I developed an initial version of this lecture (as a handout) about the time I began rethinking writing textbooks. I still often ask students to use a text like How to Write Anything, and we spend time thinking critically about how to use “guides” like this. Guides are very different from a “handbook” or the Purdue Online Writing Lab—HtWA is a useful guide in part because it includes a handbook/reference. Guides describe specific kinds of writing that seem mostly to be written by students in English classes. Well, that’s partially true. A guide might describe an evaluative essay or a process of writing to evaluate—HtWA does this. Now it is surely true that many working writers write evaluative essays. They write movie reviews and analyses of business plans and such. But, few writers who do the work of evaluation have a set of rules in mind, and that’s what guides often end up offering. Instead, writers are developing what I will call here “essays” that take on a specific aim.

School Essays

The essay is a genre that is really hard to define. Composition instructor Nancy Sommers offers this description of one her student’s essays and of essays in general:

David’s essay, like any essay, does not intend to offer the last word on its subject. The civilizing influence of an essay is that it keeps the conversation going, chronicling an intellectual journey, reflecting conversations with sources. (427)

This description may sound odd to you as you work through a First-Year Composition course largely because it is a very different idea about essaying than the one most student writers hold. In my experience, as many student writers sit down to draft, they visualize the project they are writing, regardless of the planning they have done or the assignment they are working on, in one of three familiar forms: the book report, the five-paragraph essay, or the position statement.

Essay as Book Report

Student writers often fall back on the book report because it is so familiar; many of us started in on this kind of writing in fourth or fifth grade. Instead of developing much of an idea or claiming much of anything, the writer lists out the most interesting points or ideas that she discovered and then summarizes research related to each point. Sections of a book report appear almost random, connected only by the fact that all of the information comes out of a book or topic; the order of the information follows the order it is presented in the book or by the date the research being reported was published or by the interests of the writer. Likewise, the level of explicitness varies wildly. At times, book reporters get in way too deep, relating information that seems to be irrelevant in minute detail. At other times, they skip over fascinating sub-topics, leaving the reader interested but frustrated by the lack of detail and explanation.

Five-Paragraph Essay

The five-paragraph essay is almost as familiar as the book report and often was a staple in high school English classes. This genre has very clear conventions: the writer transforms their claim into a thesis. Often that thesis is a sentence that leads to three sub-claims: good oranges are fresh, ripe, and cold. Then all the reading and thinking the writer has done gets packaged as three pools of data related to that thesis. This data might be connected clearly to the thesis, but it might just as well be three discussions of subtopics that are linked by the transitions “first,” “second,” and “third” or “another” and “another”. The conventions of the five-paragraph essay can organize but also can reduce and simplify a writer’s discoveries. Rather than grappling with reasons and evidence or telling stories or reporting new information, the writer follows the pattern. As often as not, they draft an abstract and limited text to be read only by a teacher of five-paragraph essays; they tries to reproduce the kinds examples and level of detail that have been developed in the classroom, to give the teacher what the teacher wants.

Essay as Position Statement

A position statement seems to be a less conventional version of the five-paragraph essay. With the hard work of research completed, the writer closes up their notes and starts speaking their mind, talking either to themselves or to a reader who either agrees with them or should. In this case, the writer calls on rules and moves for developing a project that make sense to them. What develops may be well-informed or may be an extended rant, may be organically organized or may feel like a random deliberation on one point after another. The position-statement writer represents what they believe but often makes few or no direct references to what they have read and may well not draw in enough backing or explain arguments clearly enough to support a new approach to the topic. The writer likely will not imagine this exercise as a journey that results in changing their own thinking.

Essaying beyond School

I will ask us to think of the essay as a genre that is a great deal more open-ended than book reports, five-paragraph essays, and position statements. They will be intellectual journeys that lead you to reflect on and develop your own thinking. Your goal is a clear interpretation of and response to a rhetorical situation and a creative, provocative, concrete, and self-consistent analysis of a topic and sources rather than a formulaic and correct response to an assignment. I offer here some general thoughts about the contours of the genre. (I work a bit from a book on the essay edited by Alexander Butrym.)

General Essay Shape

Essays typically . . .

• start with a hook, that is, with a passage of spirited writing that draws a reader into the topic the essayist wants to deal with,
• provide fairly a clear and early assertion of what the author thinks about the topic and wants to do with the essay (think thesis),
• work for one page or one hundred pages through information, experience, and other peoples ideas in order to expand the topic and accomplish the purpose, and
• conclude with a clear reference to the early assertion and maybe to the opening hook.

Some Essay Characteristics

Here are some tidbits that might complicate and expand your thinking.

• The English word “essay” comes from a French root meaning a “trial or attempt” or “to assay.”
• The German words for “essay” mean a “dealing with” or “setting forth.”
• The essay allows an intrusive authorial presence and occasional indirection and acknowledges biases and uncertainty.
• The essay is typically the reflections of an actual person in response to actual events or the actual reflections and beliefs of other people.
• The essay poses an equal relationship between reader and writer.
• Writer’s use essays for what O. B. Hardison calls “self-fashioning.” Ralph Waldo Emerson argued, We “essay to be.”

Some Strategies for Developing Essays

Looking for more direct guidance? Check out what HtWA or your favorite writing handbook have to say about reading and writing essays. Here are some general rules of thumb for developing a piece of writing. One or more may describe what you want to do within an essay. HtWA defines these developmental schemes as genres and has chapters on most of them. I tend to think of them as ways of developing one or more paragraphs within an essay.

• Description
  • External: re-creates in words the appearance of an object
  • Analytical or technical: explains the structure of an object
  • Evocative: re-creates the impression of an object on the senses
• Narration
  • Chronological: records a sequence of events in the order which they occurred or could have occurred
  • Non-chronological: uses flashbacks and flash-forwards to clarify the meaning of a sequence of events
•  Example
  • Description of some event or thing that illustrates or supports a claim
• Analogy
  • Explanation of something unfamiliar by likening it to something familiar
• Comparison and Contrast
  • Explanation of how two things in the same category differ, usually in ways that make one of them better
• Definition
  • Explanation of a word or phrase by synonym, comparison, contrast, or analogy, function, class and distinctive feature, example, etymology
• Analysis
  • Explanation that classifies a group of items or divides a whole into parts
• Process Description
  • Description of how someone can take each step in some process.
  • Explanation of the chief stages of some process so that someone else can understand how the process unfolds.
• Explanation of Cause and Effect
  • Explanation that shows the causal link between one or more events or conditions

Questions of Form in Essays (or, Is the essay really a genre?)

Rather than looking for a set of rules that your essay should conform to, you will have to decide how you want to manage the flow of language that documents your intellectual journey. This may begin with a question something like this: How does a writer discover a manageable form? That question will lead to others.

• What’s the point I am making?
• What will my major sub-points be?
• What evidence will I draw on?
• What relationships do my data suggest?
• What do I need to stress?
• What sequence will my reader naturally take?
• What data fit where?
• What should come first?
• What comes next? and next? and next?
• What comes last?

With rough answers to these questions, we’re ready to rough in a document. Sometimes it helps to think about a beginning, middle, and end.

If you work out responses to the questions above, you will begin to dump content into each of these general sections. Once you’ve got a feel for where different details, stories, examples, arguments, and the like belong, you can start drafting or planning paragraphs, for in the end, the paragraph is the thing that will guide a reader through our form.

Essay Paragraphs

Some essays have headings, but most are built of paragraphs that implement a writer’s purpose. None of the following items is a hard and fast feature of every paragraph. Rather, they are dynamics that seem to characterize readable essays. There is more on paragraphs in HtWA and the OWL.

• topic sentence(s). A sentence or two that tells a reader what the paragraph will discuss, why that content is significant, and how that content is connected to the purpose of the project. Topic sentences frequently fall at the beginning of the paragraph.
• unity. Everything in the paragraph has to relate to the subtopic that the paragraph develops.
• coherence. Each item in a paragraph must be linked to the previous item in a way that is obvious to a reader.
• development. Different kinds of documents have different expectations for paragraph development. In academic writing, the expectation seems to be 1/3 to 1/2 of a double-spaced, word-processed page.