Readings and Thoughts on Creative Nonfiction

Author: Robert L. Root, Jr.

This piece is about how powerful segmented essays can be, yet there is no formal way to learn how to write a segmented essay. Root writes this essay as a segmented essay, and breaks it up into sections about students asking him for advice, how he teaches his class, the way segmented essays are published, an example of an essay that became more powerful as a segmented essay, and the way Dillard wrote a segmented essay, "Living Like Weasels." I think this piece does a good job of demonstrating what a segmented essay is, and also has some good examples of powerful segmented essays.

Below are a few select quotes from the piece, along with some of my thoughts regarding them.

But the first textbook I opened, which identified the piece as a "narrative essay," had eliminated all the breaks, the white spaces, that separated the different segments of the essay.

In textbooks and formal readings for students, it seems segmented essays are not encouraged or not popular, which encourages students to write more linearly.

Peter Elbow called this form the "collage" essay, referring to the technique in visual art of assembling disparate images into an integrated whole; his chapter on cut-and-paste approaches to the collage is a lonely landmark in discussions of the form.

I think this a good way of explaining how a segmented essay works. It makes it more relatable and easier to understand the concept of this type of essay.

Segmented essays don't abandon structure-rather, such essays are designed in ways that may be organic with the subject, ways that incrementally explain themselves as the reader progresses through the essay.

The author makes a point of stating that segmented essays are not completely different from linear essays. Although it is a different structure, the way it is written is still important.

The segmented essay, on the other hand, attempts a tailor-made design, a structure that may be appropriate only to itself.

What makes segmented essays special are there is more thought put into how the reader should read the essay.

The segmented essay makes demands on both the writer and the reader. It demands that the reader learn to read the structure of the essay as well as its thought.

Although it makes more demands on the reader, readers in general are very intelligent and should be able to put everything together.

I write this essay in segments. How can I explain what the segmented essay is like, or how it comes about, in an unsegmented essay?

What's interesting about this excerpt is it is an entire segment. This further emphasizes the author's point.

I let others eavesdrop on those conversations since they are more likely to discover their own designs, given what the writer intuits about the meaning of her piece, than to need me to find it for them.

I think it's interesting that by eavesdropping on other people's conversations and copying other people's ideas, writers can further develop their ideas.

But at no point in my admittedly cursory perusal of those texts do I find any advice that would help students write in the very formats they are reading.

Again, students will not learn how to write segmented essays from textbooks. For whatever reason, there is no formal text explaining how to write this way.

Oliver's essay is made up of asterisked and numbered segments; it is unlikely to be reprinted in a composition anthology.

I think this is kind of sad that because of the structure of this essay, it will most likely not be reprinted in a composition anthology.

In their college composition classes they won't be taught how to read or write segmented essays, won't learn strategies that have produced the most powerful essays of their time, won't be allowed to go beyond linearity.

Again, it's interesting that there is no formal teaching on this style of writing.