William Bryant Logan. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995. Paper. 202 pages. ISBN 1-57322-004-3.

Writers do not write what they write to be used as classroom examples. Thank heaven. What a pain, however, when it comes time to find classroom examples.

Take the essay. A catch-all prose category, the "essay" is many things in practice. Attempts to define the essay are necessarily partial truths that reflect the preferences of the individual doing the defining. Thus we can see the essay as "a record of the individual mind at work and at play . . . an amateur's raid in a world of specialists" in a student-friendly way (Sanders 32) or as the specialty of writers who are easily seen as "romantic heroes" and whose fluency creates "unrealistic expectations" in students (Porter 44). For myself, I value that record of the individual mind that Sanders describes. At the same time, I recognize that this "record" is the product of art rather than transcription, and it's the demands of this art that lead Porter to place the essay at arm's length.

For myself, I want to use essays in WRT 205 to move students in and out of academic discourse–into the discourse deeply enough that they can stage a "raid" and then out far enough that they can share the booty with a general audience. I like it that the essay can move easily from one discipline to another. I like its responsiveness to day-to-day life. For some reason, I find it hard–short of assembling my own anthology–to find a collection of essays that do this consistently in a way that would make for good classroom examples. If I peruse the classroom anthologies, I tend to find either texts with the authority of expertise–texts which are more like columns or articles–or texts with the authority of art–texts like Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman" (based on personal experience and so highly crafted that they beg to be explicated as literature) or Walker Percy's "The Loss of the Creature" (an "essay," surely, but there's no "research" visible in such an essay). Rarely do I find in one place essays that are both responsive to research and distinctly personal (and amateur) in outlook. As a teacher, then, I feel hung between presenting students a rarefied notion of the essay form–something I have defined for my own pedagogical purposes–and asking students to write texts that are answerable to some kind of discourse reality–a real form that writers actually produce and that can be observed repeatedly in action.

Let me dwell on James Porter a bit. In that Writing Program war-horse "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community," Porter says that essayists like E. B. White, Joan Didion and Lewis Thomas present student writers with romantic role models, writers who seem unimpeded by social context. Porter's fear is that the virtuosity of these essayists distracts us from the more mundane sorts of competence that students actually need to acquire. Students, in his view, would be better off scrutinizing the written social context they are trying to enter and looking at accessible models of competence within that context. 205, with its strand of investigating the rhetoric of different fields, would seem to be an ideal site for this pedagogy. I'm interested in pursuing that investigation. I don't, however, want my course to be all about writing rhetorical analysis, a form students will never have to write beyond my class. Neither do I want my students in my class to write academic papers aimed at their specialized fields. (I can't really judge the quality, say, of an art history paper–I just don't know enough about what counts as fresh or cliché in that field.)

Naturally, I want to have my cake and eat it, too. I want my students to take on the essay as a genre for the way that it demands that they expose their thinking to the light of everyday experience, and yet I want them to investigate the world of specialized discourse. Because the thinking in an essay does not have to conform to discipline-specific conventions, students, by writing essays, can draw from academic articles without having to replicate academic articles. While doing research, students can learn a lot about how, rhetorically, articles deliver their messages; they can learn how to take their thoughtful responses to the articles seriously. Representing their thinking, making connections among sources, mixing what they read with what they've experienced can produce vital thinking and can produce readable essays.

At last we come to William Bryant Logan's Dirt: the Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Pitching this book with a healthy curve, I tried, over three 205s, to urge my students toward an idealized form of the essay that interested me pedagogically while still answering to something that we could see a writer, Logan, actually doing. Dirt is a collection of essays that all deal, in some way, with dirt. I offered it as a model. Students wrote their own books–or, at least, three chapters of a book–on an object or concept of their own choice. Aside from an introductory rhetoric unit (that gave us a language for talking about writing choices) and a closing reflection unit, the whole course was given over to doing research in a rhetorically sensitive way, reading Dirt as one model of "the essay," and writing the book. Here, specifically, I want to talk about the opportunities opened by this book for developing subject matter (through research and heuristic), establishing genre, and developing style.

Dirt is a book of bite-sized essays each of which can stand on its own (which gave me as a teacher license to ask students to write multiple chapters without having to worry about how the chapters fit together). The essays mix experience and research (allowing me to ask my student to think about what they read in specialized sources in relation to what they have observed and experienced). The essays show enough stylistic ingenuity to give students fresh options for expressing ideas. The essays are philosophical enough for that quality to be apparent to my students and to give me license to push my students to consider the "deeper meaning" of what they read in their research. What's especially important to me is that the essays draw from a wide range of sources–the soil science one might expect, but we also get astrophysics, literature, natural history, and engineering. In Dirt, we hear about compost and dowsing and pygmy forests and decomposing bodies and John Adams and the possibility that clay may be a living thing. By moving among different fields, Logan does not speak as an expert representative of a single field. By moving around this way and reacting as he does and through the connections he makes, Logan retains amateur standing.

The first advantage is that the book offers a great model for the multifaceted development of subject matter. Logan's example makes it clear that it's not the subject matter but the ingenuity of the writer that makes something "boring" or "interesting." If Logan can make dirt interesting, I told my students, then you can make any subject that you choose for your book interesting. While not exactly an expert, Logan clearly does have great expertise. I urged students to choose a central object or concept that was already interesting to them. If they were truly interested in their subject matter, then they built on expertise and experience they already had. Julie read about dance after having danced ballet long enough to acquire bunions. Meir read about boxing after missing the second week of class due to a nose operation that resulted from misfortune in the ring. Students without instant topics were challenged to awaken as people with passionate interests and injury potential.

The research portion of the course followed from the need for wide-ranging subject development but was a unit that could stand justified on its own inquiry. It focused on rhetorically situating sources and on the real goal of research: generating original thinking. Students produced an "anthology," a collection of texts about their chosen object or concept drawn from different disciplines and accompanied by glosses that described the rhetorical situation of each text and how its writing was influenced by its context in a discourse community.

As teachers, I'm sure we've all seen numerous cases where students come forward with inappropriate sources for a given assignment. The anthology assignment gave us a context for making judgments about sources. We got an opportunity to talk about how to read academic articles and how to look for the rhetorical context and discourse community values that determine how a source can be used. Laura, who was also doing "dance," and I discussed what difference it made for the Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, to consistently refer to dance as a "cultural form" and for Martha Graham to describe the role of modern dance as "to make apparent once again the hidden realities behind the accepted symbols." Students were reading for the features of writing in different discourse communities but were relieved from having to reproduce those conventions in their own writing.

The research unit drew a distinction between the mere gathering of information and generation of thinking. The book project presented a rare opportunity in that students did not have to cover required material. Students were not obliged to find the pro and con of an argument or the history of a debate. Sources were required to meet two criteria: that taken together they represented a diversity of discourse communities (since Dirt embraced both a Journal of Mammalogy article on gopher holes and the story of the patron saint of gardeners) and that the texts made them, the students/writers, think. If the texts didn't inspire any thinking, I had the luxury of asking students to set those texts aside. I tried not to be fussy about what the thinking was about as long as it was "interesting." If I could just keep out of the way, students tended to save projects that, acting on my own preferences, I would have rejected before students even began. How could I have guessed that Joy, in researching duct tape, would find all kinds of connections between duct tape and medicine? How could I have guessed that Kelli's project on "yards" would lead her to want to research Indian land claims to the area where she grew up? Again, in the ideal cases, students pursued their research with interest because they were following genuine passions. Our discussions about the sources and connections among the sources laid the foundation for the essays students would later write as chapters.

The collection of essays in Dirt gave us a way to establish the essay as a genre–though, remember what I've said about the difficulties of defining even basic things about the essay. I established the basic form of the essays students would write in a way that was answerable to Logan but reflected more my pedagogical biases and what I thought students were truly capable of producing. The essays in the book, while diverse, are similar enough in their approach that we could infer further "rules" for the genre on the basis of their example. Questions came up as the students began to draft. How do we start the essays? How do we conclude the essays? How do we cite sources? I could defer to Logan in most cases. "Well, how did Logan do it?" It was easy to devote a class session to surveying a number of the opening paragraphs and describing the strategies that Logan uses to kick off a chapter. Porter almost implies that the essay exists in a kind of discourse vacuum. Far from it – the audience, though general, is out there making demands. We could guess what those demands are by noting what is consistently offered by the essays: specialized information explained for the non-specialist, personal experience, language play, personal opinion and quirky humor. Looking at what was explained and what was left unexplained established levels of audience education and interest. The sorts of things that seem liberating to us as writers were demands in the eyes of students.

Citation was especially troublesome for students and provides a good example. After years of profligate citation following academic style sheets, students had to make decisions about which sources should not be acknowledged and which sources should be acknowledged–and how much detail to include in acknowledgments that are at once necessary and non-academic. The crisis of having to make these decisions (when many students wanted the security of citing every source) called the writerly act of acknowledgment into question for useful discussions of the rationale behind acknowledging the work of another. We studied the convention of citation, then, in a useful way without focusing excessively on how one community acknowledges sources.

Developing style is the final advantage I want to discuss here. William Bryant Logan is good enough that the students who don't grumble about having to read about dirt would say that Logan is a really good writer and that what he's doing they could never do. This is just the sort of reaction Porter would predict, but I must admit that it was gratifying to hear students express admiration for a writer's skill! On the other hand, Logan's not so good that students can't figure out what he's up to. Discussing a typical Logan essay is not like discussing, say, Edward Hoagland's "The Courage of Turtles." The art is less breathtaking. There are fewer ambiguities. During the book-writing phase of the course, we gave class time over to dissecting what Logan was doing on a nuts-and-bolts level and then applying different devices to draft material–just as we were doing with genre conventions. The goal of more interesting and expressive prose was in many ways inextricable from the goal of interesting thinking. In trying to experiment with the prose, we were often setting priorities about what in a particular draft was interesting and original–what it was that we wanted to use stylistic devices to emphasize. In experimenting with the expression, new angles on the original material sometimes emerged.

By now, the weaknesses of Logan's book for teaching purposes are probably apparent. The short essays are not terribly challenging intellectually. They tap into relatively few vital social issues. They are not ambitious in their scope. I tried to make up for these things in other parts of the course. The texts in the research unit were often much more challenging than Logan's book. I also took up the work of challenging the students in conferences where I monitored the progress of their books and responded to questions. (Students had to meet weekly progress targets in order to earn points for the total book grade.) The book project was broad enough and loose enough that Emily could think about race and class on Staten Island using the demographic figures she was working up for a statistics class. And Don could write about bicycling. The ambition of the projects was pretty much in the hands of the students. Then again, the open nature of the project allowed Lynne, eternally stalled with writer's block, to work on producing content. Mark could work on developing style. There was a lot of room in the assignment for students to choose their subject matter and their own agenda for developing as writers. Few were the students who did not choose to tackle real issues in their own writing.

Broadly, then, my curve on the book concerned the fundamental nature of the essay–this gave me some grading criteria and gave students a way to gauge what they were doing. My pedagogical idealism came out in the way I presented the essay to them. The essay I defined in the assignment sheet sounded more like Montaigne than William Bryant Logan–more focus on the raggedness of incomplete thinking and less on the polish of performance. The closer the student essays came to their completed form, the more I asked students to lean on Logan's examples as they made their writing choices. Students, then, listened to me for the goals of the essays they were writing and for developing their researching and thinking; they then listened to Logan for how to present their thinking, for essay conventions, for developing style. Students did have to confront the social context of discourse communities–but as readers, as consumers, and not as writers. I have to take it on faith that learning to read and decode the conventions is a valid first step to following the conventions in writing later on. At the same time, I could encourage students to think "out of the box" of a given discourse community and to develop a writerly style by using essays.

Postscript: Curiously enough, I did notice, in this third and final round of using Dirt in 205, that it was the students who were already "socialized" to their interests to some degree–the students who were passionate enough actually to know something about "blood" (Jim, a bioengineering major) or "jazz" (Heather, a singer) or "film" (Jeanne, an incorrigible movie nut)–who had an easier time approaching the essay as a genre. By adding new discoveries to the store of what they already knew, they could more dependably and confidently write interesting essays. To me, this only justifies the focus of a course that asks students to identify the wellsprings of their interests and actively pursue them.

Porter, James. "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community." Rhetoric Review 5.1 (1986): 34-47.

Sanders, Scott Russell. "The Singular First Person." Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre. Ed. Alexander J. Butrym. Athens: U of Georgia P., 1989. 31-42.