What Is an Essay?
Essay Preview: What Is an Essay?
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An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an authors personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition of an essay is vague, overlapping with those of an article and a short story. Almost all modern essays are written in prose, but works in verse have been dubbed essays (e.g. Alexander Popes An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man). While brevity usually defines an essay, voluminous works like John Lockes An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Thomas Malthuss An Essay on the Principle of Population are counterexamples.
In some countries (e.g., in the United States), essays have become a major part of formal education. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and admission essays are often used by universities in selecting applicants and, in the humanities and social sciences, as a way of assessing the performance of students during final exams. The concept of an “essay” has been extended to other mediums beyond writing. A film essay is a movie that often incorporates documentary film making styles and which focuses more on the evolution of a theme or an idea. A photographic essay is an attempt to cover a topic with a linked series of photographs; it may or may not have an accompanying text or captions.
An essay has been defined in a variety of ways. One definition is a “prose composition with a focused subject of discussion” or a “long, systematic discourse”.[1] It is difficult to define the genre into which essays fall. Aldous Huxley, a leading essayist, gives guidance on the subject.[2] He notes that “[l]ike the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything, usually on a certain topic. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay”. He points out that “a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel”–he gives Montaignes Third Book as an example. Huxley argues on several occasions that “essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference”. Huxleys three poles are:
Personal and the autobiographical essays: these use “fragments of reflective autobiography” to “look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description”.
Objective and factual: in these essays, the authors “do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme”.
Abstract-universal: these essays “make the best of all the three worlds in