The Art Of The Essay

"Essay" is from the Gallic word essayer, meaning "to try," and what you should cognize about essay authorship is that it can be an even more than trying endeavor, if you allow it, than essay reading.

In high school my English teachers, with their eldritch endowment for ossifying literature, sacrificed us to the angry Gods of Francis Bacon and Prince Charles Lamb and the like, so that to our immature and callow and impatient heads the essay was a dull and exanimate thing. Whenever we were assigned to compose an essay, we assumed that our creative activities had to be as stultifying as the 1s we'd read. Our teachers, forever on the lookout man for misdemeanors of spelling and phraseology, never indicated that we might compose about something that occupied us, in an informal style that would be more than like speech production than writing.

Who knew that authorship could be invigorating and merriment -- that in an essay 1 could put out to - one could seek -- to prosecute the reader in a conversation, a dialogue?

And then there was the all-dreaded word minimum, hanging like a chill over all our essay assignments. We came to believe that, unless we had four or five hundred words to munificent on a subject, we would not make it justice.

But did not Mr. William Shakespeare say, "Brevity is the psyche of wit?" And did not Mr. Abraham Lincoln make make with a mere 272 words in composing the top oration - the top essay - in American history?

Imagine Honest Little Abe in the one-tenth grade, presenting his essay to the class.

"This volition never do, Abraham," the instructor states him. "You're short-change by a page and a half."

In the custody of a Mrs. Sutter, my tenth-grade English Language instructor - Supreme Being remainder her psyche - the Gettysburg Address as we cognize it might have got been lost to descendants - eviscerated by accretion.

Let us therefore highly decide to compose what is in our hearts, irrespective of length, in words which peal true to our selves, even though they turn out to be incorrect ("The human race will little short letter nor long retrieve what we state here..."). Therefore allow us be here dedicated to the great project remaining before us, and allow us seek - allow us essay -- with our last full measurement of devotion, to state what we mean, in words that are simple and pure, so that this undertaking shall have got a new birth of freedom, and that essays of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.