This folder has content about essay writing, the craft of developing sustained thought in prose. The essay is the written form in which a mind works through a question — not to arrive at a predetermined conclusion but to discover what it thinks by the act of writing.
Michel de Montaigne invented the form in 1580, naming his short prose pieces essais — attempts, trials. The name is precise: the essay is an attempt at understanding, not a report of conclusions reached elsewhere. Montaigne’s essays moved associatively, following the writer’s thought as it encountered a subject, doubled back, qualified itself, and arrived somewhere unexpected [@montaigne1580]. This exploratory quality distinguishes the essay from the report, the argument, and the treatise — forms that begin with their conclusions and organize evidence to support them.
The essay tradition divides roughly into two lineages. The Montaignean lineage is personal, exploratory, and digressive — the writer thinks on the page, and the essay’s structure follows the movement of thought. The Baconian lineage, after Francis Bacon’s Essays (1597), is compressed, argumentative, and impersonal — aphoristic statements organized to persuade.
Contemporary essay practice includes both lineages and their descendants:
- Argumentative essays — take a position, present evidence, address counterarguments. The most common academic form.
- Expository essays — explain a concept or process. Clarity and structure are the primary concerns.
- Narrative essays — use storytelling to develop an idea. The essay’s argument emerges from the story rather than being stated and supported.
- Personal essays — the writer’s experience is the primary material, examined for broader significance.
- Critical essays — apply analytical frameworks to texts, events, or cultural phenomena.
- Lyric essays — hybrid forms that borrow techniques from poetry: fragmentation, juxtaposition, white space, image over argument.
Methods
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Thesis and development — the argumentative essay states a claim and develops it through evidence and reasoning. Joseph Williams showed that essays with clear thesis sentences in predictable positions (end of introduction, beginning of sections) are more usable for readers — this is document design applied to argument [@williams2006].
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Evidence and analysis — evidence without analysis is a list; analysis without evidence is assertion. The essay’s characteristic move is to present a specific piece of evidence and then explain what it means — showing the reader how to see what the writer sees.
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Concession and counterargument — acknowledging opposing positions strengthens rather than weakens an argument. Wayne Booth argued that rhetoric works through identification — the reader must believe the writer has seriously considered alternatives [@booth1961].
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Structure as argument — the order in which ideas appear is itself an argument. The essay’s structure should make the reasoning visible: each section should follow from the previous one, and the reader should be able to see why this section comes here and not elsewhere. This is the prose version of what Linda Flower called reader-based prose [@flowerhayes1981].
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Sentence-level clarity — Joseph Williams’s principles (characters as subjects, actions as verbs, old information before new) apply to essay prose as much as to technical writing [@williams2006]. Richard Lanham’s Paramedic Method provides a revision procedure for cutting the Official Style that academic essays are particularly prone to [@lanham2006].
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Revision as thinking — Peter Elbow distinguished first-order thinking (generative, uncritical) from second-order thinking (analytical, evaluative) and argued that good writing requires both — but not at the same time [@elbow1981]. Freewriting generates material; revision shapes it.
Key principles
- Say one thing. An essay should be about one thing. If it’s about two things, it’s two essays. This constraint forces the writer to find the connection between apparently separate concerns.
- Earn the abstract. Move from concrete evidence to general claims, not the reverse. Richard Mayer’s research on learning confirms what essayists have always known: understanding builds from examples to principles [@mayer2009].
- Every paragraph has a job. A paragraph that doesn’t advance the essay’s argument doesn’t belong in the essay. If you can remove it without the reader noticing, remove it.
- Address the skeptic. Write for a reader who is intelligent, informed, and not yet convinced. This standard prevents both condescension and preaching.
- End somewhere new. The conclusion should arrive at understanding that wasn’t available at the beginning. An essay that ends where it started hasn’t essayed anything.
Key texts
- Michel de Montaigne, Essays [@montaigne1580] — the founding texts of the form
- George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” [@orwell1946] — the essay as a weapon against dishonest prose
- Joseph Williams, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace [@williams2006] — sentence-level techniques for clear essay prose
- Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers [@elbow1973] — freewriting and the believing game as methods for essay generation
- Linda Flower and John Hayes, “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing” [@flowerhayes1981] — the recursive cognitive model of composing
- Richard Lanham, Revising Prose [@lanham2006] — the Paramedic Method for revision
- Phillip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay [@lopate1994] — anthology with critical introduction tracing the essay’s history
Key thinkers
- Michel de Montaigne — invented the essay form; thought on the page
- George Orwell — political essay, plain language as moral commitment
- Joseph Williams — sentence-level clarity for academic and professional prose
- Peter Elbow — the writing process, freewriting, the believing game
- Linda Flower — cognitive process of writing, writer-based to reader-based prose
- Richard Lanham — revision as the cure for institutional prose
- Phillip Lopate — the personal essay as a literary form
Relation to other writing disciplines
Essay writing shares sentence-level skills with all writing in this vault — the style guide governs grammar, voice, and word choice across disciplines. What distinguishes essay writing from technical writing is the essay’s relationship to uncertainty: technical writing closes the gap between the reader’s ignorance and the needed knowledge; the essay explores a question the writer hasn’t yet fully answered.
The essay also intersects with fiction writing in the narrative essay and with poetry in the lyric essay — forms where the essay borrows techniques from other disciplines to do its characteristic work of thinking through writing.
Entries
- Terms of Essay Writing — definitions of essay-specific craft vocabulary
- Curriculum of Essay Writing — sequential lessons on thesis development, evidence, and revision