"Beneath the object, the physical piece of writing with its unpredictable content, is the action that produced it.....yielding to the simple desire to tell - identifies the essay." (Atwan 23)
I chose my quote by Ian Frazier, because I like the way he states it. That beneath the writing “is the action that produced it.” Before I read this quote, I never considered an essay to have action. Whether writing or reading an essay, I always pictured someone, bored out of their mind, just sitting there trying to get through this familiar, tedious assignment. I like it, because it makes an essay more than just a piece of writing or that tedious assignment that your teacher gave you. It made me think about how I as a writer, needed to convey to the reader the action that went on, the thing that inspired me to write the essay. It also made me think about and reconsider the essays that I had previously read. Where was the action? What made the writer pick this certain topic?
I agree with what he wrote. Thinking back to writing essays, there was always a time that inspiration would strike me, that was when I knew what I would write about. Those times were always action-packed. Whether I was out doing some physical work when inspiration came, or the action was me sprinting to my computer in order to get my thoughts typed up, writing an essay always involved action. I think that action occurs in the essays that I have read I just haven’t been aware that the action was there.
One thing that I can take from this quote is to look at essays with a different prospective, a more analytical prospective, and try to find the action of and in the essay. I will also try harder to convey to my readers the action beneath my essay, to move them through what I am saying. Hopefully they will feel the action that moved me to write about the subject. In feeling that action with any luck, they will be able to better understand why I wrote about that particular thing.
