What the Hell is an Essay, Anyway?

Well… it can be almost anything, really.

Well… it can be almost anything, really.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Essays didn’t always exist. Most scholars credit the French magistrate Michel de Montaigne for the invention of this genre. Realizing that thinkers need more than just formal academic writing to develop knowledge, Montaigne wanted a kind of writing that is more flexible and personal. He wanted to get quick feedback on his ideas, but didn’t want to write letters. So he wrote short thought pieces and called them essais.

The word essais in French simply means “attempts, trials, or experiments.” Or perhaps “thinking out loud.” Since then, essays have become so formalized that how we write an essay may determine whether we get into one college or another.

We’ve lost sight of what essays are truly about. Essays are not about carefully crafting some masterpiece that will go down in history. Essays are about thinking out loud … getting your ideas out there to see if they work or not.

Let’s not think about what essays are … let’s think about what essays do. Then we’ll discover that an essay can be anything.

Essays show personality.

Whether you call it ethos, persona, style, or voice, essays are deeply personal. There are essays only you can write, because they’re the expression of your unique positionality.

Essays create community.

Essays are also deeply communal. The difference between a journal and an essay is purely audience. An essay is only complete when read by others.

Essays experiment with thoughts.

Essays are not written in stone. Our personality changes. Our communal life is constantly shifting. We should respond to these experiments with grace and open minds. Essays are about taking risks and discovering new ideas in dialogue with other essays.

So really … anything can be an essay — a blog, an article, a tweet, or a TikTok — as long as they do these three things.