What have i gained?
After doing this blog, I found that there are a lot of advantages that i have gained, especially when we can share our information with our friends.
I think that this course, readings and project work has given me a lot of knowledge on how to write a research paper.
It is an advantage especially when we are going to further our study.
I have learnt a lot of things during this course. I was not only being taught on how to write research paper, i am also exposed to different kinds of writing. Now, i have realized that there are many types of writings and there are a lot of things that could be done research on.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Why did i choose Muhammad Haji Salleh among other Malaysian writers?
Here are a few reasons why I chose Muhammad Haji Salleh among other Malaysian writers. .
Muhammad Haji Salleh is the only prominent Malaysian writer who writes in two languages, English and Malay with equal finesse and quality. He is amazing as he is able to capture personal feelings, thoughts, emotions and experience. His good command in both languages gives him the opportunity to translate his works and some other people’s works. Translating poetry is not an easy task as it involves a thorough understanding of the possibilities of both linguistic mediums as well as the ability to mediate the transmission of cultural nuances, experiences, thoughts and emotions embodied in poetic structure given that alternative linguistic codes sometimes inhibit the ‘trans-coding’ of one culture. In his translations, he localizes the situation so that reader will get connected to his works easily. Muhammad Haji Salleh is one of the writers whose works are most published and read in Malaysia for over 30 years. One of his quite recent published works is Rowing Down Two Rivers, in 2000. Muhammad Haji Salleh has been writing for a long time that he has not only chart the progress and development of the poet as an individual but also characterizes the progress and development of the poet as an individual but also characterizes the progress of the Malay race and the Malaysian nation. His works provide representative caricatures of the fortunes, challenges, struggles, experiences, failures and victories of the race and the nation as both move across time into an uncharted space. We could see through his eyes and feel his senses of how knowledge and learning how to cope with adversities of colonialism, globalization and neo-colonialism through his experiences
Muhammad Haji Salleh is the only prominent Malaysian writer who writes in two languages, English and Malay with equal finesse and quality. He is amazing as he is able to capture personal feelings, thoughts, emotions and experience. His good command in both languages gives him the opportunity to translate his works and some other people’s works. Translating poetry is not an easy task as it involves a thorough understanding of the possibilities of both linguistic mediums as well as the ability to mediate the transmission of cultural nuances, experiences, thoughts and emotions embodied in poetic structure given that alternative linguistic codes sometimes inhibit the ‘trans-coding’ of one culture. In his translations, he localizes the situation so that reader will get connected to his works easily. Muhammad Haji Salleh is one of the writers whose works are most published and read in Malaysia for over 30 years. One of his quite recent published works is Rowing Down Two Rivers, in 2000. Muhammad Haji Salleh has been writing for a long time that he has not only chart the progress and development of the poet as an individual but also characterizes the progress and development of the poet as an individual but also characterizes the progress of the Malay race and the Malaysian nation. His works provide representative caricatures of the fortunes, challenges, struggles, experiences, failures and victories of the race and the nation as both move across time into an uncharted space. We could see through his eyes and feel his senses of how knowledge and learning how to cope with adversities of colonialism, globalization and neo-colonialism through his experiences
Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes...the name that i was introduced by Dr Rosli Talif in my first semester..he is great poet and most of his works are about racism. he is in the searching of his roots. In his poem, mostly, he writes on being black. He is proud of bing black and he wants everyone to know that.
One of his poem that i like is I, Too
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed –
I, too, am America.
This is his biodata...
(February 1, 1902 - May 22, 1967)Born in Joplin, Missouri, James Langston Hughes was a member of an abolitionist family. He was the great-great-grandson of Charles Henry Langston, brother of John Mercer Langston, who was the first Black American to be elected to public office, in 1855. Hughes attended Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio, but began writing poetry in the eighth grade, and was selected as Class Poet. His father didn't think he would be able to make a living at writing, and encouraged him to pursue a more practical career. He paid his son's tuition to Columbia University on the grounds he study engineering. After a short time, Langston dropped out of the program with a B+ average; all the while he continued writing poetry. His first published poem was also one of his most famous, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", and it appeared in Brownie's Book. Later, his poems, short plays, essays and short stories appeared in the NAACP publication Crisis Magazine and in Opportunity Magazine and other publications.
One of Hughes' finest essays appeared in the Nation in 1926, entitled "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain". It spoke of Black writers and poets, "who would surrender racial pride in the name of a false integration," where a talented Black writer would prefer to be considered a poet, not a Black poet, which to Hughes meant he subconsciously wanted to write like a white poet. Hughes argued, "no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself." He wrote in this essay, "We younger Negro artists now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they aren't, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too... If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, as strong as we know how and we stand on the top of the mountain, free within ourselves."
In 1923, Hughes traveled abroad on a freighter to the Senegal, Nigeria, the Cameroons, Belgium Congo, Angola, and Guinea in Africa, and later to Italy and France, Russia and Spain. One of his favorite pastimes whether abroad or in Washington, D.C. or Harlem, New York was sitting in the clubs listening to blues, jazz and writing poetry. Through these experiences a new rhythm emerged in his writing, and a series of poems such as "The Weary Blues" were penned. He returned to Harlem, in 1924, the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. During this period, his work was frequently published and his writing flourished. In 1925 he moved to Washington, D.C., still spending more time in blues and jazz clubs. He said, "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street...(these songs) had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going." At this same time, Hughes accepted a job with Dr. Carter G. Woodson, editor of the Journal of Negro Life and History and founder of Black History Week in 1926. He returned to his beloved Harlem later that year.
Langston Hughes received a scholarship to Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania, where he received his B.A. degree in 1929. In 1943, he was awarded an honorary Lit.D by his alma mater; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935 and a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1940. Based on a conversation with a man he knew in a Harlem bar, he created a character know as My Simple Minded Friend in a series of essays in the form of a dialogue. In 1950, he named this lovable character Jess B. Simple, and authored a series of books on him.
Langston Hughes was a prolific writer. In the forty-odd years between his first book in 1926 and his death in 1967, he devoted his life to writing and lecturing. He wrote sixteen books of poems, two novels, three collections of short stories, four volumes of "editorial" and "documentary" fiction, twenty plays, children's poetry, musicals and operas, three autobiographies, a dozen radio and television scripts and dozens of magazine articles. In addition, he edited seven anthologies. The long and distinguished list of Hughes' works includes: Not Without Laughter (1930); The Big Sea (1940); I Wonder As I Wander" (1956), his autobiographies. His collections of poetry include: The Weary Blues (1926); The Negro Mother and other Dramatic Recitations (1931); The Dream Keeper (1932); Shakespeare In Harlem (1942); Fields of Wonder (1947); One Way Ticket (1947); The First Book of Jazz (1955); Tambourines To Glory (1958); and Selected Poems (1959); The Best of Simple (1961). He edited several anthologies in an attempt to popularize black authors and their works. Some of these are: An African Treasury (1960); Poems from Black Africa (1963); New Negro Poets: USA (1964) and The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers (1967).
Published posthumously were: Five Plays By Langston Hughes (1968); The Panther and The Lash: Poems of Our Times (1969) and Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protest (1973); The Sweet Flypaper of Life with Roy DeCarava (1984).
Langston Hughes died of cancer on May 22, 1967. His residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem, New York has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission. His block of East 127th Street was renamed "Langston Hughes Place" .
Research Paper..
I have changed my paper's topic..
the new topic is about...
Muhammad Haji Salleh and Langston Hughes..
The similarities between two great writers: Muhammad Haji Salleh and Langston Hughes in their searching of identity.
Langston Hughes and Muhammad Haji Salleh are both searching for their roots and identities..
The searching starts when they are seen different from who they really are.
Muhammad Haji Salleh and Langston Hughes use poetry as a vehicle to express their identity complexities. The poem ‘blood’, written by Muhammad is very similar to Hughes’ ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers”. For instance, compare these two lines, “the blood in me has traveled the centuries/flowed in unknown veins/crossed mangrove rivers and proud straits” in Muhammad’s blood with Hughes’ The Negro Speaks of Rivers, “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the/ flow of human blood in human veins.” In both poems, the words “blood” and “river” are used to symbolize the idea of origin and identity. For someone who has been living in the post-colonial era, Muhammad is in the confusion of his searching of identity, thus the idea or searching his origin is seen as very important and interesting to him as in a way that he could get closer to his cultural tradition. Aptly titled ‘blood’, the poem is about the blood ties between the persona and his ancestors which he believes that even though he is not able to determine who his ancestors were (‘flowed in unknown veins’), he should not be denying his blood kinship. Regardless of all the uncertainties, he claims in the last stanza, ‘ i am both branch/ and remote stalk of this tree’. Muhammad Haji Salleh’s use of “i” indicates a point of emphasis. The usage of first person pronoun closely mirrors Western individualism, focusing attention on the individuality. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is a celebration of racial roots and histories. The persona, whose “soul has grown deep like the rivers”, traces the origin of his origin of his African American self back to Africa with his reference to Congo and the Nile. It is important for African American to prove the worth of their blackness, that is to write themselves into existence. Being fair-skinned, Hughes was mistaken of being “white” by the first African that he met with. Both Muhammad and Hughes share the same problem of searching for their roots.
Muhammad and Hughes are both great poets and they have unique style in writy poetry.
the new topic is about...
Muhammad Haji Salleh and Langston Hughes..
The similarities between two great writers: Muhammad Haji Salleh and Langston Hughes in their searching of identity.
Langston Hughes and Muhammad Haji Salleh are both searching for their roots and identities..
The searching starts when they are seen different from who they really are.
Muhammad Haji Salleh and Langston Hughes use poetry as a vehicle to express their identity complexities. The poem ‘blood’, written by Muhammad is very similar to Hughes’ ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers”. For instance, compare these two lines, “the blood in me has traveled the centuries/flowed in unknown veins/crossed mangrove rivers and proud straits” in Muhammad’s blood with Hughes’ The Negro Speaks of Rivers, “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the/ flow of human blood in human veins.” In both poems, the words “blood” and “river” are used to symbolize the idea of origin and identity. For someone who has been living in the post-colonial era, Muhammad is in the confusion of his searching of identity, thus the idea or searching his origin is seen as very important and interesting to him as in a way that he could get closer to his cultural tradition. Aptly titled ‘blood’, the poem is about the blood ties between the persona and his ancestors which he believes that even though he is not able to determine who his ancestors were (‘flowed in unknown veins’), he should not be denying his blood kinship. Regardless of all the uncertainties, he claims in the last stanza, ‘ i am both branch/ and remote stalk of this tree’. Muhammad Haji Salleh’s use of “i” indicates a point of emphasis. The usage of first person pronoun closely mirrors Western individualism, focusing attention on the individuality. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is a celebration of racial roots and histories. The persona, whose “soul has grown deep like the rivers”, traces the origin of his origin of his African American self back to Africa with his reference to Congo and the Nile. It is important for African American to prove the worth of their blackness, that is to write themselves into existence. Being fair-skinned, Hughes was mistaken of being “white” by the first African that he met with. Both Muhammad and Hughes share the same problem of searching for their roots.
Muhammad and Hughes are both great poets and they have unique style in writy poetry.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Freedom Writers
In my opinion, freedom writers is a great story.
It gives me the inspiration of becoming a great teacher.
i believe that teachers can be very inspirational and that we can change the nation if we are willing to sacrifice lots of things. In that story, the sad thing is that the teacher's husband left her. The only one who is still there for her is her father.
We need to sacrifice a lot of things in order to get success. Freedom writers is a very touching story when a teacher had tried her very best to understand her students' situation and help the students to be better students.
Sacrifice is needed in order to get success. We gain something and we loose something...
It gives me the inspiration of becoming a great teacher.
i believe that teachers can be very inspirational and that we can change the nation if we are willing to sacrifice lots of things. In that story, the sad thing is that the teacher's husband left her. The only one who is still there for her is her father.
We need to sacrifice a lot of things in order to get success. Freedom writers is a very touching story when a teacher had tried her very best to understand her students' situation and help the students to be better students.
Sacrifice is needed in order to get success. We gain something and we loose something...
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Diary and journal
A diary or journal is a book for writing discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. Such logs play a role in many aspects of human civilization, including governmental, business ledgers, and military records. In more personal diaries, the writer may detail crushes or complaints.
The history of Diary
The word diary comes from the Latin diarium ("daily allowance", from dies, "day", more often in the plural form diaria). The word journal comes from the same root (diurnus, "of the day") through Old French jurnal (modern French for day is jour).
The oldest extant diaries come from East Asian cultures, pillowbooks of Japanese court ladies and Asian travel journals being some of the oldest surviving specimens of this genre of writing. The 9th century scholar Li Ao, for example, kept a diary of his journey through southern China.
Sales of "page a day" diaries go back hundreds of years (Letts, for example, is over 200 years old). At first, most of these books were used as ledgers, or business books. Samuel Pepys is the earliest diarist who is well-known today, although he had contemporaries who were also keeping diaries, such as John Evelyn. Pepys also was apparently at a turning point in diary history, for he took it beyond mere business transaction notation, into the realm of the personal.
Until, it seems, around the turn of the 20th century, with greater literacy and industrialization throughout the globe, particularly the Western world, diary writing was mostly limited to the members of the higher social classes. In the West, at least, a high proportion of historical and literary figures from the Renaissance to the 20th century seem to have kept a diary.
Tristine Rainer's 1978 The New Diary expanded awareness of diary-keeping as a literary genre, particularly among feminists. Acknowledging key figures in the resurgence of diary writing such as Carl Jung, Marion Milner, Ira Progoff and Anaïs Nin, she identified techniques that people use either spontaneously or have employed in their daily writing to explore themselves and their experience of the world. Rainer's idea, as expressed in the title, is that a diary is much more than a dry record of weather or daily events—it allows the writer to communicate deep and often spiritual realizations. Social historians were particularly interested in this, as it expanded greatly the number of historical texts available to them.
In the United States during the 1990s, various K-12 educators used a variety of journals across subject areas to encourage and document student progress, including pre-literate picture journals and "math journals" to aid in developing mathematical concepts in an individualized way, in accordance with Lev Vygotsky's concepts of instructional scaffolding. Another popular adaptation of the diary is the personal use of time management tools such as the Filofax or Franklin Planner.
My view on diary is that diary is something personal that is not meant for other people's reading..Dr Edwin has introduced to me some of the famous diaries that has been published. These diaries are quite interesting but as we are already informed, diaries are only meant for our own personal understanding. Some of the diaries are quite hard to understand as we are not familiar with the situation.
The history of Diary
The word diary comes from the Latin diarium ("daily allowance", from dies, "day", more often in the plural form diaria). The word journal comes from the same root (diurnus, "of the day") through Old French jurnal (modern French for day is jour).
The oldest extant diaries come from East Asian cultures, pillowbooks of Japanese court ladies and Asian travel journals being some of the oldest surviving specimens of this genre of writing. The 9th century scholar Li Ao, for example, kept a diary of his journey through southern China.
Sales of "page a day" diaries go back hundreds of years (Letts, for example, is over 200 years old). At first, most of these books were used as ledgers, or business books. Samuel Pepys is the earliest diarist who is well-known today, although he had contemporaries who were also keeping diaries, such as John Evelyn. Pepys also was apparently at a turning point in diary history, for he took it beyond mere business transaction notation, into the realm of the personal.
Until, it seems, around the turn of the 20th century, with greater literacy and industrialization throughout the globe, particularly the Western world, diary writing was mostly limited to the members of the higher social classes. In the West, at least, a high proportion of historical and literary figures from the Renaissance to the 20th century seem to have kept a diary.
Tristine Rainer's 1978 The New Diary expanded awareness of diary-keeping as a literary genre, particularly among feminists. Acknowledging key figures in the resurgence of diary writing such as Carl Jung, Marion Milner, Ira Progoff and Anaïs Nin, she identified techniques that people use either spontaneously or have employed in their daily writing to explore themselves and their experience of the world. Rainer's idea, as expressed in the title, is that a diary is much more than a dry record of weather or daily events—it allows the writer to communicate deep and often spiritual realizations. Social historians were particularly interested in this, as it expanded greatly the number of historical texts available to them.
In the United States during the 1990s, various K-12 educators used a variety of journals across subject areas to encourage and document student progress, including pre-literate picture journals and "math journals" to aid in developing mathematical concepts in an individualized way, in accordance with Lev Vygotsky's concepts of instructional scaffolding. Another popular adaptation of the diary is the personal use of time management tools such as the Filofax or Franklin Planner.
My view on diary is that diary is something personal that is not meant for other people's reading..Dr Edwin has introduced to me some of the famous diaries that has been published. These diaries are quite interesting but as we are already informed, diaries are only meant for our own personal understanding. Some of the diaries are quite hard to understand as we are not familiar with the situation.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Essay
An essay is a piece of writing, usually from an author's personal point of view. Essays are non-fictional but often subjective; while expository, they can also include narrative. Essays can be 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 provide counterexamples.
The essay as literary genre
The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, 'to try' or 'to attempt'. The first author to describe his works as essays was the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). Inspired in particular by the works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Oeuvres morales (Moral works) into French had just been published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his essays in 1572; the first edition, entitled Essais, was published in two volumes in 1580. For the rest of his life he continued revising previously published essays and composing new ones.
Francis Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597, 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Notable essayists are legion. They include Virginia Woolf, Voltaire, Adrienne Rich, Alamgir Hashmi, Joan Didion, Jean Baudrillard, Benjamin Disraeli, Susan Sontag, Natalia Ginzburg, Sara Suleri, Annie Dillard, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Charles Lamb, Leo Tolstoy, William Hazlitt, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Walter Bagehot, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, John D'Agata, Gore Vidal, Marguerite Yourcenar, J.M. Coetzee, Gaston Waringhien and E.B. White.
It is very difficult to define the genre into which essays fall. The following remarks by Aldous Huxley, a leading essayist, may help:
"Like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay. But a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel. Montaigne's Third Book is the equivalent, very nearly, of a good slice of the Comédie Humaine. Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and at their best in the neighborhood of only one of the essay's three poles, or at the most only in the neighborhood of two of them. There are the predominantly personal essayists, who write fragments of reflective autobiography and who look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description. There are the predominantly objective essayists who do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme. … And how splendid, how truly oracular are the utterances of the great generalizers! … The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist" (Collected Essays, "Preface").
[edit] The essay as a pedagogical tool
In recent times, essays have become a major part of a formal education. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and essays are often used by universities in selecting applicants (see admissions essay). In both secondary and tertiary education, essays are used to judge the mastery and comprehension of material. Students are asked to explain, comment on, or assess a topic of study in the form of an essay.
Academic essays are usually more formal than literary ones. They may still allow the presentation of the writer's own views, but this is done in a logical and factual manner, with the use of the first person often discouraged.
[edit] The five-paragraph essay
Main article: Five paragraph essay
Many students' first exposure to the genre is the five paragraph essay, a highly structured form requiring an introduction presenting the thesis statement; three body paragraphs, each of which presents an idea to support the thesis together with supporting evidence and quotations; and a conclusion, which restates the thesis and summarizes the supporting points. The use of this format is controversial. Proponents argue that it teaches students how to organize their thoughts clearly in writing; opponents characterize its structure as rigid and repetitive.
[edit] Academic essays
Longer academic essays (often with a word limit of between 2,000 to 5,000 words) are often more discursive. They sometimes begin with a short summary analysis of what has previously been written on a topic, which is often called a literature review. Longer essays may also contain an introductory page in which words and phrases from the title are tightly defined. Most academic institutions will require that all substantial facts, quotations, and other supporting material used in an essay be referenced in a bibliography or works cited page at the end of the text. This scholarly convention allows others (whether teachers or fellow scholars) to understand the basis of the facts and quotations used to support the essay's argument, and thereby help to evaluate to what extent the argument is supported by evidence, and to evaluate the quality of that evidence. The academic essay tests the student's ability to present their thoughts in an organized way and tests their intellectual capabilities. Some types of essays are:
Descriptive essays
The aim of descriptive essays is to provide a vivid picture of a person, location, object, event, or debate. It will offer details that will enable the reader to imagine the item described.
Narrative essays
The aim of a narrative essay is to describe a course of events from a subjective vantage point, and may be written in first-person present or first person past tense. Though not always chronological, narrative essays do follow the development of a person through a series of experiences and reflections. The focus of the essay is often to more clearly identify the point of view of the narrator, and to express common features of subjectivity.
Compare and contrast essays
The aim of a compare and contrast essay is to develop the relationship between two or more things. Generally, the goal is to show that superficial differences or similarities are inadequate, and that closer examination reveals their unobvious, yet significant, relations or differences.
Persuasive essays
In a persuasive essay, the writer tries to persuade the reader to accept an idea or agree with an opinion. The writer's purpose is to convince the reader that her or his point of view is a reasonable one. The persuasive essay should be written in a style that grabs and holds the reader's attention, and the writer's opinion should be backed up by strong supporting details.
Argumentative essays
Argumentative essays are most often used to address controversial issues - i.e. serious issue over which there is some evident disagreement. An argument is a position combined with its supporting reasons. Argumentative papers thus set out a main claim and then provide reasons for thinking that the claim is true.
Reflective essay
This deals with topics of abstract nature, as habits,and ambitions. Social, political,philosophical and religious subjects also come under this head
[edit] Imitation
Imitation essays are essays in which the writer pulls out the main thesis and outline of a particular paper, and then writes an essay in his or her own style.
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 provide counterexamples.
The essay as literary genre
The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, 'to try' or 'to attempt'. The first author to describe his works as essays was the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). Inspired in particular by the works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Oeuvres morales (Moral works) into French had just been published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his essays in 1572; the first edition, entitled Essais, was published in two volumes in 1580. For the rest of his life he continued revising previously published essays and composing new ones.
Francis Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597, 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Notable essayists are legion. They include Virginia Woolf, Voltaire, Adrienne Rich, Alamgir Hashmi, Joan Didion, Jean Baudrillard, Benjamin Disraeli, Susan Sontag, Natalia Ginzburg, Sara Suleri, Annie Dillard, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Charles Lamb, Leo Tolstoy, William Hazlitt, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Walter Bagehot, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, John D'Agata, Gore Vidal, Marguerite Yourcenar, J.M. Coetzee, Gaston Waringhien and E.B. White.
It is very difficult to define the genre into which essays fall. The following remarks by Aldous Huxley, a leading essayist, may help:
"Like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay. But a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel. Montaigne's Third Book is the equivalent, very nearly, of a good slice of the Comédie Humaine. Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and at their best in the neighborhood of only one of the essay's three poles, or at the most only in the neighborhood of two of them. There are the predominantly personal essayists, who write fragments of reflective autobiography and who look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description. There are the predominantly objective essayists who do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme. … And how splendid, how truly oracular are the utterances of the great generalizers! … The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist" (Collected Essays, "Preface").
[edit] The essay as a pedagogical tool
In recent times, essays have become a major part of a formal education. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and essays are often used by universities in selecting applicants (see admissions essay). In both secondary and tertiary education, essays are used to judge the mastery and comprehension of material. Students are asked to explain, comment on, or assess a topic of study in the form of an essay.
Academic essays are usually more formal than literary ones. They may still allow the presentation of the writer's own views, but this is done in a logical and factual manner, with the use of the first person often discouraged.
[edit] The five-paragraph essay
Main article: Five paragraph essay
Many students' first exposure to the genre is the five paragraph essay, a highly structured form requiring an introduction presenting the thesis statement; three body paragraphs, each of which presents an idea to support the thesis together with supporting evidence and quotations; and a conclusion, which restates the thesis and summarizes the supporting points. The use of this format is controversial. Proponents argue that it teaches students how to organize their thoughts clearly in writing; opponents characterize its structure as rigid and repetitive.
[edit] Academic essays
Longer academic essays (often with a word limit of between 2,000 to 5,000 words) are often more discursive. They sometimes begin with a short summary analysis of what has previously been written on a topic, which is often called a literature review. Longer essays may also contain an introductory page in which words and phrases from the title are tightly defined. Most academic institutions will require that all substantial facts, quotations, and other supporting material used in an essay be referenced in a bibliography or works cited page at the end of the text. This scholarly convention allows others (whether teachers or fellow scholars) to understand the basis of the facts and quotations used to support the essay's argument, and thereby help to evaluate to what extent the argument is supported by evidence, and to evaluate the quality of that evidence. The academic essay tests the student's ability to present their thoughts in an organized way and tests their intellectual capabilities. Some types of essays are:
Descriptive essays
The aim of descriptive essays is to provide a vivid picture of a person, location, object, event, or debate. It will offer details that will enable the reader to imagine the item described.
Narrative essays
The aim of a narrative essay is to describe a course of events from a subjective vantage point, and may be written in first-person present or first person past tense. Though not always chronological, narrative essays do follow the development of a person through a series of experiences and reflections. The focus of the essay is often to more clearly identify the point of view of the narrator, and to express common features of subjectivity.
Compare and contrast essays
The aim of a compare and contrast essay is to develop the relationship between two or more things. Generally, the goal is to show that superficial differences or similarities are inadequate, and that closer examination reveals their unobvious, yet significant, relations or differences.
Persuasive essays
In a persuasive essay, the writer tries to persuade the reader to accept an idea or agree with an opinion. The writer's purpose is to convince the reader that her or his point of view is a reasonable one. The persuasive essay should be written in a style that grabs and holds the reader's attention, and the writer's opinion should be backed up by strong supporting details.
Argumentative essays
Argumentative essays are most often used to address controversial issues - i.e. serious issue over which there is some evident disagreement. An argument is a position combined with its supporting reasons. Argumentative papers thus set out a main claim and then provide reasons for thinking that the claim is true.
Reflective essay
This deals with topics of abstract nature, as habits,and ambitions. Social, political,philosophical and religious subjects also come under this head
[edit] Imitation
Imitation essays are essays in which the writer pulls out the main thesis and outline of a particular paper, and then writes an essay in his or her own style.
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