So, most of us probably think of “an essay” as something we write for school. (If I’m wrong, please tell me so in the comments!) The essays we’re going to read for our essay unit, though, aren’t quite that kind of essay. (If you’d like examples of academic essays that I think are particularly impressive, I’d be happy to provide—please let me know, because academic writing can be quite beautiful and quite ambitious as well as correctly scholarly, and knowing that might help us think about what we’re trying to do when we do write essays for school.)
So…what IS an essay, exactly? Remember when we tried to define some of our big terms at the beginning of the semester? As we prepare to read some essays over the next two weeks, let’s think about some similar questions. Take a few minutes (no googling!) to think about how you’d define the parameters of an essay, and try to articulate your answer to that question in the comments.
What is an essay? How do we know that a piece of writing counts as one? What’s the point of an essay—what is it trying to do? What features must it have? What features CAN’T it have? How is reading one different from reading a short story, or a poem, or a play?
You don’t have to answer all those questions, but they’re there to get you thinking.
As a possible prompt to your thinking: remember the way we talked about “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” and how we’d respond differently to it if it were an essay and not a story? For us, that seemed to have a lot to do with how we related to the narrator (we liked hanging out with Yunior, even though we also pretty uniformly agreed he was an asshole). It even came up specifically that there might be a different relationship between a reader and a narrator and a reader and an author, and that the “narrator” of an essay might be the author and not a character, and that might alter the way we think of the ideas in a piece. We also imagined the possible differences to a version in which the author was trying to offer a real explanation for his behavior, which we didn’t really get in “The Cheater’s Guide to Love.” Well, interestingly, there’s an essay that’s a kind of a companion piece to that story that does pretty much exactly that—Diaz’s 2018 “The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma.” It’s a really good essay, but do be warned it’s also a tough read in spots, which you may not need in your weekend. Check your gut (taking good care of ourselves is important right now!). But it’s a powerful read, and it offers an impressively direct comparison across genres, which is good food for thought.
ENG 222: Literary Genres 
When I began reading “The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma” I had no idea what to expect. I felt a whirlwind of emotions; anger, sadness, pride, and happiness. Although, I cannot imagine how the author must’ve felt. What I was reading felt like a gateway to his mind and thoughts. Thoughts of absolute heartbreak and despair. I felt hopeless watching him slowly lose it because of an incident nobody should ever go through, but I felt proud reading about his acceptance. When I think of an essay, I think of structured writing trying to explain or argue the purpose of something. This essay, felt more like a story, and maybe now I can try to look at essays with a different perspective.
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I love the way you think about the relationship between your experience and Diaz’s here—I think there are some really fundamental issues of relating to literature in it. Unimaginable experiences, the essay as a gateway into someone else’s experience, and the relationship that creates—pride in his acceptance. There are some complicated theoretical ways we could look at all those things, and they’re also so central to what writing can do on just a gut level.
I suspect this essay feels more like a story because it’s absorbing to read—maybe also because it narrates events chronologically? And yet it’s certainly not the story version we get in Diaz’s fiction…for my money, one of the many differences is that this essay has to keep returning to its central idea—although how would we articulate what that central idea is?
(I also definitely think expanding one’s perspective on what essays can be is a good thing!)
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Could the central idea be; how experience shapes a story.
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I felt as if you can really interpret “The Silence” essay in many ways. I caught many things about trust, stereotypes, and just real concerning things in general. But in contrast to Diaz’s fiction, it was less exaggerated and more explained from the beginning throughout. If anything, this was really just a confession in the form of a narrative essay where it makes me take the essay more seriously than it did in the fictional story. Essays have length, it can have opinions and facts, it’s real, and has a worldview as you read. In other views essays can just argue about opinions to convince the reader otherwise.
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That is a very good point. I enjoy your point of view and it adds perspective to what an ‘essay’ is.
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