A Version 1.0

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| October 2004
As E. B. White said, "good writing is rewriting." I didn't
realize this when I was in school. In writing, as in math and
science, they only show you the finished product.
You don't see all the false starts. This gives students a
misleading view of how things get made.Part of the reason it happens is that writers don't want
people to see their mistakes. But I'm willing to let people
see an early draft if it will show how much you have
to rewrite to beat an essay into shape.Below is the oldest version I can find of
The Age of the Essay
(probably the second or third day), with
text that ultimately survived in
red and text that later
got deleted in gray.
There seem to be several categories of cuts: things I got wrong,
things that seem like bragging, flames,
digressions, stretches of awkward prose, and unnecessary words.I discarded more from the beginning. That's
not surprising; it takes a while to hit your stride. There
are more digressions at the start, because I'm not sure where
I'm heading.The amount of cutting is about average. I probably write
three to four words for every one that appears in the final
version of an essay.(Before anyone gets mad at me for opinions expressed here, remember
that anything you see here that's not in the final version is obviously
something I chose not to publish, often because I disagree
with it.)
Recently a friend said that what he liked about
my essays was that they weren't written the way
we'd been taught to write essays in school. You
remember: topic sentence, introductory paragraph,
supporting paragraphs, conclusion. It hadn't
occurred to me till then that those horrible things
we had to write in school were even connected to
what I was doing now. But sure enough, I thought,
they did call them "essays," didn't they?Well, they're not. Those things you have to write
in school are not only not essays, they're one of the
most pointless of all the pointless hoops you have
to jump through in school. And I worry that they
not only teach students the wrong things about writing,
but put them off writing entirely.So I'm going to give the other side of the story: what
an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least,
how I write one. Students be forewarned: if you actually write
the kind of essay I describe, you'll probably get bad
grades. But knowing how it's really done should
at least help you to understand the feeling of futility
you have when you're writing the things they tell you to.
The most obvious difference between real essays and
the things one has to write in school is that real
essays are not exclusively about English literature.
It's a fine thing for schools to

teach students how to
write. But for some bizarre reason (actually, a very specific bizarre
reason that I'll explain in a moment),

the teaching of
writing has gotten mixed together with the study
of literature. And so all over the country, students are
writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget
might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in
fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about
symbolism in Dickens.With obvious
results. Only a few people really

care about
symbolism in Dickens. The teacher doesn't.
The students don't. Most of the people who've had to write PhD
disserations about Dickens don't. And certainly

Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay
about color or baseball.How did things get this way? To answer that we have to go back
almost a thousand years. Between about 500 and 1000, life was
not very good in Europe. The term "dark ages" is presently
out of fashion as too judgemental (the period wasn't dark;
it was just different), but if this label didn't already
exist, it would seem an inspired metaphor. What little
original thought there was took place in lulls between
constant wars and had something of the character of
the thoughts of parents with a new baby.
The most amusing thing written during this
period, Liudprand of Cremona's Embassy to Constantinople, is,
I suspect, mostly inadvertantly so.Around 1000 Europe began to catch its breath.
And once they
had the luxury of curiosity, one of the first things they discovered
was what we call "the classics."
Imagine if we were visited
by aliens. If they could even get here they'd presumably know a
few things we don't. Immediately Alien Studies would become
the most dynamic field of scholarship: instead of painstakingly
discovering things for ourselves, we could simply suck up
everything they'd discovered. So it was in Europe in 1200.
When classical texts began to circulate in Europe, they contained
not just new answers, but new questions. (If anyone proved
a theorem in christian Europe before 1200, for example, there
is no record of it.)For a couple centuries, some of the most important work
being done was intellectual archaelogy. Those were also
the centuries during which schools were first established.
And since reading ancient texts was the essence of what
scholars did then, it became the basis of the curriculum.By 1700, someone who wanted to learn about
physics didn't need to start by mastering Greek in order to read Aristotle. But schools
change slower than scholarship: the study of
ancient texts
had such prestige that it remained the backbone of
education
until the late 19th century. By then it was merely a tradition.
It did serve some purposes: reading a foreign language was difficult,
and thus taught discipline, or at least, kept students busy;
it introduced students to
cultures quite different from their own; and its very uselessness
made it function (like white gloves) as a social bulwark.
But it certainly wasn't
true, and hadn't been true for centuries, that students were
serving apprenticeships in the hottest area of scholarship.Classical scholarship had also changed. In the early era, philology
actually mattered. The texts that filtered into Europe were
all corrupted to some degree by the errors of translators and
copyists. Scholars had to figure out what Aristotle said
before they could figure out what he meant. But by the modern
era such questions were answered as well as they were ever
going to be. And so the study of ancient texts became less
about ancientness and more about texts.The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of
ancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not modern
texts? The answer, of course, is that the raison d'etre
of classical scholarship was a kind of intellectual archaelogy that
does not need to be done in the case of contemporary authors.
But for obvious reasons no one wanted to give that answer.
The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that
the people studying the classics were, if not wasting their
time, at least working on problems of minor importance.And so began the study of modern literature. There was some
initial resistance, but it didn't last long.
The limiting
reagent in the growth of university departments is what
parents will let undergraduates study. If parents will let
their children major in x, the rest follows straightforwardly.
There will be jobs teaching x, and professors to fill them.
The professors will establish scholarly journals and publish
one another's papers. Universities with x departments will
as professors of x will write dissertations about it. It may
take a good long while for the more prestigious universities
to cave in and establish departments in cheesier xes, but
at the other end of the scale there are so many universities
competing to attract students that the mere establishment of
a discipline requires little more than the desire to do it.High schools imitate universities.
And so once university
English departments were established in the late nineteenth century,
the 'riting component of the 3 Rs
was morphed into English.
With the bizarre consequence that high school students now

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