I know this is hard for moderns to wrap their minds around, but essays didn’t used to be the five-paragraph atrocities that are taught in school these days. This particular essay was done as a long-form poem composed of heroic couplets. Can you imagine turning that into a sophomore English class? Education went downhill precipitously over the course of the twentieth and slid right into the garbage heap of the twenty-first century, and I conjecture that part of the problem was the rejection of traditional forms of essays, such as poems. Once these forms and structures are thrown out, what do you have left? I know teachers try to elicit cohesive groups of thoughts from their students, but when the students don’t even know what a heroic couplet is, how can anything cohesive be expected?

Jill Domschot: To Err is Human . . .