The Essay

What is an essay? And, what purpose does the essay serve?

Michel Montaigne, a sixteenth century French attorney, called his short prose pieces essais, French for "trials" or "attempts" (qtd. in Nadell, McMeniman, Langan 15).

E. M. Forster understood that writing allows us the opportunity to see our thoughts. In a discussion of the novel, he asks the question: "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?" (101).

And, over a hundred years ago, Ambrose Bierce understood that "good writing . . . , essentially, is clear thinking made visible" (5).

The essay has four basic components: the introduction and thesis, the body, and the conclusion.

Paragraphs, used in a pattern of development that is determined by the essay's mode and purpose, are the basic building blocks of any essay.

Sources

Bierce, Ambrose. Write It Right: A Little Book of Literary Faults. New York: Neal, 1909. Print.

Forster, Edward Morgan. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Houghton, 1985. Print.

Nadell, Judith, Linda McMeniman, and John Langan. The Longman Writer: Rhetoric and Reader. Brief ed. Boston: Pearson, 2005. Print.