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Essay

An essay is generally a short piece of writing from an author's personal point of view on a particular topic. Essays can include elements such as literary criticism, political views, arguments, observations of daily life, personal recollections, and reflections. While brevity usually defines an essay, some works such as John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding are much longer. In formal education, students are often assigned structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and admission essays are used for university applicant selection. The concept of an essay has also expanded to film and photography.

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35 views

Essay

An essay is generally a short piece of writing from an author's personal point of view on a particular topic. Essays can include elements such as literary criticism, political views, arguments, observations of daily life, personal recollections, and reflections. While brevity usually defines an essay, some works such as John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding are much longer. In formal education, students are often assigned structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and admission essays are used for university applicant selection. The concept of an essay has also expanded to film and photography.

Uploaded by

chang_leng
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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"Essays" redirects here. For other uses, see Essays
(disambiguation).

John Locke's 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

An essay is a short 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 provide counterexamples.

In some countries (e.g., in the United States), essays have become a


major part of formal education. Secondary students are taught
structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and
admission essays are often used by universities in selecting
applicants and, in the humanities and social sciences, as a way of
assessing the performance of students during final exams. The
concept of an "essay" has been extended to other mediums beyond
writing. A film essay is a movie that often incorporates documentary
film making styles and which focuses more on the evolution of a
theme or an idea. A photographic essay is an attempt to cover a
topic with a linked series of photographs; it may or may not have an
accompanying text or captions.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essay

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