“Black Means Run” (2022-2023)

I started this essay as a rant. Long, convoluted sentences strung together by loose ties and rushed comparisons took the place of cohesion and good pacing. I was pouring my soul into every paragraph like a diary entry, and unsurprisingly, I lost direction. By my second to last draft, all I had to show for myself was an amalgamation of witty one-liners and self-indulgent sentences. They were effective and impressive quotes, but that was all they were: quotes.

I was used to writing essays in this way—depending on stream-of-consciousness ideas and hoping I’d land back on my feet. I was essentially constructing my essays with the writing first and form later. Likewise, there was so much I had to say about the different subject matters in “Black Means Run” that it was challenging for me to whittle down my ideas into one concise argument. As you can imagine, killing your darlings in this kind of situation is difficult. Plus, my proclivity for prioritizing flowery language over cohesive language made it nearly impossible to do so.

“Writing the Essay” encouraged me to confront the way I was writing. As the semester went on and I worked on more essays, I began to structure my writing around my argument and not the other way around. The assignments we were given encouraged us to imagine a dialogue between the authors we were referencing, categorizing quotes by their vocabulary, and distilling essay paragraphs into single sentences helped us prioritize form over language. By the end of the semester, I was able to revisit “Black Means Run” more effectively, rebuilding it from its bones out and judging which of my sentences should be kept versus which ones should be let go.

Kailyn Williams, ‘25, hailing from northern New Jersey, recently transferred to Steinhardt in pursuit of a concert composition and film scoring double major. Originally a politics and journalism student at the College of Arts and Science, Kailyn has a passion for writing in both the literary and musical senses, as well as an unshakable love for reading, history, and fashion (ideally, all three simultaneously). Kailyn’s essay aims to shed light on her experiences—and the experiences of black people like her—of feeling alienated in academic and artistic spaces, feeling unseen and unheard in her own country, and the hideous consequences of both phenomena.