Essays – Thoughts and Ideas Presented in a Consolidated Form

We all have written essays in our school days. Some of us even might still like to write essays. Essays are basically fictional literary works that contains the ideas and thoughts of an individual. This has been the intention behind writing essays in the olden times. However, in the modern times essays are written not only to state personal opinions but also but also to reassert someone else's opinion. Essays are also written to describe an object as well as to record specific information.

Little about the background of essays

Normally an essay is written to fulfill the academic curricula. It has been discovered that essays were written for the first time by Michel de Montaigne in France between 1533 and 1592. The author Montaigne described his literary works as essays. This was followed by essay writing in English when Sir Francis Bacon created his literary pieces. Soon after this, several eminent literary personalities such as Virginia Woolf, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Charles Lamb, Adrienne Rich, and George Orwell wrote essays which served their literary purposes.

Different Types of Essays

Essays are of various types. People write different types of essays to serve different purposes. There are descriptive essays, narrative essays, argumentative essays, critical essays, imaginative essays, and persuasive essays. Usually an essay written with the academic purpose has a word limit of around 2000-2500 words. However, most people like to follow the five paragraph essay since it has a formal structure. This type of an essay consists of an introduction, three paragraphs devoted to the body and finally one concluding paragraph which supports the content of the entire essay.

Narrative and argumentative essays are fun to write since they give more scope to the writers to explore their thoughts. While a narrative essay is based on the writer's point of view, an argumentative essay tries to convince the reader of the author's perspective by stating facts and figures in a logical way.

Essays need not be literary always. There are non literary essays written by people as well. Non literary essays cover disciplines like music, films, photography and visual arts. In visual arts, an essay helps one to know about the creativity of the artist. It is the initial draft of the sculpture or drawing of the artist.

The application of essay writing in modern times

Essay writing is an art and one must have a very good command over the language to be able to write good essays. Hence, many schools, colleges and universities assess the merit of their students on the essays they write. Essays also help in developing the writing skills of the students and hence it is an effective tool used in the educational institutions in the present times. Therefore, write essays and explore your creativity.