Before we answer the question we have to start by asking ourselves how can we define an essay? Is it an argument or a recollection, an email or blog post, a food review or a piece of literary criticism? Is it some sort of learned, well written prose – bound in leather and tucked away on a bookshelf? I will argue that an essay can be any of these, depending on a writer’s purpose. An essay is an attempt at connecting my personal experience, ideas, and memories to people outside myself. It is as direct and as palpable as a handshake, yet in order for an essay to be effective, it requires careful preparation and delivery.
Essays range from personal to public; they can be biographical, argumentative, lyrical, historic, epistolary, or humorous (see: Types of essay). Some essays convey themes, while others are experimental. Essays are written in many tones and a multitude of approaches are possible. Anything goes, from exploratory to critical, from playful to expository. In common to all essays is the use the same basic feature: a true story, told using smart words, by the person who lived or witnessed it.
One way to classify essays is by grouping them in formal and informal essays. A formal essay is largely viewed as the typical English school assignment, a descriptive, comparison-contrast, expository, but seldom persuasive essay. The intent is to teach how to write a thesis statement, use principles of organisation, and use and cite secondary sources. In contrast, the informal essay is always personal and its prevalent form today is the blog post. While some posts are worthy of attention, the blogosphere, in general, is overwhelmingly occupied by trivia. Most great essayists have crossed the line between these two forms frequently.
I like to think of essays as containers for human memory. What matters most is how I, the writer, witness the world and remember what I saw, heard, and felt by putting those memories into words. As an essayist I am able to engage a kind of originality that’s harder to find in the conventions of other genres. The reason being that an essay has no fixed parameters apart from including a first- person narrator who is intent on telling the truth. An essay’s form and style is entirely dependent on my purpose and my audience. I get to create a new form and adopt a new style with each essay that I write. Yet there are some conventions that I need to address.
First, an essay has to have ethos, a Greek term meaning moral character. In his treatise Rhetoric, Aristotle introduces ethos as the first of three modes of persuasion. The other two are emotional appeals (pathos) and the proof of a truth through rational arguments (logos).These modes are available to any writer who hopes to convince an audience on the chosen topic.
Second, whatever argument is made within an essay must represent a larger, more universal truth. This helps to establish the moral character of one’s pursuit, and, once ethos is established the essay will speak beyond the petty concerns of the essayist. The successful essay engages the wider world and those who inhabit it – namely, readers. This is still best put by Montaigne’s maxim: “Every man has within himself the entire human condition.”
Third, an essay has to address the fundamental question “So what?” Putting down notes about how much your brother irritates you is an instance of personal storytelling that fails to consider the wider world. As an essayist one must ask: What is the purpose –the point – of my essay? What is my central claim or argument? As an essayist, one must remember that one writes for the common reader, who is intelligent, curious, and hungry for meaning. If my writing can’t speak to this common reader, then I am not speaking to my audience. I am just speaking to myself and lost the most important feature of the essay – to communicate my thoughts to the wider world. In Donald Trump’s words Sad!
Fourth, although all essays express a structure of some kind, there is no fixed formula to follow. An essay is a mental walkabout. When reading an essay, we meander inside someone else’s head, looking at the world through the writer’s eyes.
Finally, essays tell the truth. I need to convince my audience that I am credible, that I share words of wisdom, and, most importantly, that I am reliable. This brings us back to Aristotle’s first point, which is that an essay writer’s ethos is the clout of character that makes his or her claims both credible and powerful. It’s important to understand that ethos is a proof that comes directly from the writer. And because the writer is the artist, Aristotle calls it an artistic proof. That means that the integrity of the writing stems directly from the author rather than from data, interviews, statistics, or other non-artistic proofs.
Unlike other kinds of writing that often adopt a distant and apparently objective third-person point of view, an essay’s ethos is the credibility that comes out of the writer’s self-knowledge and self-presentation. As such, I cannot just tell a reader about my life. Instead, I must allow the reader to re-experience something true about the human condition and thereby make it relevant to him or her. Abstract ideas and themes must be grounded in concrete facts, yet these facts must then be synthesised with intelligence, emotion, and reflection that speak both to the hearts and heads of readers.