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 1950s) 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.