As the class writes personal essays about a meal they’ve each recently had, this week we discussed John McPhee’s 2013 New Yorker essay “Structure,” which makes any number of useful points about how to build an essay. Part of the essay seems like a pep talk, especially where McPhee appears to quote himself teaching at Princeton:

‘You can build a strong, sound, and artful structure. You can build a structure in such a way that it causes people to want to keep turning pages. A compelling structure in nonfiction can have an attracting effect analogous to a story line in fiction.’ Et cetera. Et cetera. And so forth, and so on.

We’ll read McPhee’s essay “Oranges” next, something aligned with our class’s theme of food.

 

Construction by Stephen Doyle | Photograph by Grant Cornett