And more importantly, why they should be fun.
A thing I’ve become frustrated with in recent years is the increasingly prevailing idea that an essay is a piece of writing produced exclusively within the bounds of academia and/or on the pages of a broadsheet newspaper.
An essay, at its core, is a piece of writing on a subject — typically, it poses an argument or interpretation by the author, especially in response to another piece of writing or media. Much of the time, these arguments and interpretations can involve critical analysis and consideration of a text or piece of media.
A movie review where an author discusses their thoughts and feelings on the presentation of a film could be an essay.
A fan’s meta collating and interpreting the evidence for their favourite ship within a piece of media could be an essay.
A thread on Twitter where someone ranks their favourite items from a specific category could be an essay.
In short, people can and do write essays for fun — they just don’t call them essays.
There’s nothing wrong with academic writing, nor with journalistic writing, but what bothers me about the presentation of essays as something purely of and for these environments is twofold. In the first instance, it implies that all essays should be held to academic or journalistic standards, and in the second, it pushes the idea that doing critical analysis and presenting it to a reader is inherently (or should be) seen as labour, as work.
Many people hated writing essays at school.
Teachers are juggling too many students in overcrowded classrooms in underfunded schools, with syllabi that increasingly focus on whatever facts people can regurgitate about a text rather than teaching people to do their own analysis of whatever text they like.
Reading a piece of text, extrapolating what you think about it, pointing out which bits make you think that way — that’s evidence-based literary analysis. In my opinion, it is a vital skill for everyday life, it is a skill that every person should have, especially in a world where “alternative facts” are something we have to contend with, but like…
How can you expect people to pick that skill up if you don’t make it fun? If you make it something people are worried to do because all they can do is think about is the bad grades they were terrified of getting at school, or if they think only certain people who “are good” at it are allowed to do it, what do you expect?
People don’t become media literate as a result of being made to recite the critical analysis their teacher told them was most likely to get them a good grade — they do so by analysing things themselves.
I’m biased against school, I admit — my experiences at both high school and in university, likely with undiagnosed ADHD, were repeatedly in being told I was very intelligent, and being made to feel I was anything but, often because my work was too informal, because I wasn’t serious enough. It was never anything to do with the actual skill of my analysis or the soundness of my critical thought, but with my presentation thereof. My exuberance and my enthusiasm were un-academic, and counted against me, even though my arguments were strongly made and built on more than solid foundations.
But what really upset me was seeing other students made to feel like they were stupid because they had never been taught the skills they were being tested on, who felt overwhelmed and out of their depth, who weren’t given enough time and guidance to learn to analyse text themselves.
Instead, they were rushed through class after class where the “correct” analyses were presented to them in a sort of speedrun, and they then had to go through the process of reciting all that for exams.
Learning for the sake of exams — especially exams one does not particularly want to take, but that one is required to take — is often stressful, especially when one is hurrying in too few classes a week in a large and busy classroom with little to none one-on-one tutelage.
Literary analysis, and critical analysis in general, are pretty vital skills for the day to day — without knowing how to critically analyse things, how to argue, how to think of things from a position of critical reasoning, we cannot adequately recognise propaganda. We cannot recognise logical fallacies, when they are presented to us. We are more susceptible to manipulations of the facts; we are easier targets for dogma; we are more vulnerable to the lull of our own biases.
Without knowing how to make sound arguments of our own, we cannot spot the flaws in the arguments of others.
It’s not to say that critical analysis cannot be flawed, or that they make us immune to our biases, but the value in these skills should be that everyone has them, that everyone should be able to see flaws when presented to them, be able to take something apart, if they want to.
Schools aren’t underfunded by accident. Humanities, in particular, are not underfunded by accident. Teachers are not underpaid, class sizes are not too big, school syllabi are not increasingly based on exam scores instead of skills taught by accident.
It is to the benefit of a lot of unjust power structures, to a lot of people in power, that people are not taught robust critical reasoning skills or analysis — and ditto, it is to their benefit that when people do learn, they think it’s only for the classroom, or only for the likes of journalists to put their hand to.
Politics aside, learning to critically analyse the work of others is vital to being a strong writer. You can’t learn to write well without being able to understand what makes well-written works good — and you can’t understand that without being able to take them apart yourself.
That’s part of why I’m so much in favour of people analysing and taking apart stuff they enjoy and why they enjoy it — it doesn’t matter if the subject matter is unacademic or silly or frivolous; it doesn’t matter if one’s argument is unacademic or silly or frivolous.
It matters that one has fun, and that one learns from it — and that one enjoys presenting that argument to others.
For quite a long time I was really nervous about writing critical analysis in my free time because of a lot of the reasons I outlined above: I was overly concerned with my arguments not being academic enough, not professional enough, despite the fact that my own general philosophy is that what I’m actually concerned with is fun.
I do think generally, there should be more non-fiction for the purposes of play and banter, and I think part of the reason I feel so passionately on that front is because of my background in creative fandom, where analysis of characters, of plotlines, of authorial intent, or relationships, of real life parallels to fiction, of power dynamics, of almost anything you can imagine, is the norm, is something people engage in for free and for fun.
I wish I saw that kind of passion from people for everything.
I’m on Twitter.
I did an essay engaging in literary analysis of Marty Robbins’ Devil Woman which is relevant to these thoughts:
https://johannestevans.medium.com/a-mans-choices-are-always-a-woman-s-fault-c27f4bdb677f
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