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Basic features of an essay and academic text
Essay
An essay (Latin: exagium - weighing, trying to weigh; French: essai - trying; English: essay - trying) is also - less commonly - called a literary sketch. It is a genre with a sophisticated structure and subject matter, best essay writing service, requiring writing skills, a rich lexicon and a light pen. It combines elements of features (e.g. anecdotes, life stories often appear), reportage (e.g. travel memoirs) and autobiographical forms (e.g. a diary - because the author of the essay can afford to be very subjective).
Michel de Montaigne is considered to be the creator of this genre. The basic schemes of the essay derive from his Essais (1580) and Francis Bacon's Essays (1597). However, according to the definition of essay respected today, they were written already by the ancients, such as Plato and Seneca.
Features of an essay
-The essay is a genre on the border of fiction, journalism and scientific literature.
-The construction of the essay is free - at any time the author can abandon a given theme and return to it at any point. Yet an essay should not give the impression of being chaotic, so the freedom an essayist can afford is apparent....
-The composition of an essayshark review should give the impression of being free and unforced, but not chaotic, disorderly.
-In essays you can boldly allow yourself for various digressions, your own reflections and thoughts, that is, manifestation of your individualism.
-An important feature of the essay is erudition - the authors often impress with their knowledge of philosophy, history, knowledge of ancient culture, music, etc. Quite often Leszek Ko?akowski's essays appear as "practice" texts, and if only on their example you can see how wide the essayist's knowledge is: although in Prof. Ko?akowski's essays there is a lot of information concerning philosophy, he also impresses with his knowledge of modern culture, psychology, and even with his knowledge of the laws that govern nature.
-Another important feature of the essay is its refined, original form. The essayist manifests his individualism not only in the content of the work, but also through the form.
Most often we are dealing with an unconventional - often experimental - approach to the topic, surprising reflections, open composition. The author often indicates that the topic is not exhausted, ends in a way that provokes the reader to further independent consideration, for example with a provocative question.
The language of the essay
should be beautiful, careful, but first of all - original. That is why so often we can find metaphorical formulations, paradoxes, rhetorical questions, ellipses, sentence equivalents next to coordinate sentences, own, independently created terms, sometimes neologisms.
Subjectivity of an essay
Since one of the important features of the essay is subjectivity, the essayist very often reveals himself in the text: he uses the first person singular (I) and the possessive pronoun (my) - not only presenting his own views or interpretation of the work (phenomenon, opinion), but also mentioning events from his own life. It is important in the essay to establish contact with the audience, to enter into a kind of dialogue with them: Thus, the form of the first person plural appears, generalizing formulations nvitations to common considerations et's imagine that..He often refers to experiences we all share.
Division of essays
The division of essays according to the subject matter is quite detailed. We can distinguish e.g. travel essays, nature essays, critical essays, philosophical essays, historical essays... And this is not the end. Besides, we meet "mixed" essays, for example, historical-philosophical.
Remember one quite important criterion: essays are divided into formal and informal ones. Formal essays resemble a treatise or a scientific dissertation (these are e.g. scientific and historical essays), while informal (personal) essays are subjective - the author manifests his individualism both at the level of language and content (interpretative essays have such a character).
When writing an essay, pay attention to the following elements:
-knowledge - quote, paraphrase, refer to authorities, try to connect different, sometimes very distant facts and phenomena;
-subjectivity of the text - present independent, autonomous judgements - but be careful, you cannot claim the right to infallibility! The essayist should keep a distance to himself and to the world shown;
Structure of the text - it is not good if the essay seems to be chaotic. Remember that you have the right to give titles and sub-titles to particular parts of the text;
-richness of language - use a variety of syntax constructions, varied vocabulary and phraseology.