First, learn what the essay is-and what it is not. See how the practice of writing essays has evolved over centuries yet has remained versatile, and examine the many uses of essays across the ages. Numerous essayists find starting out to be the most daunting part of writing. Professor Cognard-Black alleviates these hesitations, using examples from Aristotle to Michel de Montaigne to Edgar Allan Poe on how to look both inward and outward to find inspiration and build the story you most want to tell.
Much like a photographer who can change the angle, lens, lighting, and focus of a scene to evoke emotion from viewers, a writer colors an essay with his or her individual perspective simply by relaying his or her truth of it. This lecture focuses on looking at the world around you with a new lens, showing you how to convey those memories you've kept as an experience rather than just a recounting of facts. You'll travel down the streets of London with Virginia Woolf to explore her home as a stranger might, learning how taking on a new perspective can translate into compelling essays.
One of the most remarkable consequences of essay writing is the illuminating insights you discover about yourself. The nature of the essay doesn't allow for plot building or outlines-you simply sit and write, which means the story takes its own direction. Professor Cognard-Black encourages this process of discovery and shares stories of how many an essay she started on one topic turned into a different piece in the end. Be prepared that essay writing may require you to face hard truths, confess long-kept secrets, or be bluntly honest with yourself, and learn why this honesty is the heart of a great piece.
Many essayists find themselves doing an about-face as they write, sometimes because they may not have fully researched or thought through an idea before making claims about it. Essays that present conflicting views are not uncommon; Socrates would commonly switch sides in order to test all parts of an argument, and many others have followed his example. Learn how writing essays that provide both sides of an argument, even if you completely support one side and oppose the other, can help you to develop an elasticity of mind, expand your essay's range of ideas, and add to your ethos or credibility.
Professor Cognard-Black introduces you to artistic proofs, which are grounded in your expertise and colored by your own observations and experiences. The most important artistic proof in any essay is ethos-the writer's ethical appeal or credibility. She demonstrates how to effectively use ethos along with logos or rationality to bring reasonableness into your essays, which vital to writing effectively. You'll examine the work of a pair of writers who mastered the reasonable essay: Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele.
After discussing the importance of presenting a reasonable essay, Professor Cognard-Black explores the world of unreasonable essays, often written for the sake of humor or irony, or to be provocative, such as Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal." You'll explore an example of an essay that showcases conflicting views yet remains reasonable, and then look at examples where unreasonable writers use pure demagoguery to play on readers' emotions."
Revisit Aristotle to master the craft of pathos-being able to express empathy for the subject of any essay. Learn how to elicit emotions from your readers while remaining authentic and not manipulative, cliched, or contrived. Reflect on honest and moving uses of language from Maxine Hong Kingston and Barack Obama, who once perfectly summed up the importance of pathos in a speech by saying, Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world[.]""
To help keep your essays from becoming overly sentimental, Professor Cognard-Black discusses pitfalls for writers to avoid. You'll be introduced to three examples of what rhetorical theorists call logical fallacies and then take on the challenge of an assignment that brings together emotional appeals with rational ones to achieve credibility, empathy, and candor. You'll examine Naomi Shihab Nye's ability to blend rational argument with compassionate anecdotes, then hear a very personal take on the concept of home" from Professor Cognard-Black."
The use of a first-person perspective in essay writing is a powerful tool that invokes intimacy, empathy, and witness. Ethos is more inherent in an I" essay because the person sharing the story actually experienced the events. Learn how to write concisely to avoid an "I" story becoming simply an outlet for your own feelings, instead using your emotions to develop a broader appeal that will interest and benefit others. Professor Cognard-Black also reveals how general tricks of the writing trade (for example, "show, don't tell") don't always apply when writing essays."
This lecture opens by inviting you to walk into" a photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1893 and reflect on what you would feel, smell, hear, and taste if you were actually in the scene. Only after you've noted the reactions of those senses are you then invited to describe what you might see. Using imagery in essays does more than describe and evoke a scene, however. When done well, imagery can transport your reader to a specific time and location. Professor Cognard-Black provides examples of metaphors and sense-based descriptions, which are the most effective ways to employ imagery within essays."
Writing a visual essay requires you to detach yourself from how you have been taught to view images your whole life. Rather than passively observing and judging, you must challenge yourself to get into the visual. Repeated and lengthy viewings of visual artifacts are one step. Once you start writing, though, the goal is to not recreate the exact image that you saw, but instead to reimagine it-to view it anew. Professor Cognard-Black discusses an example essay by Barbara Kingsolver in which images enhance her writing, adding shape and color to her words.
Professor Cognard-Black guides you through Aristotle's process of inventio or invention, which is that period of discovery as you write your first draft. You'll examine openings from a number of published works, gaining a powerful toolkit that can help you craft the first sentence of your first draft. From there, Professor Cognard-Black provides a multitude of invaluable tools for revising, editing, and reviewing your writing until you've reached your final draft.
Learn how essays can break the rules of conventional writing, allowing you to design essay forms to match your needs rather than being forced to fit the rules of more conventional forms. Examine structures that reimagine the essay, such as the microessay and the prose poem or proem." Professor Cognard-Black shares her own students' work to explore what elements went into these examples to make them successful essays."
A memoir is often confused with a personal essay, but Professor Cognard-Black shows you the difference, once again using examples from her own students' work. She then provides numerous tips to help you recreate your memories and turn them into fascinating pieces of writing. Learn techniques that allow you to get as detailed as possible in your descriptions while still maintaining a central focus and writing concisely.
From the Greek lyre," a lyric poem expresses a writer's thoughts and feelings through the intimacy of the first-person narrator, evoking a strong emotional reaction in the audience. Professor Cognard-Black demonstrates the similarities between a lyric poem and a lyric essay and shares a moving example of a lyric piece written by one of her own students that uses memory fragments and figurative language to synthesize experience into a kind of mosaic. A lyric essay does not focus on telling a chronological story, but instead is meant to share, vividly, the impressions that create a mood or an idea."
Professor Cognard-Black reveals a common form of communication that is rarely thought of as an essay, though it often is: the letter. Coupled with an engaging activity, you'll see how a handwritten letter differs from any other form of direct communication. You'll explore the similarities between letters and the epistolary essay as they both speak to a specific audience and convey a strong sense of reality and veracity. Then, you'll consider passages from the best-selling book Between the World and Me, which is written as a letter to the author's son.
One of the most important parts of portrait essays is to understand that any depiction of another person-whether a famous stranger or a family member-is also a depiction of the writer. With this lecture, you'll delve into this dynamic between a subject and its writer and examine this power struggle as it plays out in a portrait essay. Using examples from Truman Capote and Scott Russell Sanders, you'll see how your own anxieties and prejudices can come through in an essay focused entirely on someone else.
While public intellectual essays don't step outside personal reflection, they do grapple with social issues, often myth-busting popular beliefs. This style of writing is distinct from a portrait or lyric essay. Professor Cognard-Black demonstrates this difference through her own examples and those of well-known public intellectuals, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Salman Rushdie. You'll learn how to trade superficial terminology and over-the-top imagery for clear, simple, and direct prose without losing the engagement and pathos-based emotional connection to your audience.
Originating in the medieval period, polemical essays are the form for writers who wish to focus on a topic from one perspective only. They are often written to be deliberately polarizing. Refusing to shy away from volatile issues, it takes a strong writer to turn an antagonistic rant into a persuasive, polemical argument. Professor Cognard-Black shares examples of both well-written and overly strident polemical essays from authors such as Jonathan Edward and Laura Kipnis.
See how non-artistic proofs are immensely important when crafting a historical essay, especially since history is subjective, and the way you tell the story shapes how it will be understood. The non-artistic proofs of research and data set the scene for a historical essay, which connects personal memory to a larger project of human history. Professor Cognard-Black shares samples of strong historical essays with a compelling use of non-artistic proofs from authors such as Maureen Stanton and Jeffrey Hammond.
One of the most surprising insights into humor essays is the revelation that most humor comes from misfortune. This idea has been around for centuries, as even Aristotle noted that laughing at tragedy is cathartic for both the writer and the audience. You'll delve into how self-deprecating humor lends itself to creating ethos or credibility in this particular form of essay. Professor Cognard-Black provides a treasure trove of humorists to study, including droll examples from David Sedaris and Tig Notgaro.
Nature essays can easily come across as unrealistic. Since the first nature essays were written in the 19th century, such pieces have often romanticized the natural world-but there is value in not sentimentalizing the great outdoors. Examining works by William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Deb Marquart, and Michael P. Branch, Professor Cognard-Black explores the various takes on nature that offer a balance between realism and idealism, between seriousness and the comedic.
Professor Cognard-Black shows you how a simple recipe is itself a story. As she explains, It sets a scene, forms a plot, arrives at a climax, and ends with a denouement." Recipes form the basis of edible essays, which start out as instructions and ingredients, but when you mix in personal connections between a dish and your own culinary culture, add a dash of imagery, and stir in the history behind the food, you've extended your recipe into a keepsake-a taste memory. Sharing examples from both the culinary and the literature worlds, Professor Cognard-Black demonstrates how food essays can be among the most delicious to create and consume."
The modern form of the essay may be seen daily in blogs, although not all blogs are essays-instead, many are no more than personal journals, rants, or fantasies without broader connections and appeals. Professor Cognard-Black provides examples of what components are required for a piece to be a fully formed blog essay. While looking at examples from her students and professional writers, including long-term essay blogger Robin Bates, you'll discover the benefits to blogging and learn about the pros and cons of other forms of publication for your essays.