Anatomy of an Essay

What Is an Essay?

Before one can learn to write an essay, it is important to first have an understanding of what exactly is an essay. For the purposes of this course, an essay is defined as "a short written piece of non-fiction, often expressing the author's own personal and well reasoned viewpoint, presented in an organized and professional way." Essays do not have to be scholarly works necessarily (although many scholars use the essay format with regularity). Indeed, essays can be factual, speculative, or even outright emotional, personal or objective; serious or humorous. (Kane, 2000)

As with any form of writing, there is a considerable degree of diversity. For example, while most essays are written in a prose format, there have been numerous examples of essays taking the form of verse (poetry). Further, some essays, especially philosophical works, can be quite lengthy. Depending on the academic discipline involved or the purpose of the essay, the definition may vary somewhat. However, for the purposes of this course and for clarity, we will focus on the definition provided above rather than these exceptions.

Based on the intended purpose of the writer, there can be many different "sub-types" of essays, as well. According to Aldous Huxley, the great English author who wrote Brave New World, Island, and Point Counter Point, stated in the preface to his Collected Essay,



"Like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. 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. But a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel. Montaigne's Third Book is the equivalent, very nearly, of a good slice of the Comédie Humaine. Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and at their best in the neighborhood of only one of the essay's three poles, or at the most only in the neighborhood of two of them. There are the predominantly personal essayists, who write fragments of reflective autobiography and who look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description. There are the predominantly objective essayists who do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme. … And how splendid, how truly oracular are the utterances of the great generalizers! … The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist." (Huxley, 1958) ]]>