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Richard E. Miller
Rutgers University
for Ann E. Berthoff
Imagine you're teaching a senior seminar on the essay. You begin with a selfreflexive assignment, the stock-in-trade of any experienced writing teacher who has been fortunate enough to have been trained to see the heuristic value of getting students to think about their own thinking. You ask the students to write an essay about the essay. The assignment strikes the students as strange and pointless, perhaps even vaguely insulting. How do you write about writing? Why would you want to?
They blink.
They go home and give it a try.
What is the essay for? Here are some of the answers you receive.
* The essay is for making an argument.
* The essay is for persuading someone to see the world the way you do.
* The essay is for showing you've done the reading.
* The essay is a way for the teacher to test your understanding of the assigned subject.
All those years in school writing essays and not one of the students knows what the essay is really for. Not one knows the right answer.
How could they all be wrong?
The essay can, of course, be made to serve many different purposes: it can be an argument-maker; it can be a testing device; it can be the staging ground for the dance of persuasion. So the students really aren't wrong; they're just showing you what the essay is routinely used for in school. But is there another kind of work that essays can be made to perform, work that both students and their teachers might find more intellectually rewarding to pursue? This is the question I wish to explore in what follows.
Every year, students who've excelled as undergraduates majoring in English think about giving advanced study a try. They take the GREs; they collect together their transcripts, their recommendations, their best papers; they write something variously called a "personal essay" or a "personal statement" about the issues, ideas, and texts they hope to spend the next many years thinking about. They make an argument for themselves.
This is one of those rare moments where student writing really does matter. The personal essay, bundled together with the other institutionally recognized documents,...