I came to essay accidentally. I mean, doesn’t everyone? Like, is the essay ever ‘the plan’?

The plan, when I arrived to begin doctoral study at a large land grant American university on the Midwestern plains in the mid-1990s, had been that I would write a dissertation on the novels of one of the region’s most beloved figures and then land a tenure-track job somewhere as a professor of American literature, the holy grail of an academic career.

But a funny thing happened on my way to the ivory tower. At universities of that profile, with enrollments in the several tens of thousands, graduate students become conscripts in a veritable army of instructors tasked with introducing undergraduates to college-level writing. So for whatever else I believed would be my focus in my doctoral program, ‘writing studies’ was necessarily added – I would become a writing teacher in the bargain.

The writing studies faculty at the University of Nebraska espoused an expressivist model, leaving behind the more traditional argumentation approach my secondary and undergraduate school instructors had taken, with its classic five-paragraph theme, for an approach they believed placed a greater premium on student writers’ self-expression and discovery. The approach emphasized the writing process – revision of multiple drafts, individual student conferences with instructors, meta-writing reflecting on the process – rather than a final student product. Assessment was holistic, taking the entire process into account, and rather than begin by asking students to approximate an academic discourse that was still to them a foreign language, as they expounded on texts equally as foreign and subjects they had only begun to plumb, students were invited to begin by writing what they knew.