Canadian Journal of Psychology, 13 4 , — The Modern Language Journal, 70 2 , — 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 paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have traditionally 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.
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.
In some countries e. 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. An 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'.
Aldous Huxley, a leading essayist, gives guidance on the subject. 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:.
Huxley adds that the most satisfying essays ' 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 — 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, and his essays grew out of his commonplacing. For the rest of his life, he continued revising previously published essays and composing new ones.
Francis Bacon's essays, published in book form in , , and , were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in English in , according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In France, Michel de Montaigne's three volume Essais in the mid s contain over examples widely regarded as the predecessor of the modern essay.
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. In the 20th century, a number of essayists tried to explain the new movements in art and culture by using essays e. 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. 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. This section describes the different forms and styles of essay writing.
These forms and styles are used by an array of authors, including university students and professional essayists. 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.
Classification is the categorization of objects into a larger whole while division is the breaking of a larger whole into smaller parts. 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. Compare and contrast is arranged emphatically. Expository essay is used to inform, describe or explain a topic, using important facts and teaching reader about the topic. Perhaps the author himself had some premonition of the book's potential: manuscripts, as he famously has Woland say to the Master, don't burn.
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