Reading Past Milton

Photo by Ian Barsby on Unsplash

I finally got around (read: scheduled time) to reading Zadie Smith's excellent essay titled The Art of the Impersonal Essay. While I don't necessarily connect to her fiction, I think she's a very clear thinker, and I admire that. I've taken notes. I don't think I was taught how to write an essay at school, and in university, I mostly learned how to write academic papers, which aren't exactly the same.

I loved the permission she gave writers to write essays from the stance of thinking out loud about and trying to make sense of something we care about.

I also thought that name-dropping John Milton and William Blake absolutely constitutes "demanding to see... identifying papers in the opening paragraph". Thinking it isn't is a clear consequence of having grown up in an English education system. I'm really glad I kept reading past it. But ten years ago, I probably would have assumed this essay wasn't for me because I didn't know who these people were.