On the second day of reading, Student X, I came across your test. You have the finest handwriting I have seen through four hundred essays. We marveled at your skill. Further, when you started your essay as a dialogue, I thought you had the potential to really take the ≥Penny≤ essay into a creative direction. But you gave up. At the end of your third paragraph, you asked how this sort of essay helps you as a writer, and then you left a large, huffy expanse of white space.

Before I answer you, I need to set the scene. I am a hairy, 43 year old man who is paying for the sins of bourbon and french fries. On this morning, in Daytona, I am wearing tan shorts and a blue Izod. I sit with three hundred others, in silence as we read one ≥penny≤ essay after another for seven hours. On a good day, I will read almost 300 essays, which means each of them get a minute or two of my time. My table has seven other English teachers reading. Before us are several discrete stacks of papers: anchors, schedules, post-its, twenty five test booklets and a bubble-in grade sheet. Four candy dishes are spaced on the table≤ two hold nuts, two hold chocolate.

We are not a pretty lot. As a general rule, we wear Shakespeare t-shirts, jeans, and flip-flops. Some are bored, some are worried about husbands and kids in far off states, and some are hung over. We are middle aged with the waists, hairlines, and complexion you would expect from our cohort. To add to this mÈlange of dorkiness, we all have a blue badge, hanging on a string, around our necks.

But, if you put us back in our classroom garb, we would be an impressive lot. The colleges have sent us their professors and lecturers and the high schools have sent their thirty year veterans. All of us are respected legends back in our home districtsãotherwise we wouldnπt get here.

I lose perspective in this big hall. We are doing piecework, as if we were in a sweatshop making sneakers. After several hundred ≥penny≤ jokes and puns, the essays take on a uniform shape and heft. I am a diving judge and, once every few minutes, another diver goes off the board and executes an inward one and a half. After several hundred dives where I judged the launch, the rotation, the form, and the entry, it all gets a little abstract to me.

Then I take breath and I think about what is in this room. Most of the brightest lights of your age have written to us. Each person was secluded from the rest of her class, given a pencil and a packet, and set to work on these questions. The entering class for Harvard, Yale, Middlebury, and Williams are stacked before me in blue folders and they had done the very best work they could on May 14, 2008. Each folder contains a classroom of students that, were they my class, I would remember for the rest of my career.

Student X, I am your reader.

You paid $84 to have me, and two others, read what you wrote. We are the best audience you are going to get; we are interested, we are informed, and we want to give you the break.. If you impress me enough, I will not only assign a high grade to your work, I may put a post-it on the essay and hand it to my table leader.

Later, in your life as a writer, you will have editors that want a specific type of thing. You might have readers that expect you to write in a certain way about certain topics. You may only get read if you know someone or if someone knows you. Your work may languish and fade under the weight of a slush pile. You will have editors and agents write you back in the most polite form letter Microsoft Word can churn out as they say ≥Your work just isnπt right for us.≤

I hope that you regret the empty space you left as much as I do. The three attempts you made were interesting and fun. The stab you made at making the penny essay into a dialogue was 8 miles to a success before you abandoned the attempt. Thanks to your style and you phenomenal penmanship (somewhere, you made a nun very proud) I expanded you two minutes to five. But there was nothing there.

As best as I can figure it, the way that you become a writer is that you write. You write for anyone who will read you. Recipes, movie reviews, Miss Lonelyhearts columns, whatever: you write for the person who will fold the paper over so that they can spend a minute reading your words. Later on, perhaps they book mark your blog, or they link it to their Facebook or whatever. Wherever you can get empty space and a reader, you write something.

This time you didnπt write anything. I turned the page, bubbled in a grade, and went on to read the next few hundred papers before the evening brought them all to an end.

Then I wrote this letter to you, knowing that you will never read it.

-Bob Barsanti