Essay on The Meaning of Life. Words 4 Pages. The Meaning of Life My few years on this planet have been a bit confusing. I have learned of many aspects of life from which one can draw meaning, if indeed such meaning can be drawn. I have also learned that there can be no singular meaning of life to stand for us all, or even any one of us · Essays are brief, non-fiction compositions that describe, clarify, argue, or analyze a subject. Students might encounter essay assignments in any school subject and at any level of school, from a personal experience "vacation" essay in middle school to a complex analysis of a scientific process in graduate blogger.comted Reading Time: 4 mins Essay definition is - an analytic or interpretative literary composition usually dealing with its subject from a limited or personal point of view. How to use essay in a sentence. Synonym Discussion of essay
The Definition of an Essay Including Writing Resources
As definitions go, Huxley's is no more or less exact than Francis Bacon's "dispersed meditations," Samuel Johnson's "loose sally of the mind" or Edward Hoagland's "greased pig.
Meaning of essays Montaigne adopted the term "essay" in the 16th century to describe his "attempts" at self-portrayal in prosethis slippery form has resisted any sort of precise, universal definition. But that won't an attempt to define the term in this brief article. In the broadest sense, the term "essay" can refer to just about any short piece of nonfiction -- an editorial, feature story, critical study, even an excerpt from a book.
However, literary definitions of a genre are usually a bit fussier. One way to start is to draw a distinction between articleswhich are read primarily for the information they contain, and essays, in which the pleasure of reading takes precedence over the information in the text.
Although handy, meaning of essays, this meaning of essays division points chiefly to kinds of reading rather than to kinds of texts.
So here are some meaning of essays ways that the essay might be defined. Standard definitions often stress the loose structure or apparent shapelessness of the essay.
Johnson, for example, called the essay "an irregular, indigested piece, not a regular and orderly performance, meaning of essays. True, the writings of several well-known essayists William Hazlitt and Ralph Waldo Emersonfor instance, after the fashion of Montaigne can be recognized by the casual nature of their explorations -- or "ramblings.
Each of these essayists follows certain organizing principles of his own. Oddly enough, critics haven't paid much attention to the principles of design actually employed by successful essayists, meaning of essays. These principles are rarely formal patterns of organizationthat is, the "modes of exposition" found in many composition textbooks. Instead, they might be described as patterns of thought -- progressions of a mind working out an idea, meaning of essays.
Unfortunately, the customary divisions of the essay into opposing types -- formal and informal, impersonal and familiar -- are also troublesome. Consider this suspiciously neat dividing line drawn by Michele Richman:.
Post-Montaigne, the essay split into two distinct modalities: One remained informal, personal, intimate, relaxed, conversational and often humorous; the other, dogmatic, impersonal, systematic and expository. The terms used here to qualify the term "essay" are convenient as a kind of critical shorthand, but they're meaning of essays at best and potentially contradictory.
Informal can describe either the shape or the tone of the work -- or both. Personal refers to the stance of the essayist, conversational to the language of the piece, and expository to its content and aim. When the writings of particular essayists are studied carefully, Richman's "distinct modalities" grow increasingly vague. But meaning of essays fuzzy as these terms might be, the qualities of shape and personality, form and voice, are clearly integral to an understanding of the essay as an artful literary kind.
Many of meaning of essays terms used to characterize the essay -- personal, meaning of essays, familiar, intimate, subjective, friendly, conversational -- represent efforts to identify the genre's most powerful organizing force: the rhetorical voice or projected character or meaning of essays of the essayist. In his study of Charles LambFred Randel observes that the "principal declared allegiance" of the essay is to "the experience of the essayistic voice.
Similarly, at meaning of essays beginning of "Walden, " Henry David Thoreau reminds the reader that "it is always the first person that is speaking, meaning of essays. The terms "voice" and "persona" are often meaning of essays interchangeably to suggest the rhetorical nature of the essayist himself on the page. At times an author may consciously strike a pose or play a role.
He can, as E. White confirms in his preface to "The Essays," "be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter. In "What I Think, What I Am," essayist Edward Hoagland points out that "the artful 'I' of an essay can be as chameleon as any narrator in fiction. Klaus to conclude that the essay is "profoundly fictive":. It seems to meaning of essays the sense of human presence that is indisputably related to its author's deepest sense of self, but that is also a complex illusion of that self -- an enactment of it as if it were both in the process of thought and in the process of sharing the outcome of that thought with others, meaning of essays.
But to acknowledge the fictional qualities of the essay isn't to deny its special status as nonfiction. A basic aspect of the relationship between a writer or a writer's persona and a reader the implied audience is the presumption that what the essayist says is literally true.
The difference between a short story, say, and an autobiographical essay lies less in the narrative structure or the nature of the material than in the narrator's implied contract with the reader about the kind of truth being offered. Under the terms of this contract, the essayist presents experience as it actually occurred -- as it occurred, that is, in the version by the essayist.
The narrator of an essay, the editor George Dillon says, "attempts to convince the reader that its model of experience of the world is valid, meaning of essays. In other words, the reader of an essay is called on to join in the making of meaning. And it's up to the reader to decide whether to play along. Viewed in this way, the drama of an essay might lie in the conflict between the conceptions of self and world that the reader brings to a text and the conceptions that the essayist tries to arouse.
With these thoughts in mind, the essay might be defined as a short work of nonfiction, often artfully disordered and highly polished, in which an authorial voice invites an implied reader to accept as authentic a certain textual mode of experience. But it's still a greased pig. Sometimes the best way to learn exactly what an essay is -- is to read some great ones. You'll find meaning of essays than of them in this collection of Classic British and American Essays and Speeches. Share Flipboard Email.
English English Grammar An Introduction to Punctuation Writing. Richard Nordquist. English and Rhetoric Professor. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks. our editorial process.
Cite this Article Format. Nordquist, meaning of essays, Richard. The Meaning of essays History and Definition. copy citation. What is a Familiar Essay in Composition? What Are the Different Types and Characteristics of Essays? Rhetorical Analysis Definition and Examples. What Is a Personal Essay Personal Statement?
Point of View in Grammar and Composition. The Writer's Voice in Literature and Rhetoric. Bad Essay Topics for College Admissions. What Is Colloquial Style or Language? How to Write a Narrative Essay or Speech. Definition and Examples of Formal Essays, meaning of essays.
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Definition essays are a form of expository writing in which the writer provides information about the term to their audience. They typically follow a standard essay format and include both a definition and an analysis of the term · Definitions and Observations "[An essay is a] composition, usually in prose.., which may be of only a few hundred words (like Bacon's "Essays") or of book length (like Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding") and which discusses, formally or informally, a topic or a variety of topics." (J.A. Cuddon, "Dictionary of Literary Terms". Basil, )Estimated Reading Time: 6 mins Essay on The Meaning of Life. Words 4 Pages. The Meaning of Life My few years on this planet have been a bit confusing. I have learned of many aspects of life from which one can draw meaning, if indeed such meaning can be drawn. I have also learned that there can be no singular meaning of life to stand for us all, or even any one of us
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