Some books on ‘how to write’ will tell you that, to get good, you just need to reduce your favorite writers down to reusable formulas. This was the gist I got from Elements of Eloquence. There is a standard way people think about “rhetorical forms,” but it feels too convenient to dull down creative expression into a dictionary of mad libs. If you merely imitate the syntax of your favorite authors, you’re actually not so different from an LLM.

If you use flowery repetition because Joan Didion does, and you thought it was pretty, and it’s something you think good writers should do, but you don’t truly get when, why, or how to pull it off, you might sound more robotic than you think. It’s hard to differentiate AI writing from bad writing. They have the same problem: they replicate patterns without understanding them beyond the surface.

I bring this up because—now that I’m done with the lift of launching Essay Architecture (.com)—I’m resuming what is the infinite game of this project: reading and deconstructing great essays.1

Despite what anyone tells you—especially me—the simplest way to get good at writing essays, I think, is to read more “good” essays.2 Here’s a reading list of 100 I’ve put together.3 You really do gain a lot just from exposure, but once you get a habit going, it helps to consider how you read, too; the right analytical lens (along with deliberate practice) can unlock even more.

Let’s look at an excerpt, but we’ll go beyond “here are some repetition templates,” and into “in what situation would a writer do this?” Here’s the opening four lines of “Goodbye to All That,” a 1967 essay by Joan Didion.

“IT IS EASY to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was.”

This is the Hook, and hooks are hard4 because they have multiple jobs: they have to open a Tension, preview the Thesis, and establish the literary Tone. So naturally, a good hook often contains an insane density of patterns. There are 11 patterns in here, almost half the system,5 but I want to focus on the obvious one: Repetition.

I’m sure some of the loopage popped out to you, but the best way to deconstruct something is to visualize it. You only have so much bandwidth to make sense of a wall of text. By breaking sentences into vertical fragments, like a prose-poem, you see its modules. By spacing them with horizontal indents, you see how parts align, and how thought burrows inward. By overlaying shapes, lines, and colors, you comprehend the relationships almost instantly. When prose is in its natural form, the patterns are invisible; to understand something, restructure it so the patterns are obvious.

This is the practice of architectural diagramming,6 but applied to essays. Now read it again, and notice the nuances of repetition you might have missed before:

So, how do you absorb this? How would you learn to think and write like this if you want your own writing to have a similar quality? (I picked this example because it’s far too complicated to reduce to a simple equation.) It’s not about parroting rhetorical devices, but understanding how the devices help the writer articulate and augment what it is they’re trying to say.7

I love this example because it shows that repetition is more than a trick for whimsical prose-poetry, its structural rebar too. Without looping phrases to expose the logic of her lists, these elaborate ideas would collapse into complexity. A repeated phrase serves as a variable to connect two non-adjacent ideas. In sentence 2, when she says “I can,” goes on a riff, and then says “but I cannot,” you know what’s about to come will contrast what was just said. Sentence 3 is 98 words, 3x longer than her average sentence in this essay, but she uses an “and” stamp to divide it into three manageable ideas. And, in both s2 and s3, the subdivisions have their own nested repetition schemes! There are devices inside devices inside devices, all to the end of containing chaos.

If8 you find yourself in a situation where you find yourself needing to pack a significant amount of detail into a single sentence,9 then you might want to expose the structure of your ideas through repetition. This lets repetition work like a punctuation device, helping the reader get the relation between ideas in as compact a form as possible. Of these 184 words, 55 words are “looped” (30% of words repeat!). Repetition is not just a jewel, it’s a compression device. It lets you travel far without feeling tired.

There are many types10 of repetition, and also, many jobs of the pattern: to compare, to connect, to enumerate, to emphasize, to expose, to burrow, to anchor, to crown, etc.11 Within each of my 27 patterns is a whole universe of types, and the goal of my Essay Architecture book is to map everything as I read and deconstruct.

There are 2 different ways you can take part in this:

• Free subscribers will keep getting posts like this. I’ll always include links to the original essay, along with at least one visualized example of a pattern, so you can both see it and understand why you would use it.

• If you want to upgrade to a paid subscriber, you’ll be able to click into any of these pattern pages to find definitions, theory, exercises, rubrics, and a growing set of examples. From “Goodbye to All That,” I’ve already added 3 more visualized examples to the Repetition page (with more notes to upload). If you want to zoom out before committing, check out the Table of Contents, my primer on the system, or my free essay on the Voice dimension.

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Footnotes:

11

I’m inspired by Richard Serra’s—a sculptor’s—verb list, and I like the idea of classifying examples through actions that are easy to remember. I am making a conscious decision to stay away from the classical names for rhetorical devices: “anaphora,” “epizeuxis,” “polyptoton,” etc. 2 of these 3 three words are getting the red typo squiggly in the Substack editor because that’s how infrequently they’re used. Of course, all the phenomenon these Latin words describe are real, but they are as anti-mnemonic as it gets. If you’re trying to teach writers dozens of concepts, the last thing you want to do is give them multi-syllabic, pompous names. If you want these devices to be remembered and used, they should be named after common verbs, and should strive to be two-syllables or under. We have to start over. See Richard Serra:

Read more

Links:

• “Against Interpretation” (1964) online

• Sontag’s 1966 book of essays, which includes this piece and 27 other essays (for $11)

I went into “Against Interpretation” thinking Susan Sontag would hate my project. Essay Architecture is about quantifying and deconstructing the essay, and so I imagine she would have considered me a hyper-interpreter (which the title clearly says she’s against). It turns out, you can’t trust Sontag’s titles (“Notes on Camp” is not about summer camp). To my surprise, the end of her essay calls for a “vocabulary of forms,” which is uncannily, exactly what I’m doing. Maybe we would’ve gotten along.

Sontag became known in October of 1964 from her essay, “Notes on Camp,” (in case you don’t know, “camp” is a type of irony). A month later, she released Against Interpretation. This went on to be the title and feature of her first book of essays in ‘66, and it set her up to shape the field of criticism.

Her essay rails against interpreting the intentions of the artists.

The ultimate sin is for a critic to skew a work of art: “Look, don’t you see that X really means A.” It’s an act of translation. The worst kind of interpretation is one that ignores the literal dimension of the work (form), and instead treats it as a mere vessel to convey a statement (content). She shows us this impulse through history, and how different movements warped art to fit their own agenda. 

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”

Interpretation impoverishes the world by setting up “a shadow world of meanings.” It makes some artists self-conscious, it makes other artists flee towards irony and abstraction that’s harder to criticize, and it dulls the sensibilities of society.

Sontag’s proposal isn’t to escape all interpretation, but to change it. She calls for a shift from “hermeneutics” (analyzing meaning) to “erotics” (analyzing the sensory effects that emerge from form). Don’t tell us what it means, but tell us what it is.

“What kind of criticism, of commentary on the arts, is desirable today? … What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more thorough descriptions of form would silence. … What is needed is a vocabulary—a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary—for forms.”

It feels like Essay Architecture is a direct response to this call to action. I’m building a non-prescriptive vocabulary of form for essays. I’m not analyzing writing to fit a political, historical, or moral agenda. I have no intention (nor ability) to psychoanalyze Sontag’s subconscious desires. This isn’t Pitchfork, either.

I simply pay attention to how an essay makes me feel, I notice how that relates to what’s objectively on the page, and then compare that to the patterns I’ve noticed across all the other essays I’ve read.

Given the alignment, what better essay than Against Interpretation to kick off this Review series? (I’m launching my critique series by critiquing a critique of critique).

So how does this work? 

• For every essay I read, I score it across 27 patterns—1 through 5—which you can see in the gray rectangles above. 

• Notice how patterns are in groups of 3? They come together to shape 9 elements, which you’ll see in the colored squares above. 

• These three elements also ladder up into a dimension (it’s triads all the way up and down). An essay has three dimensions: idea, form, and voice. Ideas have centrality, form is about linearity, and voice is a texture. 

Below, I’ll break down a strength and weakness of each dimension. You can follow Essay Architecture for detailed chapters on each of the patterns, but you can enjoy the write-up below without knowing the intricacies of the system.

Sontag has a bold thesis that challenges centuries of art and criticism, and it’s pretty simple: don’t interpret meaning, focus on form and experience. The essay is 4,019 words long, and not only is the thesis legible throughout the whole thing, but it’s supported by a stunning array of material.

Sontag died in 2004 with over 15,000 books in her NYC apartment. She was an avid reader, and this essay is a display of her encyclopedic knowledge. There are at least 49 separate examples she references, meaning she drops a new source, on average, every 82 words. Sometimes, it’s just a machine-gun list of name drops:

“Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Rilke, Lawrence, Gide… The list is endless of those around whom thick encrustations of interpretation have taken hold.” 

This might be an example where a strength and weakness are related. While the range is incredible, there’s no hierarchy. No one example was more important than the next. It’s missing a microcosm. The most detailed example is possibly about Kafka, but there’s no mention of him outside of this one paragraph:

“The work of Kafka, for example, has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory see desperate revelations of Kafka’s fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thralldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafkas as a religious allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Joseph K. in the Trial is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God …”

While there is a thesis that unifies her material, there is no central example to give the mind an anchor in complexity. There are two options here: she could zoom into one artist (ie: Kafka), or, she could put herself onto the page.

As rich as her cultural knowledge is, Sontag isn’t a character in her own essay. I have limited knowledge about her life; I’m curious to know more, but this essay doesn’t reveal anything. I’m not implying she should veer into a confessional mini-memoir. I’m saying that even 3 paragraphs would round this out.

Why does Sontag feel this way about interpretation? What brought her to this conclusion? What motivated her to write this essay? She says that critics shouldn’t speculate on the motives of the author, but if the author isn’t vulnerable enough to share her motives, the reader will naturally wonder.

Might this essay have anything to do with the fact that in 1963—the year before Against Interpretation—she released her first novel, “The Benefactor,” to mixed reviews? Were critics putting words in her mouth? I don’t know, and it’s not my job to interpret. It’s her job to tell us. 

The void of the personal dimension is common—sometimes mandatory—in journalism or academia, but this was published in a counter-cultural magazine (The Evergreen Review), alongside Beat poetry and experimental essays. The choice to leave herself off the page was a personal one. 

Unlike her amazing sources—which another well-read intellectual could replicate—her own life is a reservoir of material that no one else has access to. Experience is the research that makes an essay uniquely yours.

This essay was a revelation to me on the second read, and to me that’s a hint that there’s an underlying problem with form. The introduction didn’t give me a frame to process the flurry of detail. What’s going on?

The essay is made up of 10 sections, and the sequence makes total sense. It starts back in ancient Greece, and moves forward through the Bible, the Enlightenment, and the 20th century. I outlined the structure below, so you can quickly see how she’s moving through material:

1. Origins: Since Plato, we’ve asked art to justify its own existence.

2. The problem: Art for the sake of interpreting it misses the point.

3. Why?: Historically, people used interpretation to fit old art into new agendas.

4. Consequence: The intellect devours art, creating a world of shadow meanings.

5. Examples: Works of genius aren’t seen directly, but as elaborate allegories.

6. Reaction 1: Some artists get self-conscious and try to control interpretation.

7. Reaction 2: Others escape interpretation through irony, abstraction & parody.

8. Solution: A better form of criticism would look at form instead of meaning.

9. The Desired Effect: We can recover our senses and the power of experience.

10. Call to Action: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

The problem is, I was blind to her thesis until section 7, and it wasn’t fully clear until 8. A better introduction would have laid the contours of her thesis. I’m not saying the essay needs to reveal her whole point of view upfront. There’s value in surprise. Save the full thesis for the conclusion. But she could have hinted that a better kind of interpretation exists without spoiling the details. This gives me, the reader, a goal (I anticipate the conclusion to learn her discovery).

So while the structure is solid, the storytelling is weaker. Structure and storytelling are opposing forces; one orients you, the other teases. Without opening loops or setting stakes out of the gate, the reader has to muck through a lot of detail without knowing why they should care.

One of my favorite quotes on writing is nested at the end of this essay. 

“What is important now is to recover our senses.
We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” 

Those same three words (see, hear, feel) were also used by Joseph Conrad in 1897. Before I learned about either of these quotes, my voice dimension was structured with the same three elements: sight, sound, spirit. There’s something to it. Reading is abstract; and so prose wants to stretch itself to hit us at the level of our nervous system. This is why words want to sound musical off the lips, render hallucinations in the mind’s eye, and give you the chills up and down.

As well as she articulates this, I wouldn’t call this essay a sensory experience. There are a few moments when the ears and eyes turn on. (She’s great with repetition. She’s great with subtext. Not only is she good with imagery, but she weaves motifs of shadow and smoke through the essay.) Still, the default tone of this piece is dense and academic.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with academic writing; in fact, I think much of the essays I read could use more research, rare words, and abstract concepts. The problem is in the density. Try reading these two sentences out loud to hear what I mean.

“Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory persists. Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still comes first.”

There are too many multi-syllable words in a row, and too many abstract words per sentence. The Flesch-Kincaid score—which is a metric for readability—puts this at an 18th grade reading level (for context, this essay is at a 7th grade reading level). Sontag’s sentences are all extremely precise, but at the expense of rhythm, rhyme, concision, and tone. 

Despite some occasional elegance, this essay is work to read through. Similar to philosophy writing or architectural theory (the worst of the worst), it assumes and demands a lot from the reader.

Some might argue that this is intended for an erudite audience, but I’d argue that this attitude is laziness. An essay can simultaneously appeal to experts and beginners, the in-crowd and the out-crowd. If she slowed down and rendered her abstract concepts in more sensory terms—which is the exact solution she calls for—it would speak to both groups. Sensory prose is more legible to newcomers, and it transcends jargon and cliche to create a novel experience for even the most well-versed art critic.

Against Interpretation is a historically important essay, with a powerful and well-backed thesis. Her call for a “dictionary of forms” resonates with me, and it’s an idea I’m personally acting on. I wouldn’t be surprised if much of my thinking stems from her influence (maybe my architecture professors read Sontag). I see my project as an extension of her call to analyze what art is rather than what it means.

All that said, in terms of the formal quality of this essay, I’d say that it’s middle-of-the-pack “good.” I give it a 6.2 out of 10. This is not as bad as it sounds. It is not an F, it’s a 3.3 out of 5. While certain patterns are profoundly good, this score is a proxy for “formal completeness.” It’s a measure of how well-rounded it’s doing across all of the formal moves I’ve seen across the essays I’ve read. 

The lack of a personal narrative, paired with her dense prose, creates some distance. I’m curious to learn more about her ideas and life, and will keep reading her essays in search of other sides of her craft (open to recommendations!).

While I think it’s helpful to study and edit form from an analytical lens, it’s all for the sake of creating and consuming from a place of the immediate, the felt, and the seen. We use the mind to transcend the mind. It’s worth studying form so that we can poke into the realm of the weird, the mysterious, the strange, the confessional, the experimental, and still make sense. She says, “good art has the capacity to make us nervous.” I’ll close on the opening line of her essay:

“The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory magic; art was an instrument of ritual.”

Let’s riff:

• What did you think of Against Interpretation?

• What’s your main takeaway from this review?

• Any feedback on the format of this?

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Everything is scored using my Essay Architecture framework. A score has no correlation with how historically important the writer is, or how much I like the subject matter. The score here (out of 10) measure it’s well-roundedness. How well does it touch on the 27 patterns around idea, form, and voice?

9.9 — David Foster Wallace, “How Tracey Austin Broke My Heart,” 2008. L. B.
9.9 — Jennifer Senior, “The Ones We Sent Away,” 2023. B.
9.7 — Leslie Jamison, “The Empathy Exams,” 2014. L. B.
9.7 — Meghan O’Gieblyn, “Homeschool,” 2017. L. B.
9.6 — James Mcauley, “Memory’s Cellar,” 2023. B.
9.5 — George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” 1936. L. B.
9.4 — David Foster Wallace, “The View From Mrs. Thompson’s,” 2001. L. B.
9.3 — Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse,” 1982. L. B.
9.3 — Alexander Chee, “On Becoming an American Writer,” 2018. B.
9.2 — Leslie Jamison, “52 Blue,” 2014. L. B.
9.2 — Jonathan Gleason, “Proxemics,” 2023. B.
9.1 — David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” 2004. L. B.

8.8 — Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook,” 1966. L. B.
8.7 — Ursula Le Guin, “The Death of the Book,” 2012. L. B.
8.7 — Umberto Ecco, “Swallowing the cell phone,” 2008. B.
8.6 — Brian Doyle, “Joyas Voladoras,” 2004. L. B.
8.5 — David Foster Wallace, “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” 2006. L. B.
8.4 — Joan Didion, “Los Angeles Notebook,” 1968. L. B.
8.4 — Jerald Walker, “It’s Hard Out Here for a Memoirist,” 2023. L. B.
8.3 — Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 1841. L. B.
8.3 — Virginia Woolf, “The Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” 1927. L. B.
8.3 — E.B. White, “Good-bye to Forty-eighth Street,” 1957. B.
8.3 — Cynthia Ozick, “Existing Things,” 1996.
8.3 — David Sedaris, “Cyclops,” 1997. L. B.
8.3 — Amanda Montell, “Repeat After Me … ,” 2021. B.
8.3 — Sallie Tisdale, “Mere Belief,” 2003. L. B.
8.2 — Chuck Klosterman, “I Assume It’s Going to Be Fun,” 2009. L. B.
8.2 — Nicole Graev Lipson, “As They Like It,” 2023. B.
8.0 — Michel de Montaigne, “On three kinds of social intercourse,” 1585. L. B.
8.0 — E.B. White, “Here Is New York," 1949. L. B.
8.0 — David Sedaris, “Chipped Beef,” 1997. B.

7.9 — Virginia Woolf, “The Docks of London,” 1931. L. B.
7.8 — E.B. White, “Once More to the Lake,” 1941. L. B.
7.8 — Chuck Klosterman, “Like Regular Music, Except Good,” 2009. L. B.
7.8 — Brock Clarke, “Woodstove,” 2023. B.
7.7 — Michel de Montaigne, “On Idleness,” 1574. L. B.
7.7 — Virginia Woolf, “The Sun and the Fish,” 1928. B.
7.7 — Brian Doyle, “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever,” 2008. L. B.
7.7 — Hilton Als, “I am the Happiness of This World,” 2013. L. B.
7.6 — Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” 1844. L. B.
7.6 — Michael W. Clune, “The Anatomy of Panic,” 2023. L. B.
7.5 — Sven Birkets, “Brave Face,” 2007. B.
7.4 — Chuck Klosterman, “Rock VORP,” 2011. L. B.
7.4 — Susan Sontag, “Camus’ Notebooks,” 1963. L. B.
7.4 — Umberto Ecco, “Is Harry Potter Bad for Adults?,” 2003. B.
7.3 — Paul Graham, “The Age of the Essay,” 2004. L.
7.3 — Roxanne Gay, “On Sitting,” 2018.
7.3 — Benjamin Labatut, “The Gods of Logic,” 2024. B.
7.2 — Alexander Smith, “Dreamthorp,” 1863. L. B.
7.2 — Joan Didion, “I Can’t Get That Monster Out Of My Head,” 1964. L. B.
7.2 — Leslie Jamison, “Rehearsals,” 2019. L. B.
7.2 — Jennifer Sinor, “The Lives of Bryan,” 2023. L. B.
7.1 — Walter Benjamin, “The Lisbon Earthquake,” 1931. L. B.
7.1 — Jia Tolentino, “The Pitfalls and the Potentials of New Minimalism,” 2020, L.
7.0 — David Foster Wallace, “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” 1996. L. B.

6.9 — Kathleen Alcott, “Trapdoor,” 2023. B.
6.8 — Ursula Le Guin, “[Review of] Margaret Atwood: Moral Disorder,” 2006. L. B.
6.8 — Ilan Stevens, “Dictionary Days,” 2005. B.
6.8 — Zadie Smith, “The American Exception,” 2020. L. B.
6.7 — Teju Cole, “Reframing Vermeer,” 2023. L. B.
6.6 — Phillip Lopate, “Experience Necessary,” 2013. B.
6.6 — Kurt Vonnegut, “I have been called a Ludite,” 2005. L. B.
6.5 — James Baldwin, “Creative Practice,” 1962. L.
6.5 — Umberto Ecco, “More thoughts on cell phones,” 2005. B.
6.5 — Manvir Singh, “Don’t Believe What They’re Telling You…” 2024. L.
6.4 — Jenisha Watts, “Jenisha from Kentucky,” 2023. L. B.
6.3 — John McPhee, “Draft No. 4,” 2013. L. B.
6.3 — John McPhee, “Structure,” 2013. L. B.
6.3 — Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Architect,” 1900. B.
6.3 — James Whorton Jr., “An Upset Place,” 2023. B.
6.2 — Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 1966. L. B.
6.2 — Ursula Le Guin, “Staying Awake,” 2008. L. B.
6.2 — Phillip Lopate, “Portrait of My Body,” 1996. L. B.
6.0 — Carl H. Klaus, “Towards a Collective Poetics of Essays,” 2012. B.
6.0 — Annie Dillard, “A Writer in The World,” 1989. L. B.
5.9 — Zadie Smith, “Something to Do,” 2020. B.
5.6 — Mary Cappello, “Tactless,” 2010. B.
5.6 — George Orwell, “Why I Write,” 1946. L. B.
5.6 — Michel de Montaigne, “On fear,” 1571. L. B.

L = Link to read the essay online.
B = Book of essays that includes this essay.
As I write reviews, the essay titles will get hyperlinks.

FAQ

How does the scoring system work?

The goal of Essay Architecture is to show you the secret architecture of great essays. After reading thousands of drafts and essays, I’ve noticed these 27 patterns across the medium. All of these concepts already exist, but I put them into an architectural hierarchy and created a rubric to score each pattern 1 out of 5 (from missing to mastery).

Each essay gets a score out of 135, which is converted to a 1-10 scale. I’d say anything over a 7.8 is great, and anything over a 5.5 is good (I won’t list anything that’s not good).

The score is a proxy for “formal completeness.” It indicates its well-roundedness. How well does it cover all the known components that great essays are known to have? Some famous writers are masters in some formal elements, but weaker in others. This system aims to be blind to history, culture, politics, and gender. It holds no heroes. It defines a quality standard, which is vanishingly rare in our culture.

Isn’t quality subjective?

Well, yes and no. Of course, every reader is different. There’s no telling how someone will respond to an essay at a personal, cultural, or moral level. But when it comes to formal qualities (idea, form, and voice) we can analyze any essay from the same rubric.

Despite our extreme differences, we all have a humanOS, meaning process text in a somewhat similar manner: we process words linearly; we want prose to hit our nervous system with sights, sounds, and feeling; we have limited bandwidth; we want to learn and to empathize; we have the paradoxical desire for orientation and surprise; etc.

If anything, I’d say this system is “transjective,” a fusion of objectivity and subjectivity. It objectively declares that these 27 patterns are core to every essay, but it isn’t prescriptive in how you execute. It doesn’t give you a structural formula or a title template. It doesn’t say some voices are better than others. There is extreme flexibility, and two wildly different essays can score the same.

Does this system apply to all writing?

No! Just essays. Different genres have different formal rules. A poem, a quarterly investor memo, and a memoir shouldn’t share the same rubric. Some patterns do jump across mediums, but each medium has it’s own unique collection of rules.

The essay is the most encompassing of all the genres. It lets the soul of the memoirist, the rigor of the academic, and the pen of a poet co-exist on the same page. While some break the essay into sub-genres, I think it can and should dissolve these boundaries.

How did you come up with this system?

I edit, read, and write a lot of essays. I’ll usually scribble a list of elements that are working and not working. Intermittently, I’ll combine my lists and cluster the elements into a taxonomy.

Over time, I’ve noticed 3 main clusters: ideas have centrality, form is linear, and voice is textural. I continued to group my lists into sub-points and sub-sub-points, until I got to the rubric above. 27 felt like the right level of resolution. It assembles many of the known writing moves into one framework, and each one feels essential and flexible.

There are many named rhetorical concepts with fancy Latin names (ie: anaphora, epizeuxis), but they’re too specific and inflexible. There are dozens of “types” of repetition, and no one type is better than another. While repetition is a core patten, each writer might gravitate towards different types of it.

Why are you doing this?

This is one of the ways I practice writing. In addition to logging, writing intuitively on a typewriter, and studying vocab, I read essays with an analytic eye. Carefully studying patterns lets them come out subconsciously when I write. The whole idea is to master the formal dimensions of craft, so that the patterns are invisible to both the writer and the reader.

By open-sourcing my process, I hope to make it easier for you to study essays. The above list gives you an abundance of links and books to check out. Unlike other projects around literature criticism that are political and acerbic, the goal here is to be a learning resource. It seems like essayists of our era have forked in so many directions, and this aims to unify and inspire an ideal for the medium.

How accurate are your scores?

I’ve made a habit of reading and scoring a classic essay everyday. This means I have to be relatively quick in my evaluations, and I likely make mistakes. Sometimes I take 5 minutes on a score, and sometimes I’ll take 2 hours. It depends. You should assume any score you see is +/- 5-10%. Starting in July 2024, I’ll be posting “essay reviews,” which will have the most accurate scores, along with detailed explanations.

Will you read and score my essays?

Feel free to send any essays for me to consider here. It could be your own essay or your favorite essay. I can’t promise that I’ll get to every one because I can’t predict the volume, but I do like discovering new writers. Some of my favorite essays have come from recommendations.

michael@michaeldean.site

Stats:

• 80 essays scored

• Avg. score: 7.63

• Average year written: 1976

• Median year written: 2008

• Year range: 1571 - 2024

• Breakdown:

  • Enlightenment Era (1580-1819): 4%

  • Industrial Era (1820-1945): 13%

  • Global Era (1946-1999): 20%

  • Digital Era (2000 on): 63%