Hot take: All essays are “braided.” The act of weaving together seemingly disparate story elements into a coherent statement or takeaway is innate to the essay form at its most classical. What most half-baked essays fail to accomplish is the synthesis—the creation of something new from those at-first unrelated ingredients. This is achieved by intelligent structure and style.

When we write personal essays, we can define ‘structure’ as how we organize our story, and ‘style’ as how we tell that story. Put another way: the former can be called ‘shape,’ and the latter ‘texture.’ A strong sense of both must be present in our prose to minimize the gap between what we mean to say and what the reader takes away from our writing—or, at the very least, write something coherent and understandable. The craft techniques we will learn in class (the two-turns structure, the ladder of abstraction, “braiding,” etc.) are not the end-all-be-all methods of personal essay writing, but they will be handy tools in your repertoire when you are drafting and editing your work.

This class is for writers of all levels and no prior writing experience is required; a history of reading essays of various forms is recommended. The class is composed of short seminars, generative exercises, and open discussions about structure, style, and how to braid the two in our writing. We will also review readings from Roy Peter Clark, Jane Hu, Aldous Huxley, Helen Rosner, and Jess Zimmerman. Students will leave the class with a potential structure/outline for a personal essay, plus a stylistic tool kit to improve their essayistic prose and communication skills. We will end with a short Q&A, time permitting.

About the Instructor

Matt Ortile is an editor and writer who has taught creative writing seminars for the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, Tin House, Kundiman, Poets & Writers, PEN America, and elsewhere. He is the author of the essay collection The Groom Will Keep His Name and a co-editor of the essay anthology Body Language: Writers on Identity, Physicality, and Making Space for Ourselves. He is also an editor for print and digital at Condé Nast Traveler, and was previously the executive editor of the literary magazine Catapult prior to its closure.

Beyond the Braided Essay: Developing Structure and Style in a Personal Essay, 2 session craft and generative class with Matt Ortile