There is a class nobody is officially enrolled in. No syllabus. No grade. No $60,000 tuition bill sitting in your inbox like a threat. But millions of people are taking it anyway, every morning, on their phones, in coffee shops on Milwaukee Avenue, in the breakroom at jobs they are overqualified for. The class is the personal essay. The professors are writers at the New York Times, at Medium, at Substack. And what they are teaching... universities have been actively trying to destroy for decades.
I want to review something unusual here. Not a product. Not an album. A format. Specifically: the personal essay as a writing education, running in parallel to formal academic instruction, and winning.
The Good
The truth is, I learned more about how to argue from reading Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic than I ever did from a rhetoric textbook. And I do not think that is a hot take. I think that is just true for most people who came up reading things they actually cared about.
Personal essays teach observation first. The best ones open with a detail so specific it stops you cold. Not "my childhood was difficult" but "my father kept a jar of pennies on the dresser and never spent them, not once in thirty years, and I only understood why at the funeral." That specificity is not decoration. It is the whole argument. It is what makes you trust the writer enough to follow them anywhere.
Nobody tells you this but... that specificity is a skill. It takes practice. It takes a kind of courage that formal academic writing actively discourages, because academic writing rewards abstraction. Formal writing says: remove yourself from the equation. Personal writing says: you ARE the equation. Without you, none of this matters.
What the NYT's personal essay section does well, and what the best of Medium does too, is model the complete writing act in public. You see the thesis emerge from experience. You watch the writer argue with themselves. You see doubt honored as part of the method, not cleaned out in revision. George Saunders, in his Substack, has written about the sentence-level consciousness of good fiction in a way that no university writing guide has ever touched. Leslie Jamison on pain and observation. Hanif Abdurraqib on music and memory, writing about Ohio stadiums the way I write about the Metro on Clark Street... like a place that holds something sacred that concrete alone cannot explain.
These writers are teaching craft in real time. And people are learning. You can see it in the comments sections, in the way readers describe what hit them, in the copycat essays that show up on Medium a week after a viral NYT piece. Influence is the best evidence of instruction.
The Bad
Here is where I have to be honest about what personal essays, as a writing curriculum, still miss.
Structure, for one. The best essays have it intuitively, but the form's flexibility means a lot of what gets published is shapeless. Feeling is not argument. Observation is not thesis. Some of what passes for personal essay is really just... diary entry with good line breaks. And because the form signals authenticity, it can be hard to tell the difference between a writer who found something true and a writer who found something affecting.
Medium specifically has a quality problem it has never fully solved. The platform democratized publishing, which was necessary and good. But the algorithm rewards time-on-page more than truth-per-paragraph. So you get bloated essays, padded with resonant-sounding sentences that do not actually say anything, designed to feel meaningful rather than be meaningful. That is its own kind of dishonesty. Academic writing is dishonest through distance. This writing is sometimes dishonest through performed vulnerability.
There is also the access issue. The writers teaching the best lessons at the NYT are, mostly, already credentialed. Coates, Jamison, Roxane Gay. They came through programs, through institutions, through networks that do not open for everyone. So the "democratized writing education" argument has limits. You can read the essays for free. Getting to write them for that audience is a different conversation entirely.
And formal academic writing, for all its failure at voice, does teach something real: rigor. How to cite. How to handle a source. How to be wrong carefully. The personal essay in its worst form can slide into certainty without evidence, mistaking emotional conviction for factual authority. That is a failure mode worth naming.
Who It Is For
Here is my honest read on who benefits most from treating the personal essay as a writing course.
If you are a creator trying to find your voice... this is your curriculum. Not writing software. Not a course on hooks and headlines. Read fifty personal essays by writers you respect and pay attention to the first paragraph of each one. Pay attention to where the argument turns. Notice when the writer is running toward something and when they are hiding. That is more useful than most MFA seminars.
If you are a music photographer grinding in Chicago, trying to write artist bios that sound like you and not like a press release... this format teaches you that the specific anecdote beats the general claim every single time. "Chicago-based photographer" tells me nothing. "I was standing in the pit at Thalia Hall in 2019 when Jamila Woods stopped mid-song to look at the crowd like she was memorizing it" tells me everything I need to trust your eye.
If you are a student in a formal writing program... read the essays anyway. Read them as contraband. Let them remind you what writing is for before the institution teaches you to write only for the institution.
If you are a teacher of writing... this piece is probably annoying you. That is fair. And also: your students are already doing this. They are reading Substack at 11pm and your assigned reading at the last minute. That tells you something worth sitting with.
Verdict
The personal essay as writing education gets something right that universities have systematically gotten wrong for sixty years: it puts the human back inside the argument. It says your specific experience, observed carefully and written honestly, is not a contamination of the truth. It is the evidence.
That is a radical idea inside institutions that still train people to write as if a committee will grade them for using "I." And the fact that millions of people are self-educating through essays in the NYT and on Medium and through writers they found on the internet at 2am... that is not a crisis for writing education. It is writing education. The real kind. Happening without permission.
The format has flaws. The platforms have incentive problems. The access is not as open as it looks. But the core argument the personal essay makes about writing... that voice is not decoration, that specificity is the whole point, that the writer's presence inside the work is what makes it matter... that argument is correct. And it is winning.
Every formal essay I was ever graded on taught me to remove myself. Every essay I ever loved taught me to show up more fully. The difference between those two outcomes is the difference between writing as compliance and writing as contact. I know which one I keep going back to.
Rating: 8.5 / 10
Would be a 10 if the platforms could solve the quality problem. Would be a 9 if the best writers were as accessible as their essays. As it stands: still the most important writing classroom most people will never officially attend.