on humility and uncertainty

I'm reading Vivian Gornick's The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative for my English 246 course, which I'm devoting to the personal essay. Gornick references a concept that I really really like, and that I know that I'll use again and again when talking with students about writing--any kind of writing--writing the personal essay, writing an argument, writing an analysis, writing a speech. Gornick writes that when reading a really good personal essay, "we are in the presence...of a mind puzzling its way out of its own shadows--moving from unearned certainty to thoughtful reconsideration to clarified self-knowledge" (36).

Unearned certainty. That's what's wrong with so much of the writing that frustrates me. That's what's wrong with unreflective narrators. Their certainty is unearned. Certainty is something we're all searching for, and that's the point. It's something to be searched for, earned, not something to which a writer is ever simply entitled.

Well huh.