WELAC WRITESWhat should you read next?

The Journey Is EverythingBy Katherine Bomer

August 2018                                          Katie Wheeler

       

Welcome to the SECOND installment of the blog, WELAC Writes

Think essay. What is the first word that comes to your mind? I’m guessing it isn’t postitive! My mind immediately goes to my folder full of student papers that travel all over the nation with me. I’ve taken papers to Iowa, to Boston, to Vegas. Teachers know this problem, and Katherine Bomer hopes to help. The subtitle of The Journey of Everything is Teaching Essays That Students Want to Write for People Who Want to Read Them.

It may come as no surprise, but this isn’t a book about the Five Paragraph Essay, but instead a book stemming from Michel de Montaigne’s work around essay. Montaigne wrote essays about anything: thumbs, cannibals, kidney stones and more. He didn’t write to change minds, he didn’t write (necessarily) to persuade, he wrote “to try.” The word essay means trying in French. You might say Montaigne was the OG (Original Gangster) of writing to think and Bomer believes our students might benefit from more opportunities to write in this form.

Bomer argues that students distain writing formulaic essays and teachers spend so much time trying not to grade them because they’re boring. This was part of an extended conversation we had in a class last month taught by Bomer at Univerisity of New Hampshire’s Summer Literacy Institute. That’s my brag, and my disclaimer, I had the chance to discuss and write alongside Bomer and 20 super smart colleagues last month, which is part of why I’m recommending this book.

The other reason I recommend this book is because of how it might change your thinking about student writing. One quote that really hit home for me was, “Formulaic essay writing is like a gigantic Stop sign for thinking and learning because students’ minds are focused on the formula and not on what they think and want to say…kids are paying more attention to putting the puzzle together than to what they are meaning to say” (30-31). Bomer argues that when students are focused on “essaying” their words are more coherent, their sentences more influential, and their writing more effective. Bomer echos the words of other teacher-writers who know good writers can always follow a formula, but formulas don’t make for good writers.

In addition to prompting change, The Journey is Everything offers mentor texts, activities for generating essay topics, tips for moving topics into ideas, and strategies for shaping and refining the essay. After going through the process, Bomer describes in her book, I can tell you that at some point the writing and (hopefully) teaching you engage in with essay will make you uncomfortable. Sometimes the answers aren’t easy, sometimes they aren’t there at all; not because of a failure on Bomer’s part but because writing doesn’t always have a right answer and essay is no exception. But perhaps that is the best reason you should read and test Bomer’s strategies, to try!