What’s an Essay? Famous Essayists Explain!

Essays: What is an Essay?

What is an essay? Answering that question is critical for students, teachers, writers, and readers of all ages. If you cannot answer that question concretely and competently, you are lost when it comes to fully grasping writing and literature. If you keep reading, you will, once and for all, understand what an essay is!

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. — Preface to the Collected Essays (1960) by Aldous Huxley

Essay? It’s short but personal writing that speaks from the heart (wherever that is). — f- Words: An Essay on the Essay (1996) by Rachel Blau Duplessis

The most accurate, as well as least satisfying, definition of the essay is: a short, or shorter prose text that is not a story. — Introduction to The Best American Essays (1992) by Susan Sontag

An essay is not an article, not a meditation, not a book review, not a memoir, not a disquisition, not a diatribe, not a shaggy dog story, not a monologue, not a travel narrative, not a suite of aphorisms, not an elegy, not a piece of reportage, not a— No, an essay can be any or several of the above. — Introduction to The Best American Essays (1992) by Susan Sontag

An essay is a search to find out what one thinks about something. Whatever twists and turns occur along its path, and however deep or moral its conclusions are, an essay will have little enduring interest unless it also exhibits a certain sparkle or stylistic flourish. — In Search of the Centaur (1992) by Phillip Lopate

All the great essays are in the first person. The writer need not say “I.” A vivid, flavorful prose style with a high aphoristic content is itself a form of first-person writing: think of the essays of Emerson, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Hardwick, William Gass. — Introduction to The Best American Essays (1992) by Susan Sontag

Some genuine essays are popularly called “articles” – but this is no more than an idle, though persistent, habit of speech. What’s in a name? — She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body (1998) by Cynthia Ozick

The following quote compares the essays that students learn to write to professional adult essays.

A few weeks ago, my 11-year-old daughter was complaining about one of her writing assignments. “Dad, I have to write an essay.”

 

“Oh,” I said, “what’s so bad about that?”

 

“It’s so restricting. We have to have one main point which we state in the introduction. We have to have at least three examples or subpoints; we have to have a conclusion where we state our points in a more dramatic way. Oh, and we can’t use I.”

 

These guidelines are ones I’ve heard before, the ones that I had to follow in writing school essays over 20 years ago. And I remember feeling the same restriction. I remember wanting to respond with the schoolyard comeback, “Says who?” Who said an essay had to be this way? The answer, of course, was the writing textbooks that we used.

 

The essay, I wanted to tell my daughter, was something different, something better, something looser, more personal, more playful. To understand an essayist, it may be necessary to watch a child with a rattle. Watch her shake it with one hand, then with two, watch her drop it, pick it up, hit it against the floor, and put it in her mouth. This is play, but as Piaget has shown, play central to the development of intelligence. The essayist also plays, though this play is internalized looking at ideas from different directions, shaking them, pushing them until they fall over, pulling on them to look at their roots. — Critical Thinking and Writing: Reclaiming the Essay (1989) by Thomas Newkirk

Essays: What is an Essay? Professional Adult Essays vs. Student Essays

As one essayist points out below, “Writing essays is so difficult that mediocre writers should not try it: they should limit themselves to academic work.” That’s important to understand because the fact is that a great deal of the writing that both students and adults do is correctly classified as an essay. If your writing is personal, reflective, descriptive, or an argument, it’s probably an essay.

The quote’s point is that it takes skill to meander with a purpose, and most writers should not attempt to. Before you attempt to meander, you should be an expert at making points and making points clear. In reality, most teachers must instruct students on how not to meander. “What’s your point?” is an important question that every writer should be able to answer.

The other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn’t take a position and then defend it… Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it’s not the best way to get at the truth… And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the things they teach you to write in high school. — The Age of the Essay (2004) by Paul Graham

A genuine essay rarely has an educational… use; it is the movement of a free mind at play. Though it is written in prose, it is closer in kind to poetry than to any other form. Like a poem, a genuine essay is made of language and character and mood and temperament and pluck and chance… It is a stroll through someone’s mazy mind. — She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body (1998) by Cynthia Ozick

I write essays in the Mountainesque sense of the word: not in the oxymoronic “argumentative essays” beloved by teachers of composition, which formulize and ritualize intellectual combat with the objective of demolishing the opposition. — Essaying the Feminine (1994) by Nancy Mairs

An essay is not a report of research conducted in a laboratory: it is the laboratory itself, where life is put to the test in a text, where the author’s imagination, creativity, experimentation, critical sensitivity are displayed. To essay is just that: to try, to probe new wordings to live with, new possibilities of being by reading. — “Alfonso Reyes” Wheelbarrow (1988) by Gabriel Zaid

Essays are usually taught all wrong, they are harnessed to rhetoric and composition with a two-birds-in-one-stone approach designed to sharpen freshman students’ skills at argumentation. While it is true that historically the essay is related to rhetoric, it in fact seeks to persuade more by the delights of literary style than anything else. — What Happened to the Personal Essay? (1989) by Phillip Lopate

Writing essays is so difficult that mediocre writers should not try it: they should limit themselves to academic work. — “Alfonso Reyes” Wheelbarrow (1988) by Gabriel Zaid

The essay, then, is a difficult genre because it is an adult genre. — The Limits of the Essay (1976) by Guillermo Díaz-Plaja

The formation of an essayist demands much more time than that of a poet or novelist. At eighteen, one can be Rimbaud, one cannot be an essayist. The reason for this is simple. I repeat: the essayist works in the cultural domain with the signs of culture. — Little Essayistic (1983) by André Belleau

Essays: What is an Essay? Personality and Meandering

Essays present a personal understanding of a topic. The academic world, in general, is conflicted about the essay. On the one hand, teachers attempt to teach students “voice” as one of the Six Traits of Writing. On the other hand, many teachers forbid first-person in student writing, especially using “I.”

The fact is that many teachers don’t understand writing, so they rely on arbitrary rules that don’t make sense in every type of writing. Here are two quotes from people who do understand writing. This first one is from a classic book on writing nonfiction.

Writers are obviously at their most natural when they write in the first person. Therefore I urge people to write in the first person. (Some think it’s undignified—a fear that afflicts the academic world. Hence the professorial use of “one”.) – Even when “I” isn’t permitted, it’s still possible to convey a sense of I-ness. – On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (25th Edition, 2001) by Willaim Zinsser

This next quote comes from Gerald Graff. Graff’s ideas have been influential in developing the Common Core State Standards, especially regarding critical thinking, argumentation, and academic literacy. In fact, the standards quote him in an appendix. Graff raises an essential question: How can you separate your ideas from others’ without using “I?”

Notice that the last template above uses the first-person “I,” as do many of the templates in this book, thus contradicting the common advice about avoiding the first person in academic and professional writing. Although you may have been told that the “I” word encourages self-indulgent opinions rather than well-grounded arguments, we believe that texts using “I” can be just as well supported… as those that don’t. For us, well-supported arguments are grounded in persuasive reasons and evidence, not in their use of any particular pronouns. Furthermore, if you consistently avoid the first person in your writing, you may have trouble making the key move addressed in this chapter: differentiating your views from those of others, or even offering your own views in the first place. – They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Persuasive Writing (2007) by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein

Most strict rules about writing are really just opinions. Furthermore, many writing rules are genre dependent. Therefore, I believe in teaching writers to use good judgment. Good judgment involves understanding a slightly enlarged version of the rhetorical triangle. I usually include:

• Speaker, audience, message, occasion, genre.

Genre is the most helpful concept because understanding genre is the key to understanding all forms of writing. It answers the questions, “What is it? Is it what it’s supposed to be?” If students are required to write a “formal academic essay,” their writing must contain the qualities and characteristics of that genre.

Note: I won’t go into all the concepts related to genre. In short, all “school writing” should aim for Standard American English (SAE), which covers the rules of grammar. Also, there are various qualities and characteristics of informal essays that are not effective in school writing.

Remember, it’s beneficial to understand how professional essay writers define and describe the essay genre. It will make you a better reader, writer, and teacher. So, let’s continue on!

A personal essay is like a human voice talking, its order the mind’s natural flow, instead of a systematized outline of ideas. Though more wayward and informal than an article or treatise, somewhere it contains a point which is its real center, even if the point couldn’t be uttered in fewer words than the essayist has used. Essays don’t usually boil down to a summary, as articles do, and the style of the writer has a nap to it, a combination of personality and energetic loose ends that stands up like the nap on a piece of wool and can’t be brushed flat. — What I think, what I am. (1985) by Edward Hoagland

An essay really ought not to be on anything, to deal with anything, to define anything. An essay is a walk, an excursion, not a business trip… The essay is not a form, has no form; it is a game that creates its own rules… The essay is not a form, but a style above all. Its individualism distinguishes it from pure, absolute or autonomous art. The point of an essay, like its justification and its style, always lies in the author’s personality and always leads back to it… Ever since Montaigne the essay has been highly individualistic, but at the same time it presupposes a society that not only tolerates individualism but enjoys it. — An Essay on the Essay (1965) by Michael Hamburger

Essays: What is an Essay? Final Notes

Harking back to a distinction William Dean Howells (1837–1920) had noted as early as 1902, Gerould asked if readers wanted mere “articles,” or rather the leisure, the meditations, and the light touch of the genteel essay. Then, making her distinction into a dogmatic either/or, she asked if they wanted “news” or “truth.” Her appeal backfired: she and the essay were branded as retrograde. — Encyclopedia of Essay (1997)

Dr. Johnson’s dictionary defined an essay as “a loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece.” Bacon’s compositions tend to drive at a single conclusion, but Johnson’s “sally” is a nice fit for Montaigne’s meandering collection of thoughts, and those of his more whimsical descendants. Only a very brave or foolish exam candidate today would try to copy Montaigne instead of Bacon. The art of digression reached breathless heights in Samuel Butler’s 1890 essay “Ramblings in Cheapside.” — Montaigne’s Moment (2011) by Anthony Gottlieb – NYTimes.com

I tend to still fall back on the essay form (or lack of form) when an idea strikes me, but I am not fooled about the place of the essay in the twentieth century American letters-it stands a short distance down the line. The essayist, unlike the novelist, the poet, and the playwright, must be content in his self-imposed role of second class citizen. A writer who has his sights trained on the Nobel Prize or other earthly triumphs had best write a novel, a poem, or a play, and leave the essayist to ramble about, content with living a free life and enjoying the satisfactions of a somewhat undisciplined existence. (Dr. Johnson called the essay “an irregular, undigested piece”; this happy practitioner has no wish to quarrel with the good doctor’s characterization.) — The Foreword to Essays of E. B. White (1977) by E.B. White