Becoming a Great Essayist

The modern form of the essay may be seen daily in blogs, although not all blogs are essays-instead, many are no more than personal journals, rants, or fantasies without broader connections and appeals. Professor Cognard-Black provides examples of what components are required for a piece to be a fully formed blog essay.

Professor Cognard-Black shows you how a simple recipe is itself a story. Recipes form the basis of edible essays, which start out as instructions and ingredients, but when you mix in personal connections between a dish and your own culinary culture, add a dash of imagery, and stir in the history behind the food, you€™ve extended your recipe into a keepsake-a taste memory.

Since the first nature essays were written in the 19th century, such pieces have often romanticized the natural world-but there is value in not sentimentalizing the great outdoors. Examining works by William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Deb Marquart, and Michael P.

One of the most surprising insights into humor essays is the revelation that most humor comes from misfortune. This idea has been around for centuries, as even Aristotle noted that laughing at tragedy is cathartic for both the writer and the audience.

See how non-artistic proofs are immensely important when crafting a historical essay, especially since history is subjective, and the way you tell the story shapes how it will be understood. The non-artistic proofs of research and data set the scene for a historical essay, which connects personal memory to a larger project of human history.

Originating in the medieval period, polemical essays are the form for writers who wish to focus on a topic from one perspective only. They are often written to be deliberately polarizing.

While public intellectual essays don€™t step outside personal reflection, they do grapple with social issues, often myth-busting popular beliefs. This style of writing is distinct from a portrait or lyric essay.

In this lecture, you€™ll delve into this dynamic between a subject and its writer and examine this power struggle as it plays out in a portrait essay. Using examples from Truman Capote and Scott Russell Sanders, you€™ll see how your own anxieties and prejudices can come through in an essay focused entirely on someone else.

Learn how a handwritten letter differs from other forms of direct communication. You€™ll explore the similarities between letters and the epistolary essay as they both speak to a specific audience and convey a strong sense of reality and veracity.

A lyric poem expresses a writer€™s thoughts and feelings through the intimacy of the first-person narrator, evoking a strong emotional reaction in the audience. Professor Cognard-Black demonstrates the similarities between a lyric poem and a lyric essay and shares a moving example of a lyric piece written by one of her own students that synthesizes experience into a kind of mosaic.

A memoir is often confused with a personal essay, but Professor Cognard-Black shows you the difference, once again using examples from her own students€™ work. She then provides numerous tips to help you recreate your memories and turn them into fascinating pieces of writing.

Learn how essays can break the rules of conventional writing, allowing you to design essay forms to match your needs rather than being forced to fit the rules of more conventional forms. Examine structures that reimagine the essay, such as the microessay and the prose poem or €œproem.

Professor Cognard-Black guides you through Aristotle€™s process of inventio or invention, which is that period of discovery as you write your first draft. You€™ll examine openings from a number of published works, gaining a powerful toolkit that can help you craft the first sentence of your first draft.

Writing a visual essay requires you to detach yourself from how you have been taught to view images your whole life. Rather than passively observing and judging, you must challenge yourself to get into the visual.

Using imagery in essays does more than describe and evoke a scene, however. When done well, imagery can transport your reader to a specific time and location.

Learn how to write concisely to avoid an €œI€ story becoming simply an outlet for your own feelings, instead using your emotions to develop a broader appeal that will interest and benefit others. Professor Cognard-Black also reveals how general tricks of the writing trade (for example, €œshow, don€™t tell€) don€™t always apply when writing essays.

To help keep your essays from becoming overly sentimental, Professor Cognard-Black discusses pitfalls for writers to avoid. You€™ll be introduced to three examples of what rhetorical theorists call logical fallacies and then take on the challenge of an assignment that brings together emotional appeals with rational ones to achieve credibility, empathy, and candor.

Learn how to elicit emotions from your readers while remaining authentic and not manipulative, clich©d, or contrived. Reflect on honest and moving uses of language from Maxine Hong Kingston and Barack Obama, who once perfectly summed up the importance of pathos in a speech by saying, €œEmpathy is a quality of character that can change the world[.

Professor Cognard-Black explores the world of unreasonable essays, often written for the sake of humor or irony, or to be provocative, such as Jonathan Swift€™s €œA Modest Proposal.€ You€™ll explore an example of an essay that showcases conflicting views yet remains reasonable, and then look at examples where unreasonable writers use pure demagoguery to play on readers€™ emotions.

The most important artistic proof in any essay is ethos-the writer’s ethical appeal or credibility. She demonstrates how to effectively use ethos along with logos or rationality to bring reasonableness into your essays, which vital to writing effectively.

Essays that present conflicting views are not uncommon; Socrates would commonly switch sides in order to test all parts of an argument, and many others have followed his example. Learn how writing essays that provide both sides of an argument can help you to develop an elasticity of mind, expand your essay€™s range of ideas, and add to your ethos or credibility.

One of the most remarkable consequences of essay writing is the insights you discover about yourself. The essay doesn€™t allow for plot building or outlines-you simply sit and write, which means the story takes its own direction.

This lecture focuses on looking at the world around you with a new lens, showing you how to convey those memories you€™ve kept as an experience rather than just a recounting of facts. You€™ll travel down the streets of London with Virginia Woolf to explore her home as a stranger might, learning how taking on a new perspective can translate into compelling essays.

First, learn what the essay is and what it is not. See how writing essays has evolved over centuries yet has remained versatile, and examine the many uses of essays across the ages.