The essay is the layperson's genre, a medium for non-specialized knowledge. Which has meant that traditionally its authority has come not from what it knows, but how it knows. In other words, the essay accumulates its perspective as it proceeds. Elucidation of process is both a side effect and a goal; that is, a measure of inquiry and of engagement. When essayists write of the "freedoms" of the essay, they are thinking of this--of the enabling exchanges between meaning and momentum. When they write of its "roominess," they have in mind its corollary accommodation of paradox. After all, one may change one's thinking as one goes.
The term layperson itself is something of a paradox, suggesting as it does both membership (one of a community) and exclusion (as distinct from the officers of that community). Ideally, to write as a "layperson" is to write from the security of one who participates in shared knowledge, as well as from the skepticism of one who has not participated in the construction of such knowledge. The essay presupposes that it is possible to write from both inside and outside the culture at once. And by extension, perhaps, from both inside and outside language. Now it will be clear why so many academics eschew the essay for the article, and why so many poets and fiction writers are drawn to this genre, which combines so richly and so improbably the first principles of Heidegger with the confidence of Dr. Johnson.
The essay's post-modernism, as it were, is rooted in such confidence. Most typically, in the genre's willingness to forego resolution in favor of continuity. This is exactly what for student sets the essay apart from both research and argument papers. Although like these the essay seeks to inform and to interpret, its challenge as students understand it is unique. They must demonstrate a certain reticence when it comes to coming to conclusions, a readiness to prolong the complications of their thinking.
To make sure students do just that, the required length of the final essay project in my 305 class is 14-20 pages. This kind of space is necessary if students are to experience process as something other than a dress rehearsal, or "working with a net." One of the strengths of the essay is that it gives students the chance to discover process as organic, rather than incremental; as improvisation, rather than practice. Or as I tell my students, the essay is like one of those math equations we all remember doing in high school. The right answer alone wasn't enough to receive full credit; one also had to "show one's work." In other words, product is only a by-product of process; insight, not a gap in continuity, but a variation in design as impossible to be without as the interval between two sounds in music.
If the lower division studios enable students by making process visible, then the upper division studios may empower them by requiring that it also be made legible. Empower, because such a requirement would mean an "acting out" of the notion that knowledge is a human construction.
Perhaps I should let on that constant vigilance against mere "filler" is also a requirement of my 305 course. On my part this takes the usual form of student conferences and written comments on successive drafts of the final project. Since I've taken the essay as a topic of inquiry, my teaching practices haven't changed so much as become, well, more urgent. I mean talking with students about their papers is as essential as any heuristic I've invented to serve the rigors of the essay. In fact, to do so one has at times to be an editor, suggesting various approaches to (or rapprochements with) a subject; at other times, a librarian, referring a writer to various texts and resources. Individual attention is vital. As is the greater ease and purpose upper-division students traditionally bring to the classroom, even if only in the form of that two-edged sword, grade-consciousness. It's not easy to write an essay, or so my students keep telling me. Almost any motivation is useful.
What makes the essay so challenging for students to compose is its ultimatum of original thinking, as well as the essay's means for achieving it. To write an essay is to blend information and knowledge, analysis and analogy, imagination and critique. The essay reconciles contradictory modes. This is the source of its allure, and also the reason for its malignment as pastiche.
The essay's movement from one mode of thinking or representation of knowledge to another requires, as essayists keep telling us, both daring and tact. Because these qualities are to some extent opposites, I have thought of the essay as the genre of middle-age; that is, exhibiting both youthfulness (daring) and maturity (tact). The essay looks both forward and behind. It is (if you can stand another name for it) the genre of the cross-road, because for all its dynamism it is also stationary-I mean centered. Reflective.
Now we are getting close to what makes the essay so worthwhile a challenge for students to take up. The composing of one brings home to them the difference between autobiography and reflection, personal experience and profoundly assimilated knowledge. The essay asks students to own their knowledge, to contextualize experience, and in doing so to bring observation and fact to the level of idea, and idea to the company of ideas--the level of theory. Its exposition of sensibility occurs only as it is trying to make sense of the world. As such, it marks the reciprocities and constraints between the self and the community.
Finally, whatever elegance the essay may possess is a part of its reflectiveness. The polish of an essay's language is merely the shine that results from going over and over and over an idea. Students come to think of style, not as a curlicue decorating a vacuum, but as a display of their own commitment to hard thought.