the.com/essay
A controlled fall toward a point you discover only by writing it.
means A short piece of nonfiction prose that explores or argues a single subject from the writer's own point of view.
from From French essai, 'a trial, an attempt,' from the verb essayer, 'to try'—itself traced back to Late Latin exagium, 'a weighing,' from exigere, 'to weigh out or examine.' So buried in the word is a set of scales: an essay is something weighed and tested rather than declared. The literary sense was made famous by Montaigne, who titled his probing 16th-century pieces Essais precisely because they were attempts, not pronouncements—an old self-deprecation still humming under every term paper since.
- origin
- From French essayer, meaning to attempt or try
- inventor
- Montaigne coined the form mid-1500s
- five-paragraph
- A classroom invention, not a literary one
- longest
- Some run book-length, like Camus on suicide
- hidden math
- Essays balance argument, evidence, and rhythm like equations