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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Essay (disambiguation).
"Essays" redirects here. For other uses, see Essays (disambiguation).
For a description of essays as used by Wikipedia editors, see Wikipedia:Essays.
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Find sources: "Essay" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October
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Essays of Michel de Montaigne

An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the
definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet,
and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal and informal: formal
essays are characterized by "serious purpose, dignity, logical organization, length,"
whereas the informal essay is characterized by "the personal element (self-revelation,
individual tastes and experiences, confidential manner), humor, graceful style, rambling
structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme," etc.[1]

Essays are commonly used as literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments,
observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. Almost all modern
essays are written in prose, but works in verse have been dubbed essays
(e.g., Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man). While brevity
usually defines an essay, voluminous works like John Locke's An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding and Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of
Population are counterexamples.

In some countries (e.g., the United States and Canada), essays have become a major
part of formal education.[2] Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to
improve their writing skills; admission essays are often used by universities in selecting
applicants, and in the humanities and social sciences essays are often used as a way of
assessing the performance of students during final exams.

The concept of an "essay" has been extended to other media beyond writing. A film
essay is a movie that often incorporates documentary filmmaking styles and focuses
more on the evolution of a theme or idea. A photographic essay covers a topic with a
linked series of photographs that may have accompanying text or captions.

Definitions

John Locke's 1690 An Essay Concerning Human

Understanding
The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, "to try" or "to attempt". In
English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning.
The Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was the first author to describe his
work as essays; he used the term to characterize these as "attempts" to put his
thoughts into writing.

Subsequently, essay has been defined in a variety of ways. One definition is a "prose
composition with a focused subject of discussion" or a "long, systematic discourse".[3] It
is difficult to define the genre into which essays fall. Aldous Huxley, a leading essayist,
gives guidance on the subject.[4] He notes that "the essay is a literary device for saying
almost everything about almost anything", and adds that "by tradition, almost by
definition, the essay is a short piece". Furthermore, Huxley argues that "essays belong
to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a
three-poled frame of reference". These three poles (or worlds in which the essay may
exist) are:

 The personal and the autobiographical: The essayists that feel most comfortable in
this pole "write fragments of reflective autobiography and look at the world through
the keyhole of anecdote and description".
 The objective, the factual, and the concrete particular: The essayists that write from
this pole "do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to
some literary or scientific or political theme. Their art consists of setting forth,
passing judgment upon, and drawing general conclusions from the relevant data".
 The abstract-universal: In this pole "we find those essayists who do their work in the
world of high abstractions", who are never personal and who seldom mention the
particular facts of experience.
Huxley adds that the most satisfying essays "...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."

History
The examples and perspective in this article may not represent
a worldwide view of the subject. You may improve this article, discuss
the issue on the talk page, or create a new article, as appropriate. (January
2011) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
Montaigne
Montaigne's "attempts" grew out of his commonplacing.[5] Inspired in particular by the
works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Œuvres Morales (Moral works) into French
had just been published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his essays in
1572; the first edition, entitled Essais, was published in two volumes in 1580.[6] For the
rest of his life, he continued revising previously published essays and composing new
ones. A third volume was published posthumously; together, their over 100 examples
are widely regarded as the predecessor of the modern essay.

Europe
While Montaigne's philosophy was admired and copied in France, none of his most
immediate disciples tried to write essays. But Montaigne, who liked to fancy that his
family (the Eyquem line) was of English extraction, had spoken of the English people as
his "cousins", and he was early read in England, notably by Francis Bacon.[7]

Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597 (only five years after the death of
Montaigne, containing the first ten of his essays),[7] 1612, and 1625, were the first works
in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the
word essayist in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Other English
essayists included Sir William Cornwallis, who published essays in 1600 and 1617 that
were popular at the time,[7] Robert Burton (1577–1641) and Sir Thomas Browne (1605–
1682). In Italy, Baldassare Castiglione wrote about courtly manners in his essay Il
Cortigiano. In the 17th century, the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián wrote about the
theme of wisdom.[8]

In England, during the Age of Enlightenment, essays were a favored tool of polemicists
who aimed at convincing readers of their position; they also featured heavily in the rise
of periodical literature, as seen in the works of Joseph Addison, Richard
Steele and Samuel Johnson. Addison and Steele used the journal Tatler (founded in
1709 by Steele) and its successors as storehouses of their work, and they became the
most celebrated eighteenth-century essayists in England. Johnson's essays appear
during the 1750s in various similar publications.[7] As a result of the focus on journals,
the term also acquired a meaning synonymous with "article", although the content may
not the strict definition. On the other hand, Locke's An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding is not an essay at all, or cluster of essays, in the technical sense, but still
it refers to the experimental and tentative nature of the inquiry which the philosopher
was undertaking.[7]

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Edmund Burke and Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote
essays for the general public. The early 19th century, in particular, saw a proliferation of
great essayists in English—William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt and Thomas De
Quincey all penned numerous essays on diverse subjects, reviving the earlier graceful
style. Thomas Carlyle's essays were highly influential, and one of his readers, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, became a prominent essayist himself. Later in the century, Robert
Louis Stevenson also raised the form's literary level.[9] In the 20th century, a number of
essayists, such as T.S. Eliot, tried to explain the new movements in art and culture by
using essays. Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, and Charles du Bos wrote literary
criticism essays.[8]

In France, several writers produced longer works with the title of essai that were not true
examples of the form. However, by the mid-19th century, the Causeries du lundi,
newspaper columns by the critic Sainte-Beuve, are literary essays in the original sense.
Other French writers followed suit, including Théophile Gautier, Anatole France, Jules
Lemaître and Émile Faguet.[9]

Japan
Main article: Zuihitsu
As with the novel, essays existed in Japan several centuries before they developed in
Europe with a genre of essays known as zuihitsu—loosely connected essays and
fragmented ideas. Zuihitsu have existed since almost the beginnings of Japanese
literature. Many of the most noted early works of Japanese literature are in this genre.
Notable examples include The Pillow Book (c. 1000), by court lady Sei Shōnagon,
and Tsurezuregusa (1330), by particularly renowned Japanese Buddhist monk Yoshida
Kenkō. Kenkō described his short writings similarly to Montaigne, referring to them as
"nonsensical thoughts" written in "idle hours". Another noteworthy difference from
Europe is that women have traditionally written in Japan, though the more formal,
Chinese-influenced writings of male writers were more prized at the time.

China
The eight-legged essay (Chinese: 八股文; pinyin: bāgǔwén; lit. 'eight bone text') was a
style of essay in imperial examinations during the Ming and Qing dynasties in China.
The eight-legged essay was needed for those test takers in these civil service tests to
show their merits for government service, often focusing on Confucian thought and
knowledge of the Four Books and Five Classics, in relation to governmental ideals. Test
takers could not write in innovative or creative ways, but needed to conform to the
standards of the eight-legged essay. Various skills were examined, including the ability
to write coherently and to display basic logic. In certain times, the candidates were
expected to spontaneously compose poetry upon a set theme, whose value was also
sometimes questioned, or eliminated as part of the test material. This was a major
argument in favor of the eight-legged essay, arguing that it were better to eliminate
creative art in favor of prosaic literacy. In the history of Chinese literature, the eight-
legged essay is often said to have caused China's "cultural stagnation and economic
backwardness" in the 19th century.[10]

Forms and styles

This section describes the different forms and styles of essay writing. These are used
by an array of authors, including university students and professional essayists.

Cause and effect

The defining features of a "cause and effect" essay are causal chains that connect from
a cause to an effect, careful language, and chronological or emphatic order. A writer
using this rhetorical method must consider the subject, determine the purpose, consider
the audience, think critically about different causes or consequences, consider a thesis
statement, arrange the parts, consider the language, and decide on a conclusion.[11]

Classification and division

Classification is the categorization of objects into a larger whole while division is the
breaking of a larger whole into smaller parts.[12]

Compare and contrast

Compare and contrast essays are characterized by a basis for comparison, points of
comparison, and analogies. It is grouped by the object (chunking) or by point
(sequential). The comparison highlights the similarities between two or more similar
objects while contrasting highlights the differences between two or more objects. When
writing a compare/contrast essay, writers need to determine their purpose, consider
their audience, consider the basis and points of comparison, consider their thesis
statement, arrange and develop the comparison, and reach a conclusion. Compare and
contrast is arranged emphatically.[13]