Avent Beck

I am interested only in helping students figure out how to handle essay assignments. Essay assignments contain challenges and opportunities that most students are blissfully unaware of, and so they gain nothing particularly useful by all the labor that they put into these assignments. Learning to address those challenges and take advantage of those opportunities is a lesson about communication that has much broader applicability, too. An essay assignment is an exercise that strengthens and hones the student’s understanding not only of the assignment topic but also, and maybe even more importantly, of the student’s role in conversations about that topic. Very few students are aware of this second goal, which is why their essays are almost always boring to write and boring to read.

I have several decades of teaching experience in freshman composition. I first taught at JMU in early 1990s, before the Internet as we know and use it. And I retired from JMU in 2024, as ChatGPT and its cousins were coming onto the scene. A lot changed for students in between, but a constant was that cramped, dull mindset about what an essay assignment is and could be, which students only broke free of when they suddenly matured in their situational awareness of who they were talking to (or writing for) and why.

I would work on a specific essay assignment with you, and through that work we would discuss the general principles that make this essay’s work useful for future essays and more generally for all your future communications.

We will stay away from grammar and the small scale cleaning-up sorts of editing until all the developmental work is done. We will concentrate first in understanding the assignment, which almost always is more complex and interesting than it first seems. Then we will work on research and invention and early structural ideas, allowing each of these types of work to affect the others. Finally we will draft the essay and clean it up.

I prefer to work with actual assignments that a student must do. And I prefer to begin work as soon as possible on that assignment—that is, as soon as possible after it is assigned. Less available time means a more strenuous writing experience and likely also poorer results. Spreading out the work on an essay assignment across time is just easier and more productive.