On Empathy and Blame
Using your notes from last week, we are going to begin writing an essay. The post above should be familiar to you, and you should have responses to the prompts at the end of it. Those responses will inform our next steps, which start with finding an approach.
In Google Classroom, you’ll find the first part of this assignment, which is to break down and analyze four quotations. Here is the first, which comes from Piet Hein:
Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.
That echoes the second quotation to analyze, which is from Paul Graham, whose “Age of the Essay” tells us what writing should do (emphasis mine):
To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called “essais.” He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a thesis, because you don’t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.
If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne’s great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That’s why I write them.
Next, you should look closely at this selection from Joan Didion’s “Why I Write,” which is about how she approaches essays and other writings:
It took me some years to discover what I was.
Which was a writer.
By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Before we get to the last quotation, let’s talk about the fact that you already have a subject for the essay you will be writing. You have watched videos on empathy and blame, and you’ve thought about how those ideas connect to you, your school, and your life. You know the topic, or at least the possible topics; now you need to determine how to approach the work
This is going to be your approach, which is the first element of any piece of effective writing. You need an interesting question to ask or a unique perspective to explore. Paul Graham compares this, in “The Age of the Essay,” to a river finding its way to the sea; Virginia Woolf compares it to a “shock” that drives her to “put the severed parts together.” That’s the last quotation for you to analyze before working on your own approach:
I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.
Each of these quotations offers you a way to look at how you approach your own essay. When you’ve finished that analysis, you can begin to write about your own approach. You aren’t quite writing the essay itself yet; instead, you are outlining and brainstorming and questioning things. Ask yourself:
- What question or questions will drive your process?
- What is your perspective on these subjects?
- What’s interesting or inventive or curious about your thinking right now?
Ask me questions and share any ideas you have below. Remember that Google Classroom has your formal assignments for the week.
