Essay Topics

Essay Topics The directions below are representative of what students will encounter on test day. In some cases the writing teachers were transformedin situ into English professors. I'd much rather read an essay that went off in an unexpected but interesting direction than one that plodded dutifully along a prescribed course. Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation. I'm always pleased when I see someone laugh as they read a draft of an essay. Surprises make us laugh, and surprises are what one wants to deliver. I find it especially useful to ask why about things that seem wrong. For example, why should there be a connection between humor and misfortune? I can see more now in the fragments of memory I preserve of that age than I could see at the time from having it all happening live, right in front of me. For example, in a recentessay I pointed out that because you can only judge computer programmers by working with them, no one knows who the best programmers are overall. I didn't realize this when I began that essay, and even now I find it kind of weird. I was afraid of flying for a long time and could only travel vicariously. But don't change so much that you lose the spontaneity of the original. Sometimes you start with a promising question and get nowhere. When friends came back from faraway places, it wasn't just out of politeness that I asked what they saw. And I found the best way to get information out of them was to ask what surprised them. How was the place different from what they expected? You can ask it of the most unobservant people, and it will extract information they didn't even know they were recording. It's not something you read looking for a specific answer, and feel cheated if you don't find it. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive results. An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. The things I've written just for myself are no good. Real thought, like real conversation, is full of false starts. You need to cut and fill to emphasize the central thread, like an illustrator inking over a pencil drawing. Why do we find it funny when a character, even one we like, slips on a banana peel? There's a whole essay's worth of surprises there for sure. I didn't notice those things at the time, though. At sixteen I was about as observant as a lump of rock. Francis James Child, who had been Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard since 1851, became in 1876 the university's first professor of English. I have a hunch you want to pay attention not just to things that seem wrong, but things that seem wrong in a humorous way.