Mercer Street Student Essays Aim to Captivate Readers

By Rachel Branciforti

Mercer Street, an annual publication from the College of Arts and Science’s Expository Writing Program (EWP), features undergraduate essays chosen by lecturers and directors in the program for their mastery of fundamental thinking, writing, and creativity. Pat C. Hoy, program director and professor of English, considers them to be “a gift and a legacy” for incoming freshmen that will make their own intellectual journeys “less daunting.”
    With these essays, students are asked to reflect upon their own personal impressions of various mediums, such as movies, paintings, written texts, songs, and sculpture in order to cultivate complex ideas that will form the basis of their essays along with evidence from primary written sources. In the 2008-09 edition, one work by CAS student Kea Trevett, entitled “Mounds,” uses a series of mosaics scattered on lampposts throughout New York City and Lanford Wilson’s play The Mound Builders as well as experiences and anecdotes from her own life to explore the weight of memory and the gradual change between present and history.
    Other essays consider the poetry of Lord Byron, paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec, photography by Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan, who is an adjunct professor in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and film by Christopher Nolan. In these essays, interpretations of art are woven together and analyzed to justify and enhance the students’ discoveries made during their reading and research.
    Hoy believes that these essays help students learn the art of essay writing. They are intended to teach students how to analyze complex written and visual texts, how to reflect on the evidence they select from those texts, and how to let their reflections carry the essay’s idea from beginning to end. Hoy especially wants students to learn from these Mercer Street essays how to “captivate the reader.”