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Why does rhetoric in a presidential debate, a courtroom, or a classroom tend to be so boring? Because it is based on an artificial formula: take a position and construct a systematic defense of that position, writes essayist Paul Graham at his personal Web site. "Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth," Graham says. "It's not just that you miss the subtleties this way. The real problem is that you can't change the question." But the template of the high school essay—topic sentence, then defense, then conclusion—is hammered into students' heads until writing becomes a tedious chore, nothing but "concluding remarks to the jury," Graham says.

This is not what the modern essay was invented to be in Michel de Montaigne's book of "essais." The word is French for "attempts," as in attempts to find something out (rather than begin with a given truth and then support it). This model supports the quote—which Google suggests is from Orwell—"I write to find out what I think." Writing is indeed a way to explore one's own thoughts and make discoveries about them, Graham says. "Expressing ideas helps to form them."

But the function of writing as an internal inventory has its limits. Thought craves discipline. Writing craves structure. That may be what English teachers are trying to pound into our heads with their insistence on topic sentences and such. Graham's own essay illustrates this craving; it wanders and rambles and expels some authoritative statements without any appeal to an authority or audience. Graham says writing is about digging for answers, but he doesn't dig very deep, or unearth much of value. Other recent articles on writing and inquiry do

• To live means to learn "the acknowledgement of sin and the profession of faith," and to experience "tragedy, comedy, and everything in between." To read means the same thing, says Theresa Morin in a cover story of the Lexington (Mass.) Christian Academy Bulletin entitled "A Way of Seeing: The Role of Literature in Cultivating Inquiry." "What I appreciate about literature is that it says what I can't say or haven't thought to say, and thus opens up aspects of experience, of life," an LCA English teacher tells Morin. Says B&C editor John Wilson, quoting C.S. Lewis: "When we read, we encounter an 'extension of being.' We see with someone else's eyes and heart. We connect with the inner life of other people. We'd never have those experiences and in some cases wouldn't want to. We implicitly compare their lives to our own experience and understanding." What the article doesn't address is whether classic and/or Christian literature can do this better than contemporary fiction. With its emphasis on how literature transcends time, the article suggests it is the classics that can most transform us. Excerpt/Article
• What good is reading if it doesn't change you? So asks literary critic Mark Edmundson in Poets&Writers magazine (in an excerpt of his book Why Read?), after getting student evaluations that called his course "enjoyable." "Why is the great confrontation—the rugged battle of fate where strength is born, to recall Emerson—so conspicuously missing?" asks Edmundson. "Why hadn't anyone been changed by my course?" He reflexively concludes that this is an extension of our entertainment culture, in which books and ideas are passively consumed rather than wrestled with. But why not conclude the opposite—that after watching all that TV, his students were fulfilled by delving into deep thoughts and nourishing their minds for a change? Essay

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