The Essays Only You Can Write

This textbook leads students through three main writing assignments: a personal essay, an essay based on texts, and a research essay. The author encourages a leap toward the personal, and guides students in discovering and honing their personal instincts and perspectives.

The Essays Only You Can Write offers a perspective on essay writing that spotlights a writer’s uniqueness. Resisting the perception that personal and academic writing are at odds with one another, it treats the impulse to write “personally” as potential fuel for a variety of writing purposes.

The book encourages students to think like academics—pursuing their enthusiasms, trusting their ideas, and questioning their conclusions—by leading them through three main writing assignments: a personal essay, an essay based on texts, and a research essay. Each chapter offers exercises and strategies for various stages in the pre-writing, drafting, and revision processes. Freewriting; extensive attention to planning; devising a structure and order of ideas that both promote and reflect engagement with a topic; developing rhetorical awareness and knowledge of conventions; and an advocacy for expressive, socially-responsible writing—all are central elements of the text’s instruction.

By acknowledging the emotions inherent in the writing process, many of which can muddle thinking—I don’t want anyone to see this; what if I make mistakes?; what if the writing isn’t good?; I don’t want to be critiqued; etc.—Papoulis helps beginning college writers to navigate the psychological as well as the technical roadblocks that can get in the way of their best personal and academic writing.

Instructor Resources covering all aspects of the book are included on a passcoded webpage.