Well Wrought Urns

In my last post I talked about how disordered the world seems because my vision is temporarily impaired.  At the same time (and somewhat ironically), in class last week I tried to describe how one might think about the overall shape of an essay--and all the different parts of an essay--as a building.  In other words, I was trying to provide a visual metaphor for thinking about essay structures and organization. 


Because I think about and read and write essays often, this kind of thinking comes fairly naturally to me.  In my building metaphor, I suggested that we might see the elevator shaft as the central thesis, while each floor could be a different source (or a different aspect of the same source).  The ever changing view from each floor evokes the way an essay can look at different angles of a problem--explore a complication or an implication, acknowledge the validity of a counterargument, or turn to look more closely at, and define or explain, what a key term means. The building metaphor also allows us to think, importantly, about the way our view of the initial problem is very different when we are at the top of the building than when we were on the ground floor.


People sometimes compare essays to roads.  Again we can see again the way the image allows us to see  development along a  pathway, but one that allows for side trips down smaller pathways, an ever changing view, and finally a destination that is not the same place we started.

When I think about my own writing and revising process, however, I most often think about my draft as a lump of clay that has to be smoothed and shaped; at some places odd bits of clay must be tossed aside while at others fresh clay needs to be added.  The traditional shape of a vase works well with the idea that an essay opens itself, by the end, to some new perspectives, while remaining closely bound to a central argument.  I'm thinking here of the way vases narrow at the neck and then bloom open again; in fact vases do that twice--starting with a foot (motive?), narrowing a bit (thesis?) and then opening up most fully in the middle (where I imagine the fullest discussions of a topic to occur).


But, all roads are not straight, and all buildings are not modern, straight up and down skyscrapers and all vases are not symmetrical.  What does your essay look like to you?