Post I: Discourse Surrounding the Essay

- Justin Kaplan in "What Is an Essay?"

What is an essay, and what, if anything, is it about? "Formal" and "informal", "personal", "familiar", "review-essay", "article-essay", "critical essay", essays literary, biographical, polemic, and historical- the standard litcrit lexicon and similar attempts at a genre definition and subclassification in the end simply tell you how like an eel this essay creature is. It wriggles between narcissism and detachment, opinion and fact, the private party and the public meeting...

Kaplan states that an essay is like an eel in how it wriggles its way through many subjects. Write an essay about yourself or a personal experience. What about a historical essay or even a scientific one? Got opinions, write about it. Let the world know about what kind of facts and statistics are out there. This, I believe is completely true. An essay is not poetry or fiction. It is cold, hard facts. Whether it is formal, personal, scientific or opinionated, it is all about the truth.
To answer his question: “What is an essay, and what, if anything, is it about?” I say an essay is a piece of writing about any factual or truthful subject. It allows a writer to express themselves with very little restrictions; and as Kaplan describes an essay is very complex, yet simple. It has no genre classification, but anyone can write an essay. Poetry, on the other hand, limits a writer on how many syllables or words it can contain. A poem will not allow a full explanation of the truth. And yet an essay’s only restriction is that it can not expand the world of reason. It must contain truth and only truth; if not an essay then becomes fiction, a short story. Kaplan’s listings of what people will identify with when writing an essay is outstanding. There are no rules when it comes to what an essay’s subject can be about. From a person who has written many essays in my time I find that essays are the easiest form of writing. There is no length or preference to what it can contain and as my teacher once told me; an essay is like a skirt, it should be long enough to keep it covered yet short enough to keep it interesting.