Introduction


Michel de Montaigne is often considered the "father" of the literary essay
Perhaps the most universal of educational tools is the essay. Considering its traditionally short form, the essay has grown to encompass a wide variety of stylistic approaches and runs the gamut of content sources and subjects. For many students, the essay is the foundation of their writing education, teaching them to present ideas in a structured (usually five-paragraph) form. The essay is also the cornerstone of collegiate learning, from the much-dreaded application essay (where do you see yourself in five years?) to the ubiquitous blue-book exam. In professional writing, essayists can recall memories, argue politics, or respond to literary works. Though the expansiveness of the contemporary essay threatens to blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction, the form remains defined and linked to the latter.

Essential Facts

  1. Though the essay is traditionally a prose form, Alexander Pope dubbed many of his verse writings “essays.”
  2. Perhaps acknowledging that this brief genre can never fully encapsulate all of the ideas of a given topic, the root of the word essay means “to try or attempt.”
  3. One common subgenre of the form is the compare-and-contrast essay, which seeks to create relationships between two entities, however similar or different they might be.
  4. Reflective essays are the most loosely structured and often the closest to poetry. They use impressions rather than textbook description to convey ideas.
  5. The word essay has been used in nonliterary disciplines such as visual arts, film, and music. The link between the disciplines is tenuous at best, often characterized simply by brevity.