From John Warner:

The most important essay I ever wrote was in 3rd grade.

My teacher, Mrs. Goldman, told us we needed to write directions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She never used the word “essay” because that would’ve been meaningless to us, but this was actually a “process” or “how-to” essay, and to write a good one, you need to think very carefully about what you’re telling your audience.

We were 3rd graders, so of course, we didn’t do this. The extent to which we didn’t became apparent next class when Mrs. Goldman brought in the necessary supplies for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then told us we had to make our sandwiches exactly according to our directions.

If you forgot to mention that you needed bread on which to spread the peanut butter, you smeared it on the plate. If you wrote to spread peanut butter on a slice of bread, but didn’t say to use a knife, we were instructed to use our hands.

I don’t think anyone in the class managed to create an edible sandwich, but we had a lot of fun laughing at the attempts, and the memory is indelible. That day, I learned that writers need to be careful with their words because if someone is asked to follow them, things can go very very wrong.

Mrs. Goldman was teaching us a number of different things, genre awareness, audience, structure and sequencing. None of it had anything to do with a standardized assessment. We were solving a writing-related problem. Most of all, we were absorbing the lesson that above all, writing is done for audiences.