Every year, more than 5,000 students across six schools at NYU—the College of Arts and Sciences, the Tisch School of the Arts, Tandon School of Engineering, the Silver School of Social Work, the Rory Meyers School of Nursing, and the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development—take a course within the Expository Writing Program. It’s worth pausing to think how much writing and thinking this amounts to. If each student wrote two essays a semester (a very conservative estimate), then at least 10,000 essays were produced in the course of two semesters. 500 of those essays were submitted to Mercer Street, and 19 were selected for publication. 

That’s quite a winnowing. These essays were selected because faculty readers and the Mercer Street selection committee thought each one did a great job making rhetorical moves that other students could learn from. So as you read, consider how the essayists published here execute the fundamental tasks of any essay: pose a problem, marshall their research, and analyze their evidence, how they anticipate your needs as a reader, and develop an idea of their own. Pay attention to how they surprise you. What would it look like if you were to make similar choices in your own writing? What forms of permission and rigor do they offer?  These published students were given their own edition of Mercer Street to read a year ago, and their submissions were reviewed by faculty who also had past issues of Mercer Street on their mind. There is a tradition of reading and writing here that, over time, has developed into an essayistic micro-climate. You will go on to write a wide range of academic papers at college, and experiment with many different disciplinary forms of the essay, so it helps to think about what genre expectations these essays are projecting, what kinds of audience they are imagining. How have they anticipated you? 

Writing can feel like a solitary affair, and is often framed as an individual wrestling with their talent and fear on the screen or page. Sometimes it is just that: we might experience a sudden rush of excitement at a sentence we’ve written, a connection we’ve made. We need to celebrate the achievements of the nineteen students published here: they have invested vast amounts of time and energy in thinking as carefully as they have about how these essays work, in the pacing of their argument, and in the rhythm of their words. We can also acknowledge the mountains of words these essays rest on. These students heard other paragraphs read out loud by other classmates, saw the response their own words had on others, conferenced with their professors, and received their professor’s written feedback. Their words took shape in an often unnoticed environment of constant editorial echolocation. This is why EWP also honors our students who have been crucial in creating a classroom community of writers with the Josh Goldfaden Award; these students helped their peers understand that, as it is with all writing that goes out into the world, there is a rope of collaboration running into and out of our solitary pages that makes it clear that writing is a deeply social experience. Once accepted, these essays were fact-checked and edited by our student editors Lydia Mason, Hope Rangaswami, and Jules Talbot, in a process managed by Professors Bill Morgan and Kat Carlson, and published online by Richard Larson. These people have never met the students, but as Professor Carlson notes, the editorial process creates its own intimate acquaintance. 

As you read these essays and prepare to write your own, it might help to remind yourself that you are not alone in any of this. In turn, as you draft your essays, you will start to discern the shape of the rope you’re weaving for your own reader(s), inviting them into your world. What you create will count in ways that you can and can’t anticipate. This can be exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure. Buckle up! 

—Jenni Quilter, Executive Director of the Expository Writing Program