If you've taken wrt150, or even if you took it somewhere else, you have probably written a narrative essay mdash an essay that takes the form of a personal story arising from some sort of personal conflict. The resolution or lack thereof in a narrative essay often leads to the main idea behind the essay. An essay about the death of a loved one is often a tribute to that person, or it's about loss, mortality, or something else depending on the particular essay and author in question. While the narrative essay functions as does a piece of prose fiction, the lyric essay works off many of the principles that drive a poem. The lyric essay favors juxtaposition and imagery over a logically linear sequence.

Sometimes a lyric essay will ask questions in order to get the reader thinking about what's at stake, the message being the unanswerability of a question rather than a statement of fact or truth. And when it's working most like a poem, a lyric essay will present the reader with its material and leave that material to speak for itself. John d'agata, lyric essay editor for the seneca review, has helped to define this weird hybrid form of essay by describing it: the lyric essay takes the subjectivity of the personal essay and the objectivity of the public essay, and conflates them both intoo a literary form athat relies on both art and fact mdash on imagination and observation, rumination and argumentation, human faith and human perception. The result of this ironic parentage is that lyric essays seek answers, yet they seldom seem to find them. In miller in this sense, the lyric essay doesn't necessarily give up its answers easily. This doesn't mean that the writer doesn't know what it's about mdash on the contrary, the writer will have made a series of conscious decisions so that the piece will work efficiently to do what it is that the writer wants it to do.

The collage essay is a form of lyric essay that depends on fragmentation, imagery, juxtaposition, and metaphor to get its work done. These sections are disjunct in terms of their content mdash i might have a section about the diffifculties between me and my girlfriend, a section about kitty litter, a section about old toys, and a section about star wars. The sections don't necessarily hold together content wise, but they might hold together thematically.

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A traditional academic essay is typically split into paragraphs, but not much more than that. A lyric essay is split into sections, each of which is separated by a space break created by a double return stroke. This space break signals the end of one section and sets the reader up to accept the next few words as the beginning of an autonomous section that may or may not carry on from the previous section. Or how a chapter might follow one character for a bit before stopping to follow another for a bit mdash the change of pov might be signified by a space break.

The space break is emptiness, vacancy, a cleansing of the palate between courses so that we may begin anew with whatever is coming up next. Regardless of how you think about it, the disjunction between the diffrent sections can be jarring and disorienting for the reader. It's like having a conversation and listening to someone change the subject before they seem to finish what they are saying. But as we'll see, it's this disorientation that makes the collage work mdash the attentive reader will see the essay begin to snowball and blossom into a larger piece whose meaning is created through juxtaposition of the sections.

By taking disparate objects and insisting that they are part of the same whole, we find meaning. In order to figure out how all of this works, it would be helpful to have a model. The table below is the outline of an essay that i might write as a collage essay. Each section would be separated from the others with a space break mdash note that this is different from saying that each section is one paragraph. Imagine what this might look like if i were to write it out: by richard nordquist. In english, is professor emeritus of rhetoric and english at armstrong atlantic state university and the author of two grammar and composition textbooks for college freshmen, writing exercises macmillan and passages: a writer 39 s guide st.

Read more a collage essay also known as a discontinuous essay or patchwork essay generally forgoes conventional transitions. Leaving it up to the reader to locate or impose connections between the fragmented observations. 34 collage is a term derived from art and refers to a picture made up of pieces of found objects: scraps of newspaper, bits of old cane backing, a gum wrapper, lengths of string, tin cans. A collage can can be made entirely of found objects, or it can be a combination of the objects and the artists 39 s own drawing.

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But instead of gathering scraps of newspaper and string, they arrange scattered pieces of language. Heath, 1984 34 many feature stories in daily and especially sunday newspapers drift into the collage form for example, a neighborhood in brooklyn written up in a series of bits that present rather than explain: portraits of people and of terrain, street corner scenes, mini narratives, dialogues, and reminiscent monologues. 34 you might make a collage essay on the causes of the french revolution that consists entirely of stories, portraits, and scenes. You would have to choose and arrange your fragments in such a way that they tell why the french revolution happened as it did. Or you might have one that consists entirely of dialogues: between nobles, peasants, middle class city dwellers, and thinkers of the period between people who came before and those who came afterwards.

Of course you may have to revise and polish some of these fragments to make them as good as possible perhaps even write some more bits to give at least a minimal coherence. 34 peter elbow, writing with power: techniques for mastering the writing process. White 39 s essay 34 hot weather 34 morning is so closely associated with brisk affairs, music with evening and day 39 s end, that when i hear a three year old dance tune crooned upon the early air while shadows still point west and the day is erect in the saddle, i feel faintly decadent, at loose ends, as though i were in the south seas a beachcomber waiting for a piece of fruit to fall, or for a brown girl to appear naked from a pool. The heavy pauses between his paragraphs, could they find a translator, would make a book for the ages.

34 always the struggle of the human soul is to break through the barriers of silence and distance into companionship. Friendship, lust, love, art, religion we rush into them pleading, fighting, clamoring for the touch of spirit laid against our spirit. 34 why else would you be reading this fragmentary page you with the book in your lap? you 39 re not out to learn anything, certainly. You just want the healing action of some chance corroboration, the soporific of spirit laid against spirit. Even if you had read only to crab about everything i say, your letter of complaint is a dead give away: you are unutterably lonely or you wouldn 39 t have taken the trouble to write it. Harper amp row, 1944 collage in joan didion 39 s essay 34 slouching towards bethlehem 34 34 at three thirty that afternoon max, tom, and sharon placed tabs under their tongues and sat down together in the living room to wait for the flash. During the next four hours a window banged once in barbara 39 s room and about five thirty some children had a fight on the street.