On Essays

Yesterday, I donated to Greta Christina's Blog, which is having a pledge drive.

What I like about Greta's blog is that her posts have structure. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. A question is set up, and an answer is offered. They set out from somewhere, and they arrive somewhere. They are essays.



It is only recently that I have learned to appreciate the essay as a literary form. Growing up, I always associated them with schoolwork. And in academia, short pieces are called articles or papers. Rarely essays.

I think the distinction is worthwhile, because most academic articles or papers are not essays. A lot of them require an enormous amount of background to understand, and some can be opaque or jargon-laden. Sometimes you have to know who the scholar is out to get in order to fully grasp the argument, and sometimes he or she does not tell you. There is such a thing as a passive-aggressive footnote. I have seen it done.

Good conference papers often approach essays. My favorite of the conference papers I have given makes motions in this direction. I won't link to it, because the audience for reasonably well-crafted essays on anti-Catholicism in seventeenth-century Maryland is, shall we say, small. And it has my full name on it, which is not to the point.

My favorite essayists are Mark Twain and Virginia Woolf. Twain makes me laugh, and Woolf makes me smile. I like in particular the clarity of Woolf's style. Her Common Reader essays are the way literary criticism really should be, even if she does have some irritating ideas about Americans (second volume is here). And old Twain is the Grandmaster of Snark. His critique of James Fenimore Cooper is brilliant. And if you have ever studied German, read this.

But to return to my point. I think blogging may offer an opportunity for a literary form that has almost no commercial niche. I mean, what are most substantive blog posts other than essays? There will always be rants, and brief updates, and video-posts, and posts that are links followed by a single snide remark. I have posted many such posts myself. But the format is basically an essay-format.

Which means that we are all in good, if intimidating, company.