The McEssay

The final draft was due to the publisher May 1st. I heard back from one editor and said that they would get back to me with any further necessary revisions. So I guess it really was not the final draft.

This editor advised me to add more. She thought it didn't seem finished, but everything I tried seemed like the cliched 'tacked' on conclusion, so I left it as is. Maybe I'll have to change that later. Hopefully, I'll be able to come up with something.

Here is a link (I hope) to the "final" draft of the essay. I'm attempting to save it as a webpage, so you don't have to scroll down on the blog to read the entire blasted essay.

Sorry. I have no idea how to create it as a webpage and then put a link on here to it. I know it can be done. I'm just not sure how to do it.

So if you could care less about the essay, just skip over this mammoth entry.

"The McEssay: Choking the Voice out of Student Writers"


It has taken me a decade, but I have perfected my Sunday night ritual: fill a deep ceramic coffee mug with steaming light roast coffee, wedge my ipod headphones into each ear, cradle my gold Cross pen with blue ink (red ink is so 1950’s) in my right hand, and select an essay from the stack of College Composition papers on our kitchen table. Then I get lost in the writing.

For the next few hours, I have the best job in the world, and I am not even at work. My pen is almost non-stop. “Tell me more” it scrawls in the right margin of one paper while on another essay it circles an entire paragraph and responds, “Now you’re showing! Do more of this!” On another essay it weaves over the first paragraph, “Don’t tell us what you are going to write about, show us!” and later in another, “This would be more vivid if you used dialogue.” Of course, it often swoops in and notes the wrong use of “there” or spies a missing comma and advises, “End an introductory adverb clause with a comma.” But it seeks the potential more than the errors.

In one essay a student recounts the final bitter words she said to her mother as she left for grade school, only to have her father pluck her out of class later that day and rush her to the hospital, where her mother would die that night in surgery. Another essay takes me onto the golf course in the hazy heat of late August, where the writer’s rivalry with his older brother comes down to one final putt. Despite his escalating heart rate and his brother’s barrage of insults, the writer drains the putt and defeats his brother.

By now my coffee is cold and my ipod playlist is repeating, but I’m lost in the work. I am giggling as a student recounts how, as a child, she was fond of discovering new moles and freckles, which her mother dubbed “Angel Kisses.” One day she proudly thrust her head in her older sister’s face, displaying the newest peck from heaven. “That’s not an Angel Kiss, you freak,” her older sister declared. “You’re growing a third ear!” She believed her sibling, bragging about it at daycare, even believing she could detect conversations from the house next door. Her mother finally had to break the news that it was—alas—just a mole. In another essay, I hurry through downtown Minneapolis, dodging traffic, pedestrians, and vendors, accompanying a student and his father on their trip of a lifetime to see U2 at the Target Center. Their seats are so close the student can see Bono’s stubble. After that paper, I spit out a mouthful of icy coffee and scroll through my ipod in search of The Joshua Tree.

It was not always like this.

“Okay, who has a topic? Let’s hear one,” I asked my students.

My sophomores averted their eyes. A boy in the front row made for his untied Doc Martin hoping that would buy him a few seconds. Another boy farther back fidgeted and dragged his pencil across the spine of his notebook, praying I wouldn’t call on him. A girl to the left of the fidgeter looked straight ahead but not quite at me, focused on a point just over my right shoulder on the white board.

“Come on now. What do you feel like writing about?”

Let them choose the topic. Allow them to have mastery of the subject matter. Model how much you enjoy writing. Model the writing process. Show them how they can master it to produce excellent essays.

It was the fourth week of my second year teaching sophomore English. I had spent my rookie year just staying a few days ahead of my students, acclimating myself to the role of teacher, struggling with discipline, and trying to get my sophomores ready for the Minnesota Basic Skills Test (BST) in writing. My students had to write an essay, which was then sent to the state for scoring. The scores ranged from one to six, with three being the minimal score for passing. It was implied that we should teach toward a three and that even attaining a four was outstanding. I had learned little about the BST in college, so I devoted the summer to restructuring my curriculum so my sophomores would pass the writing test and I would not look like a complete failure.

That was exactly how we spent the first part of the following year: writing essays. The only problem? The majority of my college English classes were devoted to literature. Even the ones devoted to writing focused on teaching me how to write. Only one methods class actually focused on teaching me how to teach my students how to write, and that was a semester before I even student taught. Literary Criticism, Shakespeare, Twentieth Century British Literature, Multi-Cultural Poetry were not going to get 120 sophomores to pass the BST in writing.

Desperate, I turned to the Minnesota BST Written Composition Handbook. I found a diagram that demonstrated, using a simple metaphor that my sophomores could easily comprehend, how to create a passing essay: “the hamburger” method. It highlighted the three basic parts of an essay. The beginning of the essay was the top bun, the middle formed the hamburger patty replete with fixings, and the conclusion served as the bottom bun.

After visiting with a friend who taught writing at our district’s middle school, I found they used the same diagram for constructing simple paragraphs. This seemed like the perfect segue to take my students to the next step for passing the BST in writing: the five-paragraph essay.

My students already knew that a topic sentence, three supporting sentences, and a concluding sentence made a sound paragraph. How hard would it be to take that format and just expand it, turning their topic sentence into an introductory paragraph that ended with a thesis statement, expanding their supporting sentences into three paragraphs that referenced, with clear topic sentences, their thesis, and finally developing their concluding sentence into a final paragraph that effectively restated their thesis and wrapped up their essay? Obviously, the handbook encouraged the five-part essay formula because nearly every essay scoring above a three was written according to that recipe.

“Come on. Someone give me a topic.”

Finally an over achiever broke the silence, “Let’s write about our favorite hobby.”

“Good topic,” I said with my back already to the room. My thumb popped the cap off my Expo marker. Behind me, tablets rustled opened and pencils stood poised.

They know the routine.

“Let’s brainstorm some hobbies now,” I said with one glance over my shoulder.

“Sports,” someone called out only to be met with, “No, we always write about sports.”

“Reality TV,” someone else yelled.

“Yeah, I have seen every episode of Survivor,” another student added.
My marker flew across the board to keep pace.

“Playing guitar . . . Working on my truck . . . Video games . . . Weight lifting . . . Work . . . Archery . . . Painting . . .”

“Okay. Okay,” I said flexing my aching hand as I backed away from the board and examined what we had come up with. “Not bad. What should we focus on for our model essay?”

Model the essays for my students so they see the importance of form and focusing on a central idea, just like the handbook advises.

The entire middle row, comprised of junior varsity football players, cried, “Video games!”

The girls let out a collective sigh, but the boys in the front section of the middle row chanted, “Vid – EO” while – on cue – the boys in the back section of the middle row chanted, “games!”

“Vid - EO . . . Games! Vid - EO. . . Games!”

“Okay, okay, okay,” I said. “Remember the principal’s room is below us, so let’s try and keep it to a dull roar.” I grabbed the eraser and carved great swaths of white through the brainstorming on the board, leaving just the original “video games” in the middle.

“That’s a start. But what type of video games? Are we talking sports games? How about Madden? Or quest games, like Zelda? Shooter games? Resident Evil? How about a classic, like Pong?”

One lone student snickered at my joke.

“Madden! ” A football player called.

“Why?” I urged.

“Each year they make it better. This year there’s the franchise mode where you can sign free agents and draft players,” a student called out.

“Yeah, there are new playbooks too,” another added.

“Okay, so the hobby requires some technical knowledge and skill,” I said as I jotted that on the board. “What else?”

“It brings us all together,” yet another student began, and I drew an arrow and wrote that on the board. “Nearly every Saturday we’re over at Ryan’s. Everybody throws in ten bucks, plus an extra two for pizza, and we draw teams from a hat. You can only use original players, no modified ones. Last year Matt dominated, but this year I own him. Last weekend I raked in $60.”

“Yeah, but that’s only because my quarterback got hurt in the second quarter,” Matt called out from the back, “I was up on you by a touchdown too.”

“All right, we’ve got two things we can develop. But we need a third item,” I said.

“It’s like a tradition in my family,” Jason stated, and I hurried to record the idea. “My dad grew up playing Atari, and my older brothers grew up playing Nintendo. Whenever they’re home from college, we hook up the Playstation to the big screen in the basement and spend our whole day down there while Mom and my sisters go shopping. My uncle even comes over and plays sometimes.”

“Great,” I said and stood back from the board and surveyed our pre-writing.

Impressive. Just look at all that thinking on the board. Give them a visual pre-writing method. Just like the handbook suggests. Very impressive.

“Now given what we have up here in our brainstorm, someone come up with a thesis.”

They know the routine.

Matt finally called out as he surveyed the board, “Madden is one of my favorite hobbies because . . .” his head bobbed as he followed our clustering, “it is challenging . . . uh, brings friends together . . . and it is, kinda like a family tradition.”

“Okay, we’ve got a thesis. That’s a start. What do we need next?” I asked.

“An outline,” the middle row responded.

They know the routine indeed. I could practically see the outlines taking form in their minds.

“Yep. Who wants to time me?”

Have them time me to illustrate how quickly I can devise an outline. Just like the handbook suggests.

“I’ll do it,” Cheryl said, already looking up at the clock.

“Ready when you are,” I said with my marker poised.

“Go.”

I knew the routine better than anyone. I quickly jotted down an introductory sentence and a thesis. I organized the three supporting ideas, formulating a topic sentence for each. Then I added at least three examples for each idea. Finally, I restated my thesis in the conclusion and ended with a clincher sentence.

“Done,” I said and slammed the marker down.

“Thirty seconds,” Cheryl said on cue.

“Now I’ll turn you loose to work on your own essay. Remember, brainstorm just like we did up here,” I said cocking a thumb at the whiteboard covered in blue marker, “until you come up with three good points. Devise a thesis. Create an outline based on your thesis. Be sure to come up with plenty of examples to support each of your three main ideas. Use details in those supporting paragraphs. The richer you make them, the clearer they will be to the reader. Use transitions to move the reader from one topic to the next. And last, but not least, be sure to have a conclusion that restates your main ideas. I want to see two full pages. Rough draft due tomorrow.”

After four weeks of producing perfectly assembled hamburgers . . . I mean essays . . . the students became trained quite effectively. I continued to model the format, typing up essays and copying them to overheads. This format was so easy to master that I continued to crank out the essays right along with my students.

All I had to do was give the command - “write an essay on your favorite relative” or “write an essay about an important lesson you learned” and we mass-produced them, as if they were McEssays, easily slapped together and readily consumable.

Soon they had the form mastered. I too began to feel a mastery of writing as I illustrated the five-paragraph format over and over for my students. Instead of wrestling with ideas and directions, as I had done so often as an undergraduate, all I had to do was select a topic, brainstorm some ideas, determine which three could be best supported, formulate a thesis based on those selections, and begin writing.

The essay practically wrote itself.

Why hadn’t I encountered this form in college? When a paper was looming on the syllabus, I literally spent weeks holed up in the university library with my sources stacked around me. I randomly explored one idea, only to abandon it when I couldn’t fully support it. So I would start after another. After days of writing, I would finally emerge with some ideas gathered and, hopefully, adequately supported. Then I would type them into the proper format and submit the thing to my professor.

Think of all those hours wasted!

What a service I was providing my students. They might be bored with cranking the essays out now, but they would thank me when it came time later in the year to write their research papers. When they went off to college and saw what writing was like on that level, they would literally send me “thank you” cards. I couldn’t wait to get the mail.

Not long after the mid-term, though, they tired of essays: theirs, mine, and, especially, the student samples from the state. I decided to show them some real essays written by professionals, so I rummaged through the outdated magazines in our school library. I also devised a checklist that called for them to search professional articles for the elements of an excellent essay (after all, I had ordered a set of posters chronicling the five essential parts of an excellent essay and proudly adorned them on my walls). I could not wait to illustrate the importance of precise topic sentences, well-supported paragraphs, and effective conclusions. They would see how real writers write.

The following Monday I found myself thinking, It doesn’t get any better than this, as I surveyed my first hour sophomores scattered about my room. This is what teaching must really look like. My class finally resembled my vision of an ideal classroom. Mine was not to be the traditional classroom where students sat obediently in neat rows, scrawling furiously to keep pace with my lectures.

One boy leaned against the wall, a Rolling Stone obscuring his face, his tablet resting on his chest. Another was lying on his back with his legs arched and feet tapping idly on the carpet, thumbing through a Sports Illustrated while a stack of previous issues beneath his head served as a pillow. A cluster of girls was in a corner trading issues of Teen and Cosmo. Others were in desks or even beneath them. Periodically, students halted reading and scribbled on their assignment sheets.
Completing my circuit through the classroom, I returned to my desk. Before sitting down to get a head start on some correcting, I glanced up and thought once more, it most certainly doesn’t get any better than this.

Just then Kyle, sitting almost painfully upright in his desk, called out, “Mr. Reynolds, there is something wrong with this article.”

I was wrong. It just got better. Kyle was quiet, soft-spoken, and keen. Mine was not going to be a classroom where students had to hoist their arms and wait for me to call on them.

“What do you mean?” I asked, navigating my way toward his desk.

“Well, this article doesn’t really meet any of these requirements,” he declared, alternating his gaze from the article to the checklist on his desk, before handing me a Time article on hazing among Marine paratroopers.

“It must have some,” I said, scanning the article, confident I’d locate a clear topic sentence, several supporting sentences, and ample concluding sentences. There has to be some. This was a real writer published in a respected magazine.

“And look at that second paragraph,” Kyle added half rising out of his desk and pointing. “It only has two sentences.”

My eyes scanned the page. Well, I had to agree. The article didn’t clearly address the traditional form. There had to be a topic sentence in here somewhere. I even brought my index finger up and dragged it across the sentences - a reading practice I had not employed since elementary school - underscoring every sentence, hoping to find those essential requirements, which the BST Written Composition Handbook said had to be in every well constructed essay.

“Plus it has seven paragraphs,” Kyle stated as if we were in biology and he just pulled a three headed frog from his pocket.

“Whoa. One thing at a time,” I said. “Ah, here’s a topic sentence. Look at the third paragraph,” I said.

Kyle’s eyes followed my index finger and poured over the paragraph.

Order has been restored.

“Why didn’t she just come out and state her topic right away?”

“Well, you see she is setting the reader up with her first paragraph,” I began, smiling at his question. “She is giving us some background information by telling us a little narrative about the paratroopers and how they earn their golden wings. She is trying to hook the reader with that information.”

“Oh,” Kyle said. “I see.” Then he looked me right in the eyes and pondered, “Then why didn’t she fully support her second paragraph?”

“Well, here the author is briefly summarizing the hazing from the leaked video that got the military in trouble.”

“Okay,” Kyle said uneasily and jotted down the topic sentence I had pointed out.

Kyle was right, though. That article wasn’t like anything I had my students write. It didn’t adhere to a strict form. It didn’t bother with a thesis, clear topic sentences, and tidy supporting information. Nor was there a single paragraph containing five sentences. Were these all lies I swallowed from the state? Worse yet, I fed them to my students.

“See what you can find in another magazine,” I said and turned back toward my desk.

“Mr. Reynolds,” Kyle called.

“Yes?”

“Um, could I, uh, have the magazine back? I really like that article and want to finish it.”

I looked down at the issue of Time, still clenched in my right hand.

“Oh, yeah. Of course,” I said and handed it to Kyle. By the time I was half way back to my desk, I realized my initial theory of teaching writing was collapsing.

All of the essays my students were writing were technically sound. But they failed to inspire interest; moreover, they lacked style and voice. What the state provided was a recipe, and it was a standard recipe for average writing. That writing would get them past the test, but then what? I wanted my students’ writing to be interesting like that Time article. I wanted students to read each other’s essays the way Kyle poured over that article. Instead I was teaching them how to formulate neatly composed drivel, a McEssay.

As I plopped down into my chair and observed Kyle reading the article, the most obvious truth hit me: real writers don’t write five-paragraph themes.

Why was I teaching my students to write them? Real artists don’t paint by numbers, so would our art instructor teach her students to do so? A five-paragraph essay was just writing by numbers.

Fortuitously, my prep hour was next. Before I filled the recycling box in the staff room with the copies of the state BST handbook and its hamburger method of essay writing, I examined what I should have focused on from the very beginning, the essay that scored the highest, the almost mythical sixes.

They were not McEssays. They had more than five paragraphs. They engaged the reader immediately with dialogue or thoughts. They employed figurative language. They had voice. The style inherent in those essays was as distinctive as fingerprints. They oozed personality. Those essays were written by genuine writers who forgot all about the hamburger method of writing. Instead they wrote with voice and passion.

Today I see that it was the same voice and passion that kept Kyle reading that Time article. The same voice and style that I have devoted my career to getting my students to breathe into their writing. The same voice and style that keeps me reading their essays long after my coffee is intolerable and my ipod has shuffled through my playlist several times.

What I didn’t realize all those years ago was that the hamburger method of writing was designed to get students to just pass the test. I wanted to do so much more with our class time than just pass a test. I wanted them to develop voice and style, to experiment with form, to analyze and interpret important events from their lives. I wanted them to do what real writers do.

Now I encourage my students to explore the rich, unique experiences of their lives in the personal essay format. I tap into their natural storytelling abilities. I learn more about my students and their lives in two weeks of narrative essays than I ever did teaching the McEssay. Students recount the deaths of parents and grandparents (one even read an essay she wrote in my class at her grandfather’s wake), explore rites of passage and epiphanies, and analyze relationships, divorces, and arguments. Their lives have become the context for my class.

Every year my sophomores take the MN BST in writing; every year they are above the state average, never dipping below 93 percent passing. None have yet reached that elusive six rating, but at least they have spent their time crafting skillful personal narratives as opposed to manufacturing McEssays.

The curse of the dreaded McEssay, though, reared its ugly head during my third year teaching. I was reading my way through a batch of personal essays on rites of passage and came across an essay that ground everything I was doing in class to a halt. At the end of the student’s first paragraph was a thesis: “Shooting a cow instead of a deer my first time hunting was a major rite of passage for me because it taught me responsibility, safety, and humility.” I kid you not.

A thesis statement! I had not even breathed that word in class. Here it was springing up in a personal essay! While I had abandoned this formula, not all teachers in my building had.

As I read through the student’s essay, I was amazed at the bits and pieces of an incredible narrative butchered into a McEssay. In Minnesota, especially the northwestern section of the state, deer hunting is a way of life every fall. When a young person shoots his or her first deer, it is a transition from childhood to adulthood.

From the shreds of narrative, I learned that this young man had not seen any sign of deer all week. Deer season was coming to a close, and in the fading light of the November afternoon, from his stand along a tree line, he saw movement a hundred yards in a pasture. Obviously, it was a large animal. His nerves got the better of him, and he fired. As his thesis so clumsily stated, instead of a deer, he killed a neighbor’s Holstein.

While reading the paragraph devoted to how shooting the cow taught him humility, I felt my face flush for the student as I envisioned how he must have eagerly called for everyone in his hunting party to see the large buck he just shot.

Unfortunately, the party, likely comprised of the older males in his immediate family, came upon a dead cow instead. I’m sure the poor kid took quite a ribbing from everyone. Not to mention having to pay the farmer for his dead livestock.

I could not deny that this student had a first rate rite of passage that needed to be written. He just chose the worst possible form. Think of the suspense he could have built if he had only structured it as a narrative. What imagery he could have created. Think of the dialogue he could have incorporated. Not to mention his own thoughts and analysis of the event. He took an important experience full of humor, pain, honesty, and learning and wrote it in a form that was none of those, for all of the potential suspense, humor, and tension possible in the essay evaporated when I read the thesis.

The next day I asked the student, who sheepishly averted his eyes from mine, obviously still embarrassed about the ordeal, why he chose this form. He frowned, then shrugged, and finally said, “That’s how we wrote last year.” The writer was just clinging to a form that worked for him in the past and it ruined his essay.
Our lives, memories, and stories cannot be reduced to tidy, easily supportable theses. Nor do my students walk around with readily formed theses in their heads. When they enter my room on Monday morning, they do not begin postulating, “There were three contributing factors behind the football team’s dominating performance Friday night: a punishing ground game, a defense that forced five turnovers, and a strong punting game that kept the opponent pinned deep in their won territory the entire night.” Rather, students walk into my room sharing their stories and versions of what happened at the game. From their stories and experiences, students derive meaning and give shape to their worlds. Why not start there instead?

When the five-paragraph format is either taught too early or as the exclusive format, it inflicts serious damage. When students are shown a template they can follow and have success with, such as passing a standardized test, they cling to it dearly. In The Essay, Paul Heilker (1996) chronicles research done on the negative impact of the five-paragraph format. He cites a study conducted by Russel K. Durst which found that “90 percent of the student texts in his sample were organized this way, students using the thesis/support form to structure literary analysis, autobiographical, informative, and argumentative compositions, and even writing outside of English class” (p. 3). Instead of being one option for students to use at their discretion, depending on the assignment, the McEssay often becomes the only option they choose, regardless of the assignment.

Earlier I lamented over all the hours I had spent holed up in the university library struggling with my thoughts. However, through that writing, I was able to explore my thoughts fully and examine a topic from multiple angles. It was not until I enrolled in graduate school after my third year of teaching, that I learned the value of all that time toiling with the writing process.

In my graduate program, we began an intensive study of composition theory where I discovered William Zeiger (1985) emphasizes the importance of exploration in writing through the exploratory, familiar, or personal essay format, yet this exploratory type of writing is rarely emphasized in schools, especially college. Instead the thesis-support format is encouraged because most believe it reinforces the scientific method of thinking and proving a hypothesis (p. 457).

Zeiger, building on work done by James Kinneavy, states that the scientific process really contains two types of discourse: exploratory and expository. The former “fundamentally asks a question and suggests a tentative answer” and the latter “asserts an answer and supplies proof.” When the thesis-support format is emphasized, it really doesn’t fully represent the scientific process, only a part. What is being lost is the focus on the exploratory discourse, where one explores ideas in order to reach a hypothesis that can then be tested (p. 457).

Zeiger’s theories gave me a new insight into all my time spent writing my undergraduate work. Now I see how I was, in Zeiger’s words, “’Toughing out’” an essay. As Zeiger observes, “Writers who know that the first step in writing is exploration, and who consciously begin the writing process not in the middle but at the beginning, steal a march on the less well informed” (p. 458). By sheer effort and practice, I learned the hard way how to incorporate the exploration process into my writing.

Instead of beginning with the exploratory process and developing a number of possible topics or ideas, I began with the expository process. When a paper was assigned, I formulated a thesis and set about proving it. However, after an hour or two of writing, I often realized that one of my ideas was insufficient. Then it was back to the drawing board. Other times I stumbled upon a better idea. Back to the drawing board again. Sometimes I even realized that my initial thesis was flawed and I had to start all over. All of this was painstaking but essential. Soon I began just writing to see what I really thought about a topic before settling on a thesis. This seems painfully obvious to me now, but every year I see students at the secondary and university levels struggle with this same issue.

Now I keep a quote from E. M. Forster stenciled on my white board: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say.” This reminds me that all the time I spent ‘toughing out’ an essay was essential because I was thinking through my writing. It also reminds me of the importance of the personal narrative, where the reader is able to see the writer’s ideas unfold naturally as they grapple with them and, literally, learn what they really think. Too often the McEssay makes it appear like the writer has naturally thought these things all along. It certainly leaves no room for any type of deviation or revelation. It robs the reader of the rich experience of watching the writer’s thinking unfold in a natural progression. Zeiger observes this too, “By concentrating almost exclusively on the thesis-support exposition in college composition classes, we are implicitly teaching that the ability to support an assertation is more important than the ability to examine an issue” (p. 458).

Ultimately, Zeiger calls for the exploratory essay to be given the same type of emphasis the thesis-support essay is given. Offer students the chance to write in the exploratory process before emphasizing the expository process. I take this one step further by focusing most of our time on a variety of personal essays.

I do not claim that the personal essay is the only style of writing a student needs. In fact, gasp – shock—gulp, I have actually gone back to teaching the five-paragraph theme. However, I introduce it to students at the end of the course and make them aware that it is just one of many forms they may employ.

I structure my classes this way to offer my students a variety of forms of writing that they can draw upon in the future. In some cases, such as writing for the Advanced Placement test, students will have to employ a very rigid thesis-support format, and will they have that in their arsenal. However, they may have to devise an essay for a college application prompt, such as this one Mary Jane Reed (2004) refers in a text devoted to helping students pass college application essays, “You have just completed your 300-page autobiography. Please submit page 217” (p. 9).

There is no McEssay that will work there.

We devote the first several weeks to personal essays. I do not allow my students to just tell stories. That is really only part of the personal essay. Students must also tackle a variety of complex strategies: use vivid imagery, incorporate authentic details and dialogue whenever possible, experiment with form and structure, contemplate audience, reflect on and analyze their experiences, and always strive to develop a strong and unique voice. They are, in other words, doing what real writers do.

We spend the final three weeks writing in the thesis-support format. Students struggle with some of the hallmarks of the thesis-support format: devising a thesis, focusing strictly on developing their thesis in the body of their essay, and, of course, refraining from using “I.” They struggle most with having to filter out the voices they have been encouraged to develop for the first six weeks. However, I would rather have them already have a distinct voice that needs to be stifled than never have developed one at all.

I too must be wary when teaching the five-paragraph essay because it is the only time during my composition classes that I honestly feel like I have control over what my students are producing. This might very well be why so many secondary teachers employ it. When my students are writing their narratives, I have to approach each essay and writer differently. Instead of focusing solely on errors, I am focusing on the potential of the text. How do I coax more of the mind, the personality, and the life behind this story out and onto the page? This is often sloppy and maddening. Often all 30 writers are writing about different things in different ways. It entails sitting down with each of those writers and helping them craft their work. This approach is time consuming and not for the faint of heart.

Bruce Pirie (1997) observes the inherent sloppiness of this approach in Reshaping High School English: “We teach structure by sitting down with students who have something they care about saying, helping them sort out how they might try to say it, and looking at examples of how other writers have structured their work” because “It takes time, and the first results of student’s own shaping definitely don’t look as neat as formulaic essays” (p. 78). To say the least, this is a daunting task, and one I was certainly not up to my first year of teaching, which might be one reason I leaned so heavily on the McEssay.

When I teach the McEssay, I still feel a mastery over what we are writing about because I know the exact formula. I can read a student’s rough draft and diagnose immediately what is lacking, “your second topic sentence does not correlate with your thesis” or “you need to offer more support for your third paragraph.” This is not necessarily true with a personal essay where I might offer a student a variety of suggestions, but, ultimately, the decision resides with the writer. The power is out of the my hands.

Once my students have written a few five-paragraph essays, I end the class challenging my students to meld their voice and style into their own hybrid McEssay. I encourage them to use their voices in the essay. Some choose to liven up the usual generic introductions by either creating a brief narrative that illustrates for the reader what they are going to focus on or offering personal evidence that illustrates the issue they are going to discuss in their essays. And they can even write a sixth paragraph if they wish.

Ultimately, it is the personal narratives that allow my students to produce their most powerful work. Earlier this year after assigning a personal narrative, in which students were to write about a family heirloom, Nicole, a very gifted writer in my College Composition class, raised her hand to share her essay. She described a silver ring with the words “for the love of my life” engraved upon the band. Then she recounted how, as a child, she loved to stare at the ring on her grandmother’s finger and hear her recount the story of how Nicole’s grandfather gave it to her the day her mother was born. Then she flashed forward in time, recalling how it had been eight months since her grandmother’s last story . . . and six since she had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Finally, Nicole brought us full circle, staring at the words “Beloved Wife and Mother” on her grandmother’s tombstone. Her mother handed her an envelope, which still held the aroma of her grandmother’s black coffee and cigarettes. Inside the letter was the ring. Plus the note, “Always make me as proud as you do now.”

By the time Nicole finished, I had to blink rapidly to quell the tears swelling at the corners of my eyes. I was not the only one doing this. Some had lost the battle and dabbed their eyes with their sleeves or hands. A few sniffled. I found myself searching the ceiling. I was not the one only doing this either. I smiled and swallowed hard. Not a word was uttered. The importance of our essays, our stories, and our lives, hovered in the room.