New Essay (rough draft)

Tell me if I need to correct anything.. other than that its here for your enjoyment!!

How to Capture a Reader

Authors are like hunters. They are stalking among the populace gathering insight and leaving traps: their work. The effort each author puts into their work creates the trap for any unsuspecting reader—one never knows when they will be inspired to become the hunter. The imprisonment of an idea in books, essays, or poems begs us as readers to capture our own thoughts from what we are reading. Of the many hunters, Nancy Sommers, Walker Percy, and Richard Rodriguez, are a few authors that have captured my attention; trapped me. Their way of writing is not A-typical, and the structure of their writing and the points they bring across ferry the reader into a personal understanding of their ideas; thus, bringing a stronger connection to the reader when there is a more personal collision with topics.

The beginning of every essay sets a catalyst of how successful the essay could be in the entrapment of the reader. Slowly the message begins to form and the reader can begin happily or not. As for Nancy Sommers her essay, “I Stand Here Writing,” begins with word play that grabs the readers’ attention. “I stand in my kitchen, wiping the cardamom, coriander, and cayenne off my fingers. My head is abuzz with words, with bits and pieces of conversation. I hear a phrase I have read recently, something about ‘a radical loss of certainty’” (454). And thus begins her entrapment of the reader. We see the grittiness of her essay beginning with spices, almost imagining them on our fingers too and the introduction or thesis of her essay the ‘radical loss of certainty,’ how the journey of writing never deposits us where we usually would wish to be. Yet, the complicated ideas of Sommers’s essay can sometimes be lost among her creative outlet in the stream of consciousness style; unless a reader can see the essay for what it truly is: a portal for students. This attempt to use the student as a lens through which we may gain insight and better understanding of her essay is key. Logical flow of an essay need not apply and there is no regard for it. Sommers attempts to reflect all the forces of her argument in flashes of her life and its experience, pieces of her history litter the pages and the continuity of her thoughts flow like a river. Parts of her essay symbolize the more logical academic form and these little bits bring the reader back into the focus of her topic: ‘the radical loss of certainty.’ Through the lens of everyday life she asks these questions: “How do I look at these facts? How do I embrace these experiences, these texts of my life, and translate them into ideas? How do I make sense of the conversations they engender in my head?” (455). The personal aspects of her work strike me as what questions I have in my own life, how can I personally see the world differently, even basic writing differently? What is this ‘radical loss of certainty’ she talks about? My discovery through her essay is that when writing one is taking a journey, not merely to reach the end, but to understand where the process takes us as writers and as readers.

The beginning of Walker Percy’s essay, “The Loss of the Creature,” is the beginning of the jaunt into the process of recovery. Percy states: “Every explorer names is Island Formosa, beautiful. To him it is beautiful because, being the first, he has access to it and can see it for what it is. But to know one else is it ever as beautiful—except the rare man who manages to recover it, who knows that it has to be recovered” (402). This is no recovery for the chemically dependent, but rather the recovery of the mentally impaired populace; those of us who just graze through life never really seeing or wishing to see. Percy’s essay is the classic example of a truly academic essay. Though Percy may feel personally about the issues he imposes he does not bring in examples that would tie any connection to him other than that we know the idea came from him and no more. He begins with a problem, stating his facts and his understanding, creating a circle of how his argument will tie into his next theory and so on. He uses classic examples of tourists looking for their ‘it’ moments of their trips, making us feel less like people and more like the hungry press in search for a juicy story. One way to ensnare a reader is to antagonize. Percy does not nearly go as far as some readers do, but makes a classic point of provoking a person to read closer to the actual truth of his thoughts and what meaning they might bring to us. For example: “‘This is it’ and ‘Now we are really living’ do not necessarily refer to the sovereign encounter of the person with the sight that enlivens the mind and gladdens the heart. It means that now at last we are having the acceptable experience” (407). It is enough to put a fire in my belly. A question I would pose to Percy would be: What truly is a ‘sovereign encounter?’ and who are you to classify my experiences? It is that notion of being superior that entraps readers to not only keep reading, but to scoff (sometimes) at the posed ideas by authors. Though his ideas are presented in a less personal manner they still hold merit in the ways it impresses upon us to think. And his essay requires no easy thinking, this is the deep stuff. We are handed his essay and ask ourselves, what now? How am I to make sense of this? Defining an academic essay where we must make the ties to our own personal accounts rather than his experiences. Percy’s structure and flow of his essay tie all his ideas into one even idea of how we can discover ourselves through what we are trying to gain from the world.

The beginning of Richard Rodriguez’s essay, “‘Blaxicans’ and Other Reinvented Americans,” is less like a graceful entrance into ideas and more like an explosion of TNT. He begins: “There is something unsettling about immigrants because… well, because they chatter incomprehensibly, and they get in everyone’s way. Immigrants seem to be bent on undoing America” (418). Its enough to wonder if he has immigrants coming after him with weapons. Even though his essay begins with fire it is mostly about the misunderstood properties of what it is to be classically American. His structure is very personal and throughout his essay he refers back to his experiences or rather ‘trials’ to make his points. The length of this personal essay is striking as well; the shortness only emphasizes the thoughts expressed within and Rodriguez’s believes that America will no longer be fighting the ethnic issue. Rodriguez points out that America can talk about diversity till we are blue in the face: “Race mixture has not been a point of pride in America… that I might marry your daughter, you might become we; we might become us. America has so readily adopted the Canadian notion of multiculturalism because it preserves our preference for thinking ourselves separate—our elbows need not touch, thank you” (419). This dignifies America as being a society that identifies ourselves as hypocritical. His basic trap for the reader is to exacerbate an old wound of America: the race issue and it works. The personal note he adds to every line enlivens the essay for the reader, driving home his ideas that we are slowly reinventing America. Can you hear that trap snapping?—we are now caught in his clutches. In the middle of his argument he brings in this idea of assimilation and the aspects in which America will soon fulfill to complete this assimilation process. Authors that forget the gray area always attract me to tear their idea to bits. Rodriguez is a perfect example and I think he knows this; the stance he takes with his argument conveniently forgets to mention the rest of the world. Assimilation is suitable for America, but what about the other six billion people? How will they be affected? Rodriguez may have a point on culture and the ‘mythologies of race,’ but his true talent is getting the reader to battle with his ideas in order to defend their own.

These three authors have one thing in common, they ensnare readers. Capture them in webs of ideas that stick to us like honey, though sometimes they are not as sweet to think about. Sommers and Rodriguez present their essays in the form of personal experiences with flashes of logical reasoning tied in effortlessly, causing the reader to see their ideas presented as a come one, come all show. Whereas Percy’s essay forces the reader to think and rethink his ideas, gathering what they may in hopes of understanding it. All three of these hunters show qualities that make us hone our insight in order to see theirs and what makes them great authors is the valued skill to make us keep reading. Their styles and structures are not in any way similar but strike the reader nonetheless and a stronger connection from personal issues stem a deeper connection with the reader that grows into understanding, allowing us to connect to the topics. Allowing us to be hunters in our own journeys of writing.