Essay

An essay is a short piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos,learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition of an essay is vague, overlapping with those of an article and a short story. Almost allmodern essays are written in prose, but works in verse have been dubbed essays (e.g. Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man). While brevity usually defines an essay, voluminous workslike John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population provide counterexamples.
In some places(e.g., in the United States), essays havebecome a major part of formal education. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and admission essays are often used by universities in selectingapplicants and, in the humanities and social sciences, as a way of assessing the performance of students during final exams. The concept of an "essay" has been extended to other mediums beyond writing. Afilm essay is a movie that often incorporates documentary film making styles and which focuses more on the evolution of a theme or an idea. A photographic essay is an attempt to cover a topic with alinked series of photographs; it may or may not have an accompanying text or captions.
An essay has been defined in a variety of ways. One definition is a "prose composition with a focused subject ofdiscussion" or a "long, systematic discourse".[1]
It is difficult to define the genre into which essays fall. Aldous Huxley, a leading essayist, gives guidance on the subject.[2] He notes that "[l]ikethe novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything, usually on a certain topic. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is...