Finding the River
Camille Corot’s “Interrupted Reading” (1870)
Here is Paul Graham’s “The Age of the Essay” as posted to his website: http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html.
Read this carefully. You aren’t required to annotate the text, except that annotation helps you to understand it. Annotating is one way to build understanding. Another is to collaborate on an interrupted reading of the text.
Interrupted reading is what it sounds like: You read a bit, discuss or write about what you’ve read, and then read more. That’s closer to what real-world reading looks like, and it invites others into the discussion. For that purpose, you’ll be given a copy with numbered paragraphs: Paul Graham’s “The Age of the Essay” (Reformatted).
You don’t want to interrupt the act of reading too much, though, which is why you should read the instructional essay on analysis and over-analysis. You need a balance.
In a similar fashion, it’s important that you occasionally let silence into your life, especially while you read. Sometimes you need to sit with your own thoughts, free of distraction, in order to find meaning. If this is a mandated lesson, take advantage of the opportunity.
Once you’ve read Graham’s essay, we will complete the following:
To encourage you to get started on this reading, here is an excerpt from the beginning of Graham’s essay:
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. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents 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 the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens? 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…
The complete essay gives you the rest of the history, and then it gives us the philosophy and practicality we’ll need to spend the rest of the school year developing your ability and desire to write.
You should also read Graham’s “A Version 1.0,” which is an interesting look at how he edited and revised “The Age of the Essay” into its published state. Here is a direct link: http://www.paulgraham.com/laundry.html.
More on a Universal Approach to Writing
Our writing philosophy in this course is best expressed by Neil Postman:
Writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist — all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.
Over time, that philosophy has led to a universal writing process. Here are the links you need to learn, practice, and master that process:
- The Writing Process: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2758
- ☆ Writing Process: Universal Guide: https://tinyurl.com/sisyphus-writes
- Abbreviated Writing Guide: https://tinyurl.com/sisyphus-writes-small
- The Age of the Essay: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=4919
- ⬑ Guided Analysis: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=3382
- Find the River: Writing an Essay: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=3409
- Writing Process: College Application Essay: https://tinyurl.com/sisyphus-applies-to-college
- Writing Process: Reader’s Response: https://tinyurl.com/sisyphus-reader-responds, plus http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=3013
The universal writing guide, college essay guide, and Paul Graham’s “The Age of the Essay” are also available in a printed packet:
- Bishop Composition Packet: https://tinyurl.com/bishop-comp-packet
The universal guide is essential to any writing-based work in our makerspace. Paul Graham’s “The Age of the Essay” is also the textual focus of our writing unit. More on that below.
Overall, except when test prep is necessary, you should read what you write and write what you read. You must understand how an author writes in order to emulate that author, of course, so we are focused on using what we read, not doing what David Foster Wallace described as “the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty.”