The Art of Writing an Essay

In your first-year writing courses, and no doubt throughout college, you’ll be expected to write essays. This can cause confusion for both students and instructors, since the whole concept of the essay, as a genre, is broad and loosely defined. In fact, I would call it a meta-genre, and it can be broken down into many sub-genres, such as research papers, literacy narratives, profiles, case studies, issue analyses, and ethnographies. Most textbooks, this one included, will include a few of these subgenres in an attempt to teach you different approaches to writing essays.

Regardless of which subgenre it is, there are a few key conventions that make an essay an essay (and not, say, a short story or a poem or an instruction manual).

Essays Poke at Something

If you can’t walk past a dead cat on the road without grabbing a stick and poking it in the belly, then you might be an essayist.

If you can’t witness someone saying something stupid without asking them why they would say that, you might be an essayist.

If you see a red button on the wall with a sign that says, “Do Not Press Button,” and you can’t resist the temptation, you might be an essayist.

All essays, be they boring or fun or long or short, all probe at something. They question. They push buttons. The word essay actually comes from the middle-French word assai, which means “to test something” or “to weigh something.”

You don’t write an essay simply to spew out information—you write it to make sense of that information. If you write an essay about a kid who likes to jump giant ravines on his dirt bike, you don’t do it to simply tell the story of a kid jumping a ravine. You do it to find out what would compel him to do something so dangerous, or to highlight our society’s obsession with adrenaline, or as a snap-shot into today’s youth culture, or to question whether one brand of bike is better than the other for death-defying stunts. In the end, it’s up to you to decide what you want to discover or test or probe or question or illustrate or highlight or condemn or praise in your essay—that’s what makes them so fascinating and varied. You could pick fifty people at random and give them the exact same topic, and you will receive fifty completely different essays. The one thing they’ll have in common, though (besides the shared topic), is that they will “test” or “weigh” something. They will poke at its belly.

Essays are Narrow in Focus

Essays, by definition, narrowly focus on one topic. You can only say so much in a few pages, so make it count. One mistake inexperienced writers often make is trying to cover everything in their essay. Afraid of running out of ideas and falling short of the minimum-page count, students will resort to cramming everything they know about a topic into their essay. Even if they find a way to tie everything together and present it in a logical order, they still end up glossing over everything and not really saying much of anything. If your essay has a thesis (a specific claim or argument), then everything in your essay should serve to back up that claim. If your essay has a driving question, then everything should be in service of answering that question. Avoid filler and tangents and anything irrelevant.

Essays are Short

In college, you’ll be expected to write essays (also called papers) that are less than twenty pages. Generally speaking, if it’s less than fifty pages, it’s still an essay. Over fifty pages, and you have a thesis on your hands. Beyond a hundred pages, and you have a dissertation or a book.

I've read essays—quite good ones, in fact—that were less than a page.

Essays are True

If your essay is 90 percent true, then it’s not an essay. It’s a short story. Essays are based in reality. They contain real events, experiences, stories, facts, quotes, and emotions. That isn’t to say they can’t be creative or interpretive, but they aren’t fiction. If you want to play make-believe in your essay (like developing a hypothetical scenario), make sure the reader knows that's what you are doing.

Essays Have Multiple Paragraphs

This might seem too obvious to even mention, but I’ve read several student essays over the years that are just one long paragraph. In most cases, this is easy to fix: just find a few places to break the paragraph up, and spend a little more time writing. Very few topics can be adequately treated in one paragraph. Life is way more interesting than that! But even if all you can come up with is a very short essay, it still needs to contain more than one paragraph.

Essays Contain Multiple Rhetorical Modes

This is where I tend to have a hard time with a lot of mainstream textbooks on writing. They like to teach you how to write a narrative essay, or a description essay, or a compare/contrast essay, or a persuasive essay, or an expository essay, and so on. The reality, however, is that this isn’t how real writing is done. If you look at any essay worth reading, it will combine many of these rhetorical modes. It will have description and narration and exposition and argument and analysis.

Here’s an example of what I mean. A couple years ago, I walked out of my building on a rainy day and immediately slipped on the wet pathway, wrenching my back and dropping my books. Fortunately, I didn’t fall, but I witnessed three students within a few seconds fall to the ground. Apparently, there was some sort of “treatment” on the quad to make the bricks shiny and pretty, but as soon as they got wet, it was like walking on a sheet of ice. I told my class about it, and then we brainstormed what we might say if we were to write a letter to the president of the school about the incident. The students came up with a lot of great ideas: start with a story of what happened, describe the quad and the rain, cite statistics about workplace injuries, predict how much the school could lose in lawsuits from injured students and employees, compare and contrast the costs of paying those lawsuits with pre-emptively fixing the bricks, and so on. When we were done, the students could see that in order to effectively write the letter, we would need to incorporate several different rhetorical modes. It would never be enough to simply write a narration (a story of what happened), or a comparison/contrast, or a description. Writing takes all modes to be effective. Essays are no exception.

I suppose what the writers of textbooks are getting at, but they don’t make it clear enough in their chapters, is that some types of essays lean more heavily on a few types of rhetorical modes. If I’m writing about why I don't like traveling, then of course I’ll have a lot more narration and description. If I’m writing about what would happen if our school raised tuition rates, I would use a lot more cause-and-effect or comparison-contrast rhetorical modes. If I’m writing about why professors should receive massive pay raises (which they should), then I would use argument as my primary rhetorical mode (while including as many sob stories, i.e. narrative, as I could!).

If you think you’ve never written an essay, you probably have. Your teacher just called it by a different name. Understanding what an essay is in general terms will make it much easier to write one using the specific instructions provided by your instructor (such as minimum page length, use of sources, organization, and so on).

Why Do We Call it an "Essay" and Not Something Else?

There are three key players in the history of the essay:

I'm not a history major, so I'll keep this short (and please forgive me if I omit important details or overgeneralize).

It goes like this: two-thousand years ago, Seneca the Younger was a wealthy, deep-thinking Roman who loved chatting with everyone he met. He might have had a photographic memory, because he could meet a perfect stranger, have a pleasant conversation about a random topic--like fish prices--and then four years later, out of the blue, send a letter to that person with more thoughts on fish prices. He wrote thousands of letters to people all over the Roman empire during his life. One thing most of his letters had in common was they focused on a single topic. If Seneca was writing to Antoni about fish prices but then remembered he also wanted to talk about gout, he would write two letters: one on fish prices, and one on gout.

After the fall of the empire, some Catholic monks had the good sense to save Seneca's letters--or at least the few dozen that still existed. There they sat for a thousand years collecting dust in a monastery. During that time, most folks couldn't read. Books were expensive and hard to make--usually hand-written by monks on parchment. One book could take more than a year to transcribe. So there really wasn't an incentive to learn how to read. It was an art reserved for clergy and scholars.

During the renaissance, in the mid-15th Century, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, which led to an explosion in literacy. Books could be made quickly and cheaply. Folks could now buy a Bible for their home, and they finally had a reason to learn to read themselves.

For a while, publishers were only investing in the printing of Bibles and religious pamphlets. It was the safe and logical approach. But, in time, some publishers realized that there was a whole untapped market of people who might want to read something other than the Bible. One of the first secular books published was the translated letters of Seneca.

A French philosopher and nobleman, Michel De Montaigne, read Seneca's letters and thought, I could write letters like this. I'm a smart guy. I have deep thoughts. He began writing his "letters" on all sorts of topics, but unlike Seneca, he didn't address them to anyone. After writing nearly a hundred of them, he found a publisher who agreed that they were every bit as insightful and interesting as Seneca's letters--no doubt people would want to buy them--but perhaps they shouldn't call them letters. That might confuse people. Montaigne gave it some thought and settled on essai, a middle-French word meaning to test or weigh something, which eventually became essay in the English language.

But even if Montaigne hadn't coined the term, college students would still be writing essays. They would just be called something else, like papers or letters or narrowly-focused-write-em-ups.

I like the history of the word essay because it highlights that, like letters, essays are short, they are focused, and they are written by human beings trying to connect and communicate with other human beings.