"An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument — but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of 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, 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 . 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, essays have become a major part of formal education. 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 mediums beyond writing. A film essay is a movie that often incorporates documentary film making 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
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".
It is difficult to define the genre into which essays fall. Aldous Huxley, a leading essayist, gives guidance on the subject. 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 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 on setting forth, passing judgement 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."
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. Inspired in particular by the works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Œuvres Morales 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. 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 1597, 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary."
Hope this helped!
~Olivia
(P.S. Brainliest answer please? I am working for Virtuoso and I only need two more brainliest answers.)
I had to do this project and its probably different from your experience but ill put my essay.
Explanation:
In 2019, if somebody told me that next year the world would be shut down and nobody could get within six feet of each other, I would have brought that person to a mental facility. The coronavirus is the most unimaginable, crazy period of time I (and probably the rest of the world) have ever lived through.
I’ve missed out on many things such as vacations, events, birthday parties, and fun activities. Towards the end of the sixth grade, there were all these fun activities and field trips planned since we were graduating elementary school. Only a week before all those activities were to start, the schools shut down and all we got was a driveby graduation at our school which I did actually enjoy but let's face it, that little event did not make up for the loads of things our grade was so very excited to do. My family was also supposed to go to Martha’s Vineyard with my aunt, cousin, and her fiance which we had started doing every summer, but we had to cancel it. The summer was nice though, as I went downtown a lot with my friends, went on my boat a lot, practiced sports, and swam in my pool. I think we can all agree that the summer probably would have been better without a global pandemic to worry about.
Although it’s been hard, the coronavirus has had some upsides to it. I’ve been recently focusing on improving myself/health and if the pandemic hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have as much time daily and throughout the year to make these improvements for myself. For example, I’ve been going to the local CrossFit gym every day after school and I even participated in a nutrition challenge and won! It built up my self confidence a lot and I'm as fit and as healthy as I've ever been thanks to the extra time I've had to better myself. A lot of people have been saying things about the coronavirus making them have depression, anxiety, and social anxiety and I suppose I gained a bit of that (who hasn’t?) but it’s been really nice to get to focus on myself for a whole year and try new things I've always wanted to do but haven’t had time for. The pandemic has changed me, in some ways for the better because I take things less for granted now and really care about my health, state of mind, and wellbeing much more.
-Are the words "Transition" and "Conclusion sentence" there because you used it as a guide, you are required to have them, or you need to put one in
-There was a little bit of a lot of word and sentence repeating, I feel like a different word choice could have been used, like synonyms. Like instead of knowledge being used 500 times, awareness or apprehension, understanding, or comprehension could have been used. Just look up synonyms of words you used a bunch of times or for bland (boring) words
- There is some punctuation that could be improved
- Flow is good, with a few choppy parts
- Other than those it is really good
-Let me know if you need anything else, I am more than happy to help
