Multigenre essays should be made more available to students in all
disci-plines, especially to students in freshman composition classes. By
multigenre essays I mean essays that include creative elements such as
lists, letters, and interviews, in addition to traditional academic
prose. By combining creative elements with academic prose I propose that
writers will be able to express more of what they want to say in an
essay by using both analytical and associative ways of thinking. The
benefits of having students write multigenre essays are three-fold: 1)
when students are given the option of including such things as dialogs,
poems, and vignettes in addition to standard academic prose, they gain
in rhetorical flexibility-experimenting with and finding the right
genres and combination of genres that best fits what they want to say;
2) they also gain in their ability to take a more personal stance on an
issue by having more options for positioning themselves in reference to
a given topic; and 3) they gain in their ability to push at the
perceived boundaries of a discourse.