In a conversational style, Thomas Newkirk traces the origins of the overly-structured, voiceless school essay and challenges English teachers everywhere to liberate the voices of their students and de-schoolify their writing. Newkirk's calm and logical reasoning will have teachers re-thinking how to teach essay writing to their students.For decades studednts have been taught that writing essays meant saying what they are going to say, saying it, and, then saying it again. Textbook companies created models, like the hamburger essay, where the top bun is the topic sentence, the meat is the supportint details, and the bottom bun is the conclusion. Lanuguage arts teachers of all grade levels struggled to mold their students' thoughts into these simple, straight forward formulas. And what was the result...bland, passionless, phony prose that contained little of the student's own voice and made readers fall asleep at their desks."Time to wake up," says writer/teacher, Vicki Spandel (CREATING WRITERS and THE 9 TRAITS OF EVERY WRITER). "Thomas Newkirk helps us to see how thesis-control essays can smother the very thinking that the act of writing should feed. This is no neat and tidy book of strategies, but an impassioned plea to abandon our misguided revererence for formula and mind-controlling structure. This manifesto should be required reading for all teachers of writing. I will carry it with me, read from it, quote it, and recommend it wherever I go."