Useful Resources for Teaching Essays

I’ve come across several new-to-me resources for teaching essays.  Despite the fact that these sites are variously geared towards “creative nonfiction” or “literary nonfiction,” these resources should be of general use for any writing-related course, particularly considering the malleability of those genre labels.

The first, Brevity, is an online magazine devoted to “the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction.”  The magazine contains lots of interesting essays, but the craft essays might be of particular interest for teaching.

The Brevity site also links to a blog called You Gotta Teach This Essay, which is a forum where teachers “share information on those essays that [they have found] particularly useful in teaching the art and craft of literary nonfiction.”  The entries generally contain synopses of the essays, suggestions for pedagogical approaches, and links to the texts (when possible) or other information on locating the texts.

From You Gotta Teach This Essay, I ended up browsing Quotidiana, a repository of 340 public-domain essays.  Aside from general interest humanities applications, this site might have particular relevance for the CORE course, for History courses, for Women’s Studies (especially given the separate drop-down menu highlighting the women essayists included in the archive), or possibly for Political Science settings.