readers’ expectations for the genre but maybe also making a text fresh and interesting. Can you think of a time you had to write in a new or unfamiliar genre for the first time? You might have gotten stuck with where to start or what to include. Writing in a new genre can be hard if you don’t yet know the expectations for content, language, and organization. In this chapter, we’ll share a specific strategy that can help you through these kinds of challenges. More specifically, we will look at how to identify and analyze the rhetorical moves of a genre.

What Are Rhetorical Moves?

Most likely, the term rhetorical moves is new to you. It may sound intimidating, but it’s just a (sort of) fancy phrase to describe something you probably already do. Rhetorical moves—also just called moves —are the parts of a text that carry out specific goals; they help writers accomplish the main action of the genre (Swales). For example, a typical wedding invitation in the United States includes moves like inviting (“You are invited to attend…”) and providing venue information (“…at the Tucson Botanical Gardens”). These moves are necessary to carry out the genre’s main action; without an inviting move, an invitation could easily fail to accomplish its goal, and without a providing venue information move, attendees won’t know where to go! A wedding invitation can also include optional moves like recognizing parents (“Jordan and Jaime Taylor request your company at…”) or signaling appropriate attire (“Black tie optional”). Optional moves often respond to specific aspects of a situation or give writers a way to express certain identities or personal goals. Wedding invitations in different countries or cultural communities can have different common moves as well. In China, for example, wedding invitations often include the character for double happiness (囍).

Even a text as short as a restaurant review can include multiple moves. The main action of a restaurant review is to tell other people about the restaurant so that they can decide whether to eat there or not, so the moves that a writer includes work toward that goal. The review in Figure 1 includes three moves:

• evaluating the restaurant overall (“The food was amazing!”)
• evaluating specific dishes (“…one of the best carne asada burros I’ve had…,” “Their salsa was amazing…”)
• providing details about the price (“It was a little on the pricey side…”)

After looking at just one restaurant review, we don’t really know if these are typical moves or if they are just unique to this one consumer’s review. To understand what moves are common to consumer restaurant reviews (which might be a bit different than professional restaurant reviews), we need to look at many examples of texts in that genre. As a writer, it can be very useful to look for moves that are required (sometimes called obligatory moves ), common, optional, and rare. You can also think about moves that never seem to occur and consider why that might be the case. For example, have you ever seen a wedding invitation mention whether this is someone’s second (or third) marriage? Or that mentions how much the wedding is going to cost? Those particular moves would probably confuse some readers and not help achieve the goal of the genre!

Analyzing Rhetorical Moves

Analyzing rhetorical moves is the process of identifying moves in multiple samples of a genre, looking for patterns across these texts, and thinking critically about the role these moves play in helping the genre function. To get started with moves analysis, you just need a few strategies we’ll show you throughout the rest of this chapter. We ourselves have used these strategies in situations where we had to write in unfamiliar genres. As a new professor, Madelyn recently had to write her first annual review report—a document used to track her career progress. The instructions she was given were a bit vague and confusing, so she gathered samples of annual reviews from her colleagues to get a better sense of the typical length and type of content included in this genre. One sample she looked at used an elaborate chart, which made her quite nervous because she had no idea how to make this kind of chart for her own report! But after realizing that this chart was not included in the other samples, she decided this move was probably optional and decided to not include it. In this case, understanding the typical moves of the annual review report helped Madelyn avoid unnecessary stress and feel confident her report would meet readers’ expectations.

Before trying to figure out a complicated or unfamiliar genre, it will help to practice first with something familiar like a student absence email. Having received hundreds of these emails as professors (and written a few ourselves), we know this genre is characterized by some typical rhetorical moves as well as a great deal of variation. Let’s walk through the process of carrying out a rhetorical moves analysis.

Identifying Typical Moves of a Genre

The emails in Table 1 were all written by college students (referred to here by pseudonyms). We only share four samples here, but it’s better to gather 5-10 or even more samples of a genre to really get a sense of common features, especially when you are working with a more complex or unfamiliar genre. To identify typical rhetorical moves, first, you’ll want to identify the moves in each individual text you collect. Remember that a move is a part of the text that helps the writer carry out a particular function or action. For this reason, it is helpful to label moves with a verb or an “action” word. When you sense that the writer is doing something different or performing a new “action,” you’ve probably identified another rhetorical move. A move can be one sentence long, an entire paragraph, or even longer, and your interpretation of a move might differ from someone else’s interpretation. That’s okay!

Rhetorical Moves in Four Sample Absence Emails

Dear Dr. Pawlowski,

[1] I just wanted to tell you that I will be absent from class today. [2] I have completed my mid-term evaluation and I have started my annotated bibliography. If I have any other questions I will ask my study partner! [3] Thank you, and I will see you on Friday!

Jay Johnson

Dear Professor,

[1] I am sorry but [2] today I am missing class [3] because I have to take my cat to the vet due to an emergency. [4] Could you let me know what I need to do to make up the missed material?

[5] Thank you for your understanding,

Good morning,

I hope you had a wonderful spring break. [1] I am still experiencing cold symptoms from the cold I caught during the start of spring break. It was mainly from digestive problems (bathroom issues) coming from medication that [2] I had trouble coming to class yesterday. [3] I would like to apologize for any inconvenience I might have caused.

[4] I am continually working on the final assignment that is due tomorrow. [5] If I am not able to turn it in on time, could I possibly have a 24 hour extension? If not, I understand. [6] Thank you as always and I hope to see you tomorrow.

Best Wishes,

Hi, [1] Sorry but [2] I won’t be in class today.

Look at how we labeled the moves in these four samples. We did this by first reading each sample individually and thinking about how different parts achieve actions. We then labeled these parts with verb phrases to describe the writer’s moves. In some texts, multiple sentences worked together to help the writer accomplish a particular goal, so we grouped those sentences together and labeled them as a single move (notice move 2 in Sample 1). Sometimes we found that a single sentence helped to accomplish multiple goals, so we labeled multiple moves in a single sentence (notice Sample 4). Don’t worry if you feel like you aren’t locating the “right” moves or labeling them appropriately; this is not an exact science! You might choose different labels or identify more or fewer moves than someone else analyzing the same samples. To find a fitting label for a move, it’s helpful to ask, “What is the writer doing in this part of the text?” To keep consistency in your labeling, it might also help to ask, “Have I seen something like this before in a different sample?” Looking at how we labeled the moves, would you agree with our labels? Do you see any additional moves? Would you have broken up the samples differently?

After identifying moves in individual samples, the next step is to compare the samples, looking for similarities and differences to better understand what moves seem typical (or unusual) for the genre. Based on our labels in Table 1, what moves do you see most and least frequently? A table is useful for this step, especially when you are working with longer or more complex genres and want to visualize the similarities and differences between samples. In Table 2, we listed all of the moves found in the four samples, noted which samples included each move, and decided whether each move seemed obligatory, common, optional, or rare for this particular genre based on how often it appeared. If we noticed the move in every sample, we labeled it as “obligatory,” but if we only saw a move in one or two samples, we figured it might be more optional or rare. We need to be careful, however, about making definite conclusions about what is or is not a typical feature of a genre when looking at such a small set of texts. We would probably locate many more moves or develop a different analysis with a larger sample size. Nevertheless, check out our findings in Table 1.

Table 1. Comparing move across samples

Understanding How Moves Help Carry out the Genre’s Social Actions

We now want to consider how certain moves help the genre function. Start by asking yourself, “What does the genre help the readers and writers do ?” and “How do certain moves help carry out these actions?” Keep in mind that a genre may serve multiple purposes. You might send an email to excuse yourself from an upcoming class, to explain a previous absence (see Sample 3), ask questions about missed material (see Sample 2), to request an extension on an assignment (see Sample 3), and so on.

Based on Table 1, at least one move could be considered essential for this genre because it is found in all four samples: informing the instructor about an absence. This move helps the writer make the purpose of the email explicit. Sometimes this simple announcement is almost all that an absence email includes (see Sample 4). Can you imagine trying to write an absence email without mentioning the absence? Would such an email even belong in this genre? Along with a general announcement of the absence, students often include information about when the absence occurred or will occur, especially if they need more information about missed material.

Some of the moves we labeled as optional or rare in Table 2 are not necessarily ineffective or inappropriate, but they might not always be needed depending on the writer’s intentions or the context of the missed class. Sample 2 includes a request for information about missed material, and Sample 3 includes a request for an accommodation. Do the emails with requests leave a different impression than the samples without? Do the writers of requests carry them out in similar ways?

We could continue going through each move, looking for patterns and considering rhetorical effects by asking a) why each move is typical or not, b) what role each move plays in carrying out the genre’s purpose(s), and c) how and why moves are sequenced in a particular way.

Identifying Options and Variations in Moves

Variation across genre samples is likely to occur because of differences in context, audience, and writers’ preferences. But some genres allow for more variation than others. If you’ve ever written a lab report, you likely received very specific instructions about how to describe the materials and methods you used in an experiment and how to report and discuss your findings. Other school genres, like essays you might write in an English or Philosophy course, allow for more flexibility when it comes to both content and structure. If you notice a lot of variation across samples, this might mean that the genre you are looking at is flexible and open to variations, but this could also indicate that you need to label the moves more consistently or that you are actually looking at samples of different genres.

Based on our observations and analysis, the student absence email appears to have some degree of flexibility in both content and organizational structure. There is variation, for example, in how detailed the students are in providing a reason for their absence. Sample 2 mentions an emergency vet visit, providing just enough detail to show that the absence was justifiable and unexpected. Sample 3 also includes an explanation for the absence, but the writer chose to include a far more personal and detailed reason (a cold caught on spring break and bathroom issues from medication? Perhaps TMI (too much information)?). There is also a great deal of variation in the structure of the emails or the sequence of moves. In Sample 3, the student doesn’t mention their absence until the third sentence whereas all the other writers lead with this information. What other differences do you see? How do you think a professor would respond to each email? Understanding your options as a writer and learning how to identify their purposes and effects can help you make informed choices when navigating a new or unfamiliar genre.

Identifying Common Language Features

Writers make linguistic choices to carry out moves, and oftentimes you’ll find similarities across samples of a genre. While there are seemingly infinite features of language we could analyze, here are some to consider:

• passive/active voice
• contractions (e.g., it’s, I’m, we’re, you’ve)
• sentence types
• sentence structures
• word choice
• use of specialized vocabulary
• use of pronouns

To dig deeper into the linguistic features of moves, we could take a few different approaches. First, we could view the genre samples side-by-side and look for language-level patterns. This method works well when your genre samples are short and easy to skim. We noticed, for example, that all four student absence emails use first-person pronouns (I, me, my, we, us), which makes sense given that this genre is a type of personal correspondence. Would it be possible to write in this genre without using personal pronouns?

Our analysis could also focus on how language is used to carry out a single move across genre samples. Using this method, we noticed that in both of the samples that included requests to the teacher, the students use the auxiliary verb could to make their requests. In Sample 2, Layla asks, “Could you let me know what I need to do to make up the missed material?” In Sample 3, Corey asks, “Could I possibly have a 24-hour extension?” There are other possibilities for phrasing both questions more directly, such as “What do I need to do?” or “Can I have a 24-hour extension?” Why might it be beneficial to phrase requests indirectly in this genre?

You don’t need to be a linguistic expert to analyze language features of a genre. Sometimes all it takes is noticing a word that seems out of place (like the use of the greeting “Hi” instead of “Dear Professor”) or finding a phrase that is repeated across genre samples. Or you might start with a feeling you get while reading samples of a genre: the samples might generally feel formal or you might notice a humorous tone. Noticing language features helps you more closely analyze how certain moves are carried out and to what effect .

Critiquing Moves

To critique means to offer a critical evaluation or analysis. By critiquing a genre, we are doing more than identifying its faults or limitations, though that can certainly be part of the process. We might also look for potential strengths of the genre and possibilities for shifting, adapting, or transforming it. The use of the greeting “Hi” in Sample 4 could be an interesting start to a critique about how formal this genre is or should be. While we understand why some professors find it too informal to be addressed with a “Hi” or “Hey,” we also see this move as evidence of how the genre’s norms and expectations are seemingly changing. We personally don’t find these greetings as jarring or inappropriate as we might have 5-10 years ago. Our reactions might have to do with our individual teaching styles, but email etiquette may also be changing more broadly. To pursue this line of inquiry, we could collect more samples of student emails written to other professors and maybe even talk to those professors about their reactions to informal email greetings. Or we could talk to students about why they choose to use formal or informal greetings in these emails. To conduct a critique or analysis of a genre, it is sometimes useful to gather more samples or more information about the context in which the genre is used. Talking to actual users of the genre is often especially useful (see how Brad’s students did this in the next section). Here are some questions to get you started on a critique of rhetorical moves (some have been adapted from Devitt, et al.’s Scenes of Writing ):

• Do all moves have a clear purpose and help carry out the social actions of the genre?
• What is the significance behind the sequence of the moves?
• What are consequences for the writer or other users if certain moves are included, or not?
• Who seems to have freedom to break from common moves? Who does not?
• What do the moves suggest about the relationship between the writers and users of this genre? How might this relationship impact the inclusion/exclusion of certain moves?
• What do the moves suggest about the values of a broader community (i.e. a specific class, a specific institution, or the entire educational system of the region)?

A critique of moves might also lead you to find ways to express your own identity or bend more traditional conventions of a genre. For example, U.S. wedding invitations traditionally included a move which recognized the parents of the bride as the hosts of the wedding (e.g., “Mr. and Mrs. John Smith request the pleasure of your company at the marriage of their daughter [bride] to [groom]”). A critique of this move shows that it reflects a more gender-biased social view, in which a female is given to a male by her parents. Today, many (perhaps even most) couples omit this move entirely.

Applying Moves Analysis: Writing a Statement of Need

Moves analysis can help as you write in different classes or other personal or professional situations. Let’s take a look at how we can use moves analysis to approach a complicated or unfamiliar genre. You can use the chart in the Appendix as you follow along.

In one of Brad’s writing courses, students used moves analysis when they wrote a grant proposal on behalf of a local nonprofit organization. Grant proposals are common in academic and professional contexts. The goal of a grant proposal (the action it hopes to accomplish) is to convince a funder to support a project or initiative financially. In other words, “give us money!” Each granting agency—the organization with the money—has its own expectations in terms of format, organization, and even word count for proposals, but most include similar sections: a Statement of Need, Objectives for the project, Methods of implementing, Evaluation, and a proposed Budget (“How Do I Write a Grant Proposal?”). We can’t discuss all of these sections here, so in these next few paragraphs, we’ll walk you through a brief moves analysis of just the Statement of Need section (we’ll call it the Statement), just as Brad’s students did.

First, we need to understand what the Statement is hoping to accomplish and why it is important. According to Candid Learning, a support website for grant seekers, a Statement “describes a problem and explains why you require a grant to address the issue” (“How Do I Write”). This section lays out the stakes of the problem and proposes the solution. To learn more about how these Statements work, Brad’s class reviewed several samples from Candid Learning’s collection of successful grant proposals (“Sample Documents”). Let’s take a look at some of the moves students identified in three samples. These proposals were requesting funds for educational development in Uganda (Proposal from Building Tomorrow), an interpreter training center (Proposal from Southeast Community College), and community-based art programming (Proposal from The Griot Project).

Identifying Typical Moves in Statements of Need

First, Brad and his students identified moves in the individual Statements, using verbs to describe them. Then, we compared moves across the samples. Here are three of the moves we found:

Connect Proposal to Broad Social Issue

The writers included statistics or other data from credible sources as a way to establish the need or problem and connect to broader societal issues. Here are a few examples of this move in action:

• UNICEF and USAIDS estimate that 42 million children in this region alone are without access to primary education. (Proposal from Building Tomorrow)
• A study, published in January of 2006 in the journal Pediatrics shows that ad hoc interpreters were much more likely than professionally trained interpreters to make errors that could lead to serious clinical consequences, concluding that professionally trained medical interpreters are essential in health care facilities. (Proposal from Southeast Community College)

Why do you think the writers reference respected sources, like UNICEF, USAIDS, and the journal Pediatrics ? Brad’s students thought this move could both help the grant writer build credibility with their reader and show how the project will impact a social problem that goes beyond their local context. We did not see this move in all of the samples, so we’d say this move is common but not necessarily obligatory for this genre.

Demonstrate Local Need

Grant writers have to show the local problem their project is going to solve and why it’s needed. For example:

• Officials in the Wakiso District of Uganda…estimate that 55% of the district’s 600,000 children do not have access to education. (Proposal from Building Tomorrow)
• Statewide, 143,251 people speak a language other than English at home. In Lancaster County, that number is 24,717, up 260% since 1990 (U.S. Census 1990, 2000, 2005). (Proposal from Southeast Community College)
• As community constituents, we have observed a lack of after school and summer enrichment projects that utilize the power of art as a means of community unification. (Proposal from The Griot Project)

Students decided this move is obligatory because it’s in all of the samples. This makes sense because grant writers need to show why their project is important. Referencing outside sources appears to be common within this move, but not required. Why do you think referencing outside sources could be effective, given this move’s role in the genre?

Identify Solution and/or Impact

At some point in the Statement, usually at the end, the grant writer explains how their proposed project will meet the need they identified:

By opening doors to new, accessible neighborhood classrooms, BT can help reduce the dropout rate, provide children with the opportunity to receive a valuable education, and be an instrumental partner in building a better tomorrow. (Proposal from Building Tomorrow)

Brad’s students noticed this move in all of the Statements. Why do you think this move seems to be obligatory ?

Given what we know about grant proposals and the Statement, these moves seem to be rhetorically effective when sequenced in the order described above: connect to a societal problem, demonstrate local need, and identify a solution or describe the impact of the proposed project. Using these three basic moves helps writers show that their proposed work is important and that they have a plan to solve a problem with the grant money. Understanding the Statement in this way led Brad’s students to conduct further research into issues like food scarcity and access to health care that affected their partner organizations so they could make connections to social issues in their Statements.

The three moves identified were used in most of the grant proposals Brad’s students read. But students did notice variation. Remember that even when moves seem obligatory or common, they won’t necessarily be found in the same order. For example, one proposal identified the local need before connecting to a broader issue, and The Griot Project’s proposal did not include the connecting move at all, instead focusing solely on local knowledge to make their case. Why do you think this might be? Here, it may help to learn more about the audience. The Griot Project’s grant proposal was submitted to Neighborhood Connections, an organization that provides “money and support for grassroots initiatives in the cities of Cleveland and East Cleveland.” When the grant writers say, “As community constituents, we have observed…,” they are localizing their efforts and showing how their project can be considered a “grassroots initiative.” Understanding the audience can be one factor in understanding variation among samples.

When students looked across the samples, they noticed personal pronouns like I , we , or us were optional or rare . In fact, the only personal pronoun was in the demonstrating local need move, where one organization referenced their own observation (“we have observed”) to demonstrate the local need. However, they shifted back to third person when identifying the impact (“the Griot Project will improve”), like the other samples. Why do you think the writers included themselves so explicitly in the text when demonstrating the local need , while the rest of the samples maintained a more distant position? What might be gained with this choice, and why might some writers hesitate? Why do you think all of the writers used third person pronouns when identifying the organization’s impact ?

Students also noticed a common sentence structure in the identifying move, which we called “ By x-ing .” Each of the grant writers used a single sentence and a By x-ing phrase to connect the proposed intervention to an outcome. For example, “ By opening doors…BT can help reduce the dropout rate…” (emphasis added). Why do you think this sentence structure seems to be common within this move?

Staff members from an organization supporting economic development on Native American sovereign lands reminded members of Brad’s class that writing a grant proposal means representing an organization and the people and communities it serves. With this in mind, they asked students to emphasize the resilience of the community rather than perpetuate negative stereotypes in the grant proposals; they didn’t want a pity campaign. As a result of this conversation, students decided to highlight local conditions like a lack of grocery stores and access to transportation before introducing statistics about obesity and diabetes rates. They also included pictures of happy families to counter stereotypical images of poverty. In this way, critique of the genre led to subtle, yet important, transformation.

Clearly, a moves analysis like this could go on for a while! Remember, we’re not looking for the “right” answer—we’re trying to understand the options that we have as we begin to contribute our own examples to the genre.

Producing and Transforming Genres using Moves Analysis

Carrying out a moves analysis is more than just an academic exercise. You can use this process whenever you need to write in a new genre. Maybe you are applying for summer internships and you are writing a cover letter for the first time. Instead of starting from what you think a cover letter might look like, you can find several samples and conduct a moves analysis to identify features of this genre. You might also want to try pushing the boundaries a bit. Sometimes, playing with moves or incorporating additional moves in a genre can lead to interesting innovations or new uses for a genre. For each writing situation, you’ll want to decide whether it makes sense to take some risks and be innovative or to stick with more typical approaches. Conducting a moves analysis can be your first step to considering how to carry out your goals, and maybe even expressing your individuality, in a new genre.

Works Cited

Devitt, Amy, et al. Scenes of Writing . Pearson Education, 2004.

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing , Volume 1, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor Press/The WAC Clearinghouse, 2010, pp. 249-262.

“How Do I Write a Grant Proposal for My Individual Project? Where Can I Find Samples?” Candid.Learning , Candid, 2020, learning.candid.org/resources/ knowledge-base/grant-proposals-for-individual-projects/.

Hyon, Sunny. Introducing Genre and English for Specific Purposes . Routledge, 2018.

Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech , vol. 70, no. 2, 1984 pp. 151-167.

“Proposal from Building Tomorrow to Echoing Green.” Candid.Learning , Candid, 2020, https://learning.candid.org/resources/sample-documents/ proposal-from-building-tomorrow-to-echoing-green/

“Proposal from The Griot Project to Neighborhood Connections.” Candid.Learning , Candid, 2020, https://learning.candid.org/resources/sample-documents/ proposal-from-the-griot-project-to-neighborhood-connections/

“Sample Documents”. Candid.Learning , Candid, 2020, https://learning.candid. org/resources/sample-documents/

“Proposal from Southeast Community College to Community Health Endowment of Lincoln.” Candid.Learning , Candid, 2020, https://learning.candid. org/resources/sample-documents/proposal-from-southeast-community-college-to-community-health-endowment-of-lincoln/

Swales, John M. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings . Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Tardy, Christine M. Genre-Based Writing: What Every ESL Teacher Needs to Know . University of Michigan, 2019.

rhetorical moves , genre analysis , genre

Author Bios

Brad Jacobson is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso focusing on high school to college writing transitions and culturally-sustaining approaches to writing pedagogy, assessment, and policy. His work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Writing Assessment and Writing Program Administration .

Madelyn Pawlowski is an Assistant Professor of English at New Mexico University. She specializes in teacher development, genre studies, and language ideologies, practices, and policies. Her work appears in journals such as Composition Forum and numerous edited collections.

Christine M. Tardy is a Professor of English at the University of Arizona. She teaches courses in the undergraduate English program, MA-TESL program, and SLAT PhD program. Her research focuses on the areas of second language writing, genre and discourse studies, English for Academic Purposes (EAP)/Writing in the Disciplines (WID), and the politics and policies of the English language, particularly in institutional contexts. Her work appears in numerous edited collections and in journals such as Written Communication , Research in the Teaching of English , and Journal of English for Academic Purposes .

• This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and is subject to the Writing Spaces Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/, email [email protected], or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. To view the Writing Spaces Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces.org/terms-of-use. ↵

the strategies and approaches used by a writer to communicate effectively with an audience

an analysis of the conventions and deviations for a specific genre

often thought of as a type or category of writing, e.g. business memos, organization charts, menus, book reviews; a discursive response to a recurrent, social action; materials that mediate social interaction

Make Your "Move": Writing in Genres Copyright © by Brad Jacobson; Madelyn Pawlowski; and Christine M. Tardy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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A Guide to English: Literary Form

• An Introduction to Rhetoric
• Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing
• The Writing Process
• Formatting and Citations
• The Reference Collection
• Searching for Books
• Searching for Articles
• Bibliographic Trace
• Citation Management
• Scholarly Associations
• The English Language
• Literary Form
• Peoples and Identities
• Periods and Movements in American Literature
• Periods and Movements in Commonwealth Literatures
• Thematic Genres and "Genre Fiction"
• Award Winners (indexed)
• Criticism & Theory
• Creative Writing
• Multimodal Composition
• Text Analysis / Distant Reading
• Digital Stewardship
• Data Visualization
• GIS and Geospatial Data
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• Programming
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Formal Genres; aka Literary Forms

In this section.

• Introduction
• Literary Forms
• American Literature
• Commonwealth Literatures
• Award Winners

On this Page

What are formal genres, what is a novel.

• General histories
• The British novel
• The American novel
• The postcolonial novel
• The short story
• What is a short story?
• History & Criticism
• Short story anthologies

Studying Poetry

Commonwealth poetry, american poetry, theater / drama, studying the theater, commonwealth theater, american theater, other literary forms.

• Autobiography & Memoir
• Journals & Diaries

Maxims, Aphorisms, Apothegms, Quotations, and Sayings

• Graphic Novels and Comics

Form  is a way of categorizing literature based on its structure or purpose . One way of using the term genre is to refer to formal genres , a way of classifying literary works by their form.

"When we speak of the form of a literary work we refer to its shape and structure and to the manner in which it is made - as opposed to its substance or what it is about. [...] A secondary meaning of form is the kind  of work - the genre to which it belongs. Thus: sonnet, short story, essay." -J.A. Cuddon and M.A.R. Habib,  The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory ,  "Form"

According to J.A. Cuddon and M.A.R. Habbib ( The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory , "novel"), the term  novel  is

derived from Italian  novella , 'tale, piece of news', and now applied to a wide variety of writings whose only common attribute is that they are extended pieces of prose fiction. [...] It would probably be generally agreed that, in contemporary practice, a novel will be between 60,000 words and, say, 200,000. [...] We may hazard it is a form of story or prose narrative containing characters, action and incident, and, perhaps, a plot. [...] The subject matter of the novel eludes classification. No other literary form has proved so pliable and adaptable to a seemingly endless variety of topics and themes.

Cuddon and Habbib go on to summarize the history of the novel form, but more extensive treatments of the history of the novel in general and in particular Anglophone literatures can be found in the boxes below.

The Novel - General Histories

The British Novel : History and Criticism

The American Novel : History and Criticism

The Postcolonial Novel : History and Criticism

The Short Story

What is short fiction.

A short story, according to J.A. Cuddon and M.A.R. Habbib, is "a prose narrative of indeterminate length, but too short to be published separately as novels or novellas usually are. According to Edgar Allan Poe, it is a story that concentrated on a unique or single effect and one in which the totality of effect is the objective."

Short fiction  is a term that encompass not only short stories but typically longer forms such as novellas and novelettes, as well as short-short forms such as  flash fiction .

Short stories tend to be published in periodicals as well as short story anthologies . Anthologies range from stories by multiple authors selected for a particular theme, to collections of the best stories from a given time or place, to anthologies which collect the entirety or a selection of an author's short fiction.

The Short Story : History and Criticism

Short Story Anthologies

Large selections of short story anthologies can be found in the PS (American Literature) section at  the call number PS648 and in the PR (Commonwealth Literature) section at the call number PR1309 , while anthologies of stories by particular authors can be found under each author's respective call number. See also the Anthologies headings under the Peoples and Identities page of this section.

In the Reference Collection

In the General Collection

Poetry Critics

Poetic Criticism by Poets

General Overviews

Old English / Anglo-Saxon

Middle English

Early Modern

Early modern poetic criticism.

The Augustan Age

The Romantics

Twentieth Century

The Nineteenth Century

Contemporary Poetry

Autobiography / Memoir

Letters / Correspondence

Letter-writing technologies.

Letter-Writing Across Time

Famous Letter-Writers

Anthologies

Journals & Diaries

Individual Authors

Graphic Novels / Comics

Histories of Graphic Novels

Histories of Comic Books

Comics and Cultural Studies

Comics and Gender

Children and Young Adults

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1.4: Language, Misconceptions, and Authorial Intention in Literature

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The Language of Literature

One of the problems in reading literature, of course, is that language itself can be so slippery. Let me give two examples to show what I mean. In Shakespeare’s Othello , Othello is describing how Desdemona loved to hear the tales of his adventures, and he says

She wish’d she had not heard it, yet she wish’d

That heaven had made her such a man. (I.3.162-63)

Now what exactly do those lines mean? We must assume that Shakespeare knew what he was doing with language, and yet these lines contain an obvious ambiguity. Do they mean that Desdemona wished that heaven had made a man like Othello for her (reading “her” as an indirect object) or do they mean that she wished she had been made a man so that she could have such adventures (reading “her” as a direct object)? Should Shakespeare have clarified what he meant? Did poor old Shakespeare make a mistake here? As you might expect, the answers to those last two questions are both “no.” The ambiguity is intentional, and both readings are “correct.” On the one hand, Desdemona is revealing her love for Othello. She admires him and his deeds and wishes that a man like that existed for her. When we consider the kind of circumscribed life that a Renaissance woman of Desdemona’s class was forced to live and the poor impression that most of the other men in the play make on us, her wish is even easier to understand.

On the other hand, given that circumscribed life, she also might well wish that she had been male and she reveals that she is not simply a timid, shrinking woman who exists to be used by men in any way they choose. She is someone who rebels against the limits that confront her, and her words here prepare us for her independent actions as the play progresses. So Desdemona’s wish is deliberately ambiguous, and both sides of the ambiguity are significant. What we must remember, then, is that writers use words the way artists use paint. In a work of literary artistry, none of the words are accidental or arbitrary, and if they seem ambiguous or out of place, we must try to understand why the writer used them. Yes, occasionally a writer makes a mistake, as Keats did when he identified Cortez as the European discoverer of the Pacific Ocean, but generally we have to assume that writers know what they are doing; and before we attack their use of words, we must try to understand them.

This point leads to the second problem with language, which is that words change their meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary (affectionately known as the OED) gives examples of how every word in it has been used over the centuries, and browsing in the OED to see how words have changed can be a lot of fun. Such browsing can also be important. One simple but well-known example will illustrate my point. In the Declaration of Independence we read that “all men are created equal,” but we must ask what this important phrase means. If it means that I am as good a baseball player as Stan Musial or as good a singer as Placido Domingo, then it is clearly untrue, but surely that is not what it means. It means rather that all men are equal before the law. Fine. But what about the phrase “all men”? Although Garry Wills has argued that Thomas Jefferson included African-American men in the category of “all men,” we can safely assume that many in his audience, including many of the Declaration’s signers, certainly did not. And no one would argue that Jefferson or any other signer of the Declaration included American Indians or women in the category of “all men.” Thus while we read (or I hope we read) the phrase generically to mean that everyone, of every gender, race, or religion, is equal before the law, the earliest readers of the Declaration understood it to mean that all white males are created equal.

Whose reading is correct? The question itself is almost absurd. Apparently Jefferson may have meant one thing while his audience understood another—both eighteenth-century understandings— while we, from another perspective, understand it in yet another way. So, from an enlightened eighteenth-century point of view, Jefferson was correct. But from a common eighteenth-century point of view, deplorable though we may find it, Jefferson’s audience was correct. And from an ideal twenty-first-century point of view, which has not yet become a reality, our reading is correct. While it is essential that we recognize the superiority of our reading of this phrase, we also must, in the interest of historical accuracy, acknowledge at least two eighteenth-century readings of the phrase. As we saw in the example from Othello , multiple meanings abound; and even if we can argue that one interpretation has some kind of primacy, we must be sensitive to other possibilities that exist not as alternatives but as complements to the readings we prefer. And to return to our earlier discussion of intention, do we want to read this passage according to what we think Jefferson’s intentions might have been or according to the way the language is now understood?

Of course, this approach to reading requires a great deal of flexibility from the reader, who must be open to multiple interpretations and to taking different approaches, an openness that may contradict human nature. This view also runs counter to what we usually learn in school, where the emphasis is so often on finding the single correct answer to a question rather than on asking complex questions and then considering their complexity. Certainly the latter method cannot be tested with a multiple-choice exam and graded by a computer, but schools are responding to and reinforcing a society that rewards the single correct answer. Consequently, when people read literature, they are afraid that they are not getting what it “really” says. Even if they enjoy the reading, they fear, often quite mistakenly, that they are missing the “message.”

Messages and Misconceptions About Reading Literature

Here is another misconception about literature: that it contains messages, hidden or otherwise. Too often people approach literature as though it were all like Aesop’s Fables. Those fables are wonderful: they tell stories, and each story is followed by a moral, such as “Necessity is the mother of invention.” But very little literature works that way. Literature does have a moral dimension, of course, but great works cannot be summed up in pithy moral statements. A person who reads Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and decides that the point of the play is “don’t kill your father and marry your mother” has perhaps followed the action of the play but has missed the important points that the play makes. Of course, anyone who needs to read a play to learn that important lesson probably has other, more serious problems. One basis for such misconceptions is our uncertainty about what a work may be saying, which leads us to the easiest answer we can think of, an answer which is often a cliché or a moral truism. (This tendency is obviously related to our desire to get the one “correct” answer.) Another basis is the tendency among teachers to ask what the “theme” of a work is. This question is one that has often puzzled me because any good work contains multiple themes; when we pretend that a work has a single theme, we are likely to reduce a complex work to a single, aphoristic “message.” Telegrams convey messages, and if authors wanted to communicate such messages, they would send telegrams (or tweets) or write tracts or publish aphorisms. However authors want to convey some of the complexities and contradictions of human existence, and to reduce those qualities to “messages” or even to “main themes” is to do violence to what an author is trying to accomplish.

For example, the theme of most Renaissance love poetry (most of which was written by men) can be reduced to “I love her. She doesn’t love me. Oh rats.” We can find this “theme” in Petrarch, in Shakespeare, in Spenser, in Sidney, even in contemporary country-western music. Frankly it does not need to be said all that often, and if this is really all that those poets were saying, we would be foolish to waste our time reading them. But what they were doing was in fact quite different. They were using this stock situation to explore such aspects of the world as religion, the self, the nature of relationships, and the nature of love itself. Focusing only on their usnrequited love is like buying a bicycle because of its color: the color may be interesting, but a person who decides on the basis of the color has missed the whole point of the bicycle.

Furthermore, a good deal of the enjoyment in such poems comes from the clever ways in which poets use that stock situation for their own purposes, often to mock their own speakers, as Sir Thomas Wyatt does in “They Flee from Me,” or even to be deeply critical of their speakers, as Sir Philip Sidney does in Astrophel and Stella (a point, incidentally, about which many Renaissance scholars might disagree).

The speaker in Wyatt’s poem may lament his beloved’s apparent lack of faithfulness to him, but the words he uses to describe their relationship make it clear why she has abandoned him. He compares her to birds (or perhaps to squirrels—it’s hard to tell), little creatures that come to his window and eat out of his hands. This comparison reveals that he thinks of her as a little domesticated pet, another creature who eats out of his hands; and as the poem continues, he reveals further that he thinks of her only in sexual terms as an object that he can use, not as a real person. Can it be any wonder that she has abandoned him? Part of the fun of this poem comes in watching the doltish speaker reveal himself as a fool while he thinks that he is exposing his lady’s unfaithfulness. At the same time, this speaker is completely mystified because he truly believes himself to be a sincere and faithful lover. Similarly, Sidney’s Astrophel shows himself to be a shallow, if ardent, lover—a young man who knows the rules of the game of love but who seems incapable of realizing that his beloved Stella does not want to play. On the other hand, Edmund Spenser’s lover in the sonnets of the Amoretti learns what it means to be a real lover and, in an extraordinary turn of events for a Renaissance sonnet sequence, actually marries the lady.

Can we take three such different poets, all of them writing in the sixteenth century, and talk about the “theme” of their poems? They are exploring human existence by examining the essential human emotion of love, but they are doing so in distinctly different ways and having fun while they do so.

Of course, there are a number of misconceptions about literature that have to be gotten out of the way before anyone can enjoy it. One misconception is that literature is full of hidden meanings. There are certainly occasional works that contain hidden meanings. The biblical book of Revelation, for example, was written in a kind of code, using images that had specific meanings for its early audience but that we can only recover with a great deal of difficulty. Most literary works, however, are not at all like that. Perhaps an analogy will illustrate this point. When I take my car to my mechanic because something is not working properly, he opens the hood and we both stand there looking at the engine. But after we have looked for a few minutes, he is likely to have seen what the problem is, while I could look for hours and never see it. We are looking at the same thing. The problem is not hidden, nor is it in some secret code. It is right there in the open, accessible to anyone who knows how to “read” it, which my mechanic does and I do not. He has been taught how to “read” automobile engines and he has practiced “reading” them. He is a good “close reader,” which is why I continue to take my car to him.

The same thing is true for readers of literature. Generally authors want to communicate with their readers, so they are not likely to hide or disguise what they are saying, but reading literature also requires some training and some practice. Good writers use language very carefully, and readers must learn how to be sensitive to that language, just as the mechanic must learn to be sensitive to the appearances and sounds of the engine. Everything that the writer wants to say, and much that the writer may not be aware of, is there in the words. We simply have to learn how to read them. Another popular misconception is that a literary work has a single “meaning” (and that only English teachers know how to find that meaning). There is an easy way to dispel this misconception. Just go to a college library and find the section that holds books on Shakespeare. Choose one play, Hamlet, for example, and see how many books there are about it, all by scholars who are educated, perceptive readers. Can it be the case that one of these books is correct and all the others are mistaken? And if the correct one has already been written, why would anyone need to write another book about the play? The answer is that there is no single correct way to read a good piece of literature.

Again, let me use an analogy to illustrate this point. Suppose that everyone at a meeting were asked to describe a person who was standing in the middle of the room. Imagine how many different descriptions there would be, depending on where the viewer sat in relation to the person. Furthermore, an optometrist in the crowd might focus on the person’s glasses; a hair stylist might focus on the person’s haircut; someone who sells clothing might focus on the style of dress; a podiatrist might focus on the person’s feet. Would any of these descriptions be incorrect? Not necessarily, but they would be determined by the viewers’ perspectives. They might also be determined by such factors as the viewers’ ages, genders, or ability to move around the person being viewed, or by their previous acquaintance with the subject. So whose descriptions would be correct? Conceivably all of them, and if we put all of these correct descriptions together, we would be closer to having a full description of the person.

This is most emphatically not to say, however, that all descriptions are correct simply because each person is entitled to his or her opinion. If the podiatrist is of the opinion that the person is five feet, nine inches tall, the podiatrist could be mistaken. And even if the podiatrist actually measures the person, the measurement could be mistaken. Everyone who describes this person, therefore, must offer not only an opinion but also a basis for that opinion. “My feeling is that this person is a teacher” is not enough. “My feeling is that this person is a teacher because the person’s clothing is covered with chalk dust and because the person is carrying a stack of papers that look like they need grading” is far better, though even that statement might be mistaken.

So it is with literature. As we read, as we try to understand and interpret, we must deal with the text that is in front of us; but we must also recognize both that language is slippery and that each of us individually deals with it from a different set of perspectives. Not all of these perspectives are necessarily legitimate, and we are always liable to be misreading or misinterpreting what we see. Furthermore, it is possible that contradictory readings of a single work will both be legitimate, because literary works can be as complex and multifaceted as human beings. It is vital, therefore, that in reading literature we abandon both the idea that any individual’s reading of a work is the “correct” one and the idea that there is one simple way to read any work. Our interpretations may, and probably should, change according to the way we approach the work. If we read War and Peace as teenagers, then in middle age, and then in old age, we might be said to have read three different books. Thus, multiple interpretations, even contradictory interpretations, can work together to give us a better understanding of a work.

Author's Intent

Intentions are a problem in studying literature. One complication is easily dispensed with. Teachers should never ask, “What was the author trying to say here?” The question, of course, implies that the author was an incompetent who was so unsuccessful in making a point that student readers have to decipher it. The real question is something like “What do these words say?” You may notice the phrasing of that question, which does not ask, “What does the author mean?” or “What does the author intend?”

The reason for that phrasing is that we cannot know (or we have to pretend that we cannot know) what the author intended. When we read literature, our focus has to be on what the words say, not on what the author intended. One reason that we have to take this stance is that an author’s words, even an author who is totally in control of those words, inevitably say more than the author intended. It even happens that the words may mean something that the author did not intend. I once attended a poetry reading, at the end of which someone asked the poet, “Why do you have so many images of flayed animals and animal skins in your poems?” to which the poet replied, “Do I?” After rereading his poems, he said, “Yes, I see that I do,” and he then tried to find a reason for those images, but clearly he was taken by surprise at what he himself had written.

Another reason to avoid focusing on the author’s intention is that if we know (or even think we know) what the author intended, we might cease our own interpretive activities. The author’s understanding of his or her work might be important, but strangely enough, it is only one understanding and might not be the best one. To use an analogy from music, Igor Stravinsky conducted many of his own compositions for recordings. Those versions are good, and they are surely important, but they are not the best interpretations of his own music.

Furthermore, we can never really know what an author intended, even if the author tells us. For one thing, authors are cagey creatures and might lie to us. For another, the author might not always know what his or her intention was. After all, how often do we really know our full intentions when we do or say something? And authors frequently use speakers in their works who are not themselves. If one of Shakespeare’s characters says something, we have to remember that we are listening to a character, not to Shakespeare. So, too, with poets and storytellers. Jonathan Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver tells us many things that Swift himself would never have believed. So focus on the words, not on the author. Furthermore, even if we think we know what the author intended, we must remember that the author’s reading of a work is still only one among many possibilities.

Contributors and Attributions

• Adapted from " On the Language of Literature " from Literature, the Humanities and Humanity by Theodore L. Steinberg, licensed CC-BY-NC-SA

• Authors and Poets
• College Students
• book lovers
• Teachers & Teaching
• High School Students

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• Studying Literature

7 Misunderstood Characters in Literature

First impressions can be misleading—in life, but in fiction as well. Sometimes, a character may gain a reputation that’s not exactly true to the text. We owe it to ourselves and to the world of literature to give such characters a couple more chapters before drawing conclusions. That’s why we’ve rounded up a collection of commonly misunderstood characters. From Frankenstein’s monster to Mr. Darcy, here are some characters who deserve to be read between the lines.

1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The character: Frankenstein’s monster

The misunderstanding: After Victor Frankenstein creates his so-called “monster” from various corpses, he flees from it. The monster, free to wander the world, is met with cruelty and fear. Everyone sees an eight-foot-tall, yellowish, shriveled beast of a man and immediately thinks that he means harm.

The truth: He just wants to love, be loved, and discover the truth about his creation . (But he does kill some people, so maybe the folks in the book weren’t wrong to go running.)

2. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The character: Narrator

The misunderstanding: The unnamed protagonist of this stream-of-consciousness short story is a young woman being treated for her “nervous condition” with forced bed rest and isolation. Though she protests, she is treated like a child until she literally goes insane, thanks to her husband John’s patronizing and misogynistic medical practices.

The truth: The protagonist is more competent and capable than she’s given credit for and knows her health better than anyone. If her husband had listened to her and allowed her to do some work or get out of the house while depressed, she maybe wouldn’t have so thoroughly lost her grip on reality.

3. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The character: Mr. Darcy

The misunderstanding: Just about the richest character in the book, Mr. Darcy seems rude, standoffish, and stuck-up to just about everyone else in the novel. In Elizabeth Bennet’s eyes, he seems incapable of saying anything nice or enjoying anyone’s presence.

The truth: On a second read-through, it begins to become clear that that he’s not so much stuck-up as he is adorably socially inept , especially after having been chastised by Elizabeth . He’s just doing his best.

4. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

The character: Ebenezer Scrooge

The misunderstanding: He hates Christmas and, it seems, all things good and happy. To everyone in the town, he’s a Christmas-hating, little-boy-mistreating, downright-evil old humbug who only thinks about money.

The truth: Admittedly he’s nasty , but once you peel back the layers of trauma, you’ll see he’s a complex person who has been hurt and is actually capable of doing nice things for other people.

5. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The character: Gregor Samsa

The misunderstanding: After Gregor Samsa mysteriously becomes a gigantic insect (literally), his entire family shuns him and treats him like, well, a giant disgusting bug. And in doing so, they seem to forget that he is still their beloved son and brother.

The truth: Even though he’s developed a new fondness for music, as well as an appetite for rotten garbage, he’s still the same person— more or less . And, just like any person, he suffers when ostracized.

6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

The character: Ophelia

The misunderstanding: For apparently no reason, Ophelia goes insane, then kills herself.

The truth: A kind, obedient, and innocent person, Ophelia falls victim to the political intrigue of Claudius’s court. Her overbearing father and brother chastise her for the affection she has for Hamlet, and when she becomes distraught after Hamlet begins mistreating her, she kills herself, having had no one around who would listen to her.

7. Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield

The character: Miss Brill

The misunderstanding: The titular Miss Brill spends a day in the park, people-watching and enjoying the sights. But to those around her, she seems out-of-place, sitting alone on a park bench wearing her over-the-top fur. All in all, she comes across as off-putting and maybe even a little crazy.

The truth: She just wants to be included in the world around her, creating fantasies of how she’s connected to everyone. But she ends up realizing more than ever how much of an outcast she is, and in turn, she ends up getting a glimpse of how cruel people can be .

So, which characters do you owe a second chance? Are there any other characters out there you feel get a bad rap? Let us know in the comments!

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