Essay
An essay is a 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 all modern 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 works like John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population are counterexamples.
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Famous quotes containing the word essay:
“There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be pure—pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Essay writing is perhaps ... the easiest for the author and requires little more than what is called a fluency of words and a vivacity of expression to avoid dullness; but without ... a real foundation of matter ... an essay writer is very apt, like Dogberry in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, to think that if he had the tediousness of a king, he would bestow it all upon his readers.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
“‘Twas something we knew all about to begin with
And needn’t have fared into space like his master
To find ‘twas the effort, the essay of love.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)