On Essay

Joshua Harris, 2019

To many students I teach, essay is a dirty word — but not one of the fun ones. In fact, essay is the dirtiest of the dirty words because, unlike other bad words, teenagers won’t even use “essay.” I say that’s a shame, because I love essays. I love editing them, and I love writing them. I lovingly defend the essay, even the dreaded college essay. The essay gets a bad rap, and like most problems ever, middle school’s to blame. So I’d like to set the record straight. Or at least, to try.

I was in middle school when I first learned the dreadful-est form of the dirtiest word: the five-paragraph essay. My teachers told me that every essay had a thesis, and beneath this thesis were three supporting points, and that beneath these three supporting points was a conclusion that said the exact same thing all over again. I hated it. And I couldn’t do it. And I hated that I couldn’t do it. I wish I knew in sixth grade what I know now: that the five-paragraph essay is [insert your choice of any other dirty word]. Because it's not an essay, it’s a formula. And a bad formula, because the solutions it provides are rarely satisfying.

I think the five-paragraph formula may be the single worst way to teach essay writing. It fails to reflect how people think, and how they naturally express what they think. When a teacher tells his or her students to fit their ideas inside of the five paragraph formula’s constraining box, the students return to their teacher a stack of box shaped ideas: boring, conventional, cliché. Not all ideas fit inside of a box with three equivalently sized compartments. Some ideas are boxes with only two compartments, one of which is way larger than the other. Some ideas aren’t boxes at all. Fitting nuanced ideas inside the five-paragraph formula stifles them. Serious question: when was the last time you had an argument or idea that came into your head in the form of the five-paragraph essay, with three equally sized subheadings? I haven’t ever. So I say, toss out the five-paragraph formula, and let it rot in the rhetorical garbage alongside the climate change deniers.

But then what? What is the structure of the essay? That’s just the trouble—and the beauty. The essay has no pre-ordained structure. The shape of an essay mirrors the shape of a writer’s thought; the essay is an amorphous thing that adjusts its shape to the author’s ideas, not vice versa. In great essays, the writer is an architect, building original rhetorical structures from and for the material at hand. Sometimes, that structure appears like the familiar box, albeit with altered compartments for ideas of different sizes. But, in some essays, the ideal structure is little more than a hefty bag of ideas full to the bursting, digressive with attention deficit, barely able to hold all the contents inside through ordered disorder. Whatever the shape, of many shapes, the well-constructed essay expresses nuanced thought in a deliberately organized way. And when it works, when it stands, an essay can be a beautiful thing.

“Essay” used to be beautiful. Essay wasn’t always a dirty word, and in French, it still isn’t. Essay derives from the French verb “essayer”, meaning “to try.” This is just what many classic essays do: they try, they taste and test and sample, they journey through the thinking process of a dynamic mind. In Western culture, the father of the essay is the French Renaissance-era writer Montaigne, a ballsy experimenter whose writing synthesized ancient Greek philosophy, personal diary entries, and revolutionary thinking. In one essay, “Of Cannibals,” Montaigne makes perhaps the earliest ever plea for cultural relativism. At the outset, he describes his encounters with the Tupinamba people in Brazil who ceremonially eat their vanquished enemies. But after presenting this ethnography, Montaigne questions whether the practices of these foreign Brazilian tribes are really any more vicious than the violent and barbarous practices found in Europe.

It’s a brilliant piece of socially progressive argument, centuries ahead of its time, and legitimately one of the earliest examples of essay in the canon. To my readers who are ardent defenders of social justice—Montaigne did it first, and he did it in the essay. So what happened? Clearly, the essay lost some of its revolutionary punch between 1500s France and third period language arts.

Essays once challenged widespread thought, contested a reader’s ideas, provoked curiosity about something often taken for granted. Is it such a novel concept that the persuasive essay is, well, supposed to persuade? An essay is ineffective if it expresses something that everyone with sense already believes. This is how middle school kills the essay: by approving mechanical statement essays which reproduce a box built a million times before, but say nothing of value. There is no essay until there’s insight, and there is no insight until it’s specific, unique, personal, and new. In an argument essay, it’s not enough to say “The Great Gatsby relies heavily on figurative language.” In what way, to what effect? In a personal essay, it’s not enough to say “my hard times have been hard.” What makes the story personal? In a college essay it’s not enough to say, “I like doing the thing I do” or “I am the person I am.” What’s your singular perspective? An essay is complete once it says not just what, but also because and how and why, with painstaking specificity. That’s the way to banish cliché. That’s the way to make the essay stop feeling so boring, so conventional, so dirty — so bad.

It’s ironic that essay has become an untouchably dirty word, bad as opposed to bad-ass, because “essay” actually shares with cuss words the same central intent: rebellion. Like swearing, writing an effective essay is a subversive act, an expression of a thought that counters the reader’s expectation. One of George Orwell’s most famous essays questioned whether Gandhi was really such a saint. Montaigne’s essays defied centuries of European tradition. Pretty badass. Yet, when thinking of “essay,” people still invoke the useless five-paragraph formula. It’s just slander.

What’s an essay lover to do, but to write an essay in defense of the essay?

It’s time to reclaim the essay as a creative act, as a persuasive act, as a rebellious act. To strip the essay of its immense negative charge, or else, render it a dirty word we feel comfortable saying in public. ESSAY. It’s the single greatest vehicle for free thought and self-expression—how could middle school have corrupted it so that it become something detestable? I love it, or else, I try to.

For all that I have come to love the essay, I also don’t. The essay drives me mad. It takes effort to express ideas with clarity. And every time I think I’ve gotten it right, I show my work to a friend, and I find I wasn’t as clear as I thought, learn I was clunky where I thought I was clever. To make yourself into a character in an essay is tough, to capture the right tone in an essay, even tougher; it’s hard to be opinionated without being preachy, emotional without being maudlin, funny without being smug. And were these challenges not enough, to do so within the college essay’s criminally low word count? Absurd. It’s an immense challenge. I love it, I tear my hair out, I love it again.

Writing is a duck. Gliding along, seemingly effortless, while beneath the surface a pair of stunted frumpy legs paddle for dear life. But what is a duck to do, but to paddle?

What is an essayist to do, but to try?

Joshua Sonny Harris

Writing Instructor and Essay Obsessive

2019