THE PERSONAL / LITERARY ESSAY
When essayists sit down to write for a living, they usually compose what we call a
“personal” or “literary” essay. We use both terms, not exactly interchangeably, because
we need both of them to capture what happens in a good essay of this sort.
We call them personal essays because the reader expects that the voice they hear
in the essay is the author’s autobiographical voice. The reader hears the writer talking to
them as him- or herself. Almost always, this kind of essay is expected to be written in the
first person; that is, using “I” constructions. (We should note, however, that although
first person is acceptable / expected, we still must live by the same rules we live by in
everyday life: people who can only talk about themselves tend to get boring after a
while, or, even worse, we mistrust them because they seem not to talk about the world
but only about their [fragile] psyches).
The point is this: the reader invites the writer to be personal, but any
autobiographical references, experiences, etc. must somehow lead the reader beyond the
merely personal into the realm of the human. Another way to put this is: in a good essay
of this type, the individual, personal, or idiosyncratic must be used to bring about an
insight not just into the writer’s condition—but into the human condition. The personal
must bring about the universal.
A good example of this is E. B. White’s essay, “The Ring of Time,” in which he
talks about a visit to a circus rehearsal in Sarasota, Florida. He and some other observers
watch a young girl practice her horseback acrobatics… But the essay is not about
acrobatics; from the title you can tell it’s about “time.” Not everyone has the personal
experience of the circus, but everyone has to cope with the experience of time. Get it?
We call them literary essays because we expect the writer to use artful devices of
language to build their essays. We would not expect the literary device of rhyme, for
example, which finds its better home in poetry, but we would see an essayist toying with
the structures and rhythms of sentences, the presence of metaphor and symbol, as well as
bigger structural devices like foreshadowing, contrast, irony, and the like.
So, with this in mind, I do not care what the specific topic is of your Essay 4 so
long as it is personal and literary—artfully constructed to present autobiographical
experience in such a way that it sheds light not just on you but on the human condition
(don’t write the essay that talks about how you felt when your first pet died unless that
event can move beyond your own personal feelings and into the realm of pets, death, petdeath, and some interesting insight or observations about any or all of them).
I am reminded of an opening line from the essayist Annie Dillard (the title of the
essay I cannot remember): “Children have no sense of wonder.” This is a provocative
claim because it goes against what we’ve all been taught culturally to believe (that’s the
“human condition payoff”), and the way that Dillard uses her personal experience and
literary technique to “prove” the claim really changes who you are after you’ve read the
essay. That what a good essay does: it changes the reader.