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What is an Essay?

10 May, 2020

11 minutes read

Author: Tomas White

Well, beyond a jumble of words usually around 2,000 words or so - what is an essay, exactly? Whether you’re taking English, sociology, history, biology, art, or a speech class, it’s likely you’ll have to write an essay or two. So how is an essay different than a research paper or a review? Let’s find out!

Defining the Term – What is an Essay?

The essay is a written piece that is designed to present an idea, propose an argument, express the emotion or initiate debate. It is a tool that is used to present writer’s ideas in a non-fictional way. Multiple applications of this type of writing go way beyond, providing political manifestos and art criticism as well as personal observations and reflections of the author.

An essay can be as short as 500 words, it can also be 5000 words or more. However, most essays fall somewhere around 1000 to 3000 words ; this word range provides the writer enough space to thoroughly develop an argument and work to convince the reader of the author’s perspective regarding a particular issue. The topics of essays are boundless: they can range from the best form of government to the benefits of eating peppermint leaves daily. As a professional provider of custom writing, our service has helped thousands of customers to turn in essays in various forms and disciplines.

Origins of the Essay

Over the course of more than six centuries essays were used to question assumptions, argue trivial opinions and to initiate global discussions. Let’s have a closer look into historical progress and various applications of this literary phenomenon to find out exactly what it is.

Today’s modern word “essay” can trace its roots back to the French “essayer” which translates closely to mean “to attempt” . This is an apt name for this writing form because the essay’s ultimate purpose is to attempt to convince the audience of something. An essay’s topic can range broadly and include everything from the best of Shakespeare’s plays to the joys of April.

The essay comes in many shapes and sizes; it can focus on a personal experience or a purely academic exploration of a topic. Essays are classified as a subjective writing form because while they include expository elements, they can rely on personal narratives to support the writer’s viewpoint. The essay genre includes a diverse array of academic writings ranging from literary criticism to meditations on the natural world. Most typically, the essay exists as a shorter writing form; essays are rarely the length of a novel. However, several historic examples, such as John Locke’s seminal work “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” just shows that a well-organized essay can be as long as a novel.

The Essay in Literature

The essay enjoys a long and renowned history in literature. They first began gaining in popularity in the early 16 th century, and their popularity has continued today both with original writers and ghost writers. Many readers prefer this short form in which the writer seems to speak directly to the reader, presenting a particular claim and working to defend it through a variety of means. Not sure if you’ve ever read a great essay? You wouldn’t believe how many pieces of literature are actually nothing less than essays, or evolved into more complex structures from the essay. Check out this list of literary favorites:

The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag
High-Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now and Never by Barbara Kingsolver
Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion
Naked by David Sedaris
Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau

Pretty much as long as writers have had something to say, they’ve created essays to communicate their viewpoint on pretty much any topic you can think of!

The Essay in Academics

Not only are students required to read a variety of essays during their academic education, but they will likely be required to write several different kinds of essays throughout their scholastic career. Don’t love to write? Then consider working with a ghost essay writer ! While all essays require an introduction, body paragraphs in support of the argumentative thesis statement, and a conclusion, academic essays can take several different formats in the way they approach a topic. Common essays required in high school, college, and post-graduate classes include:

Five paragraph essay

This is the most common type of a formal essay. The type of paper that students are usually exposed to when they first hear about the concept of the essay itself. It follows easy outline structure – an opening introduction paragraph; three body paragraphs to expand the thesis; and conclusion to sum it up.

Argumentative essay

These essays are commonly assigned to explore a controversial issue. The goal is to identify the major positions on either side and work to support the side the writer agrees with while refuting the opposing side’s potential arguments.

Compare and Contrast essay

This essay compares two items, such as two poems, and works to identify similarities and differences, discussing the strength and weaknesses of each. This essay can focus on more than just two items, however. The point of this essay is to reveal new connections the reader may not have considered previously.

Definition essay

This essay has a sole purpose – defining a term or a concept in as much detail as possible. Sounds pretty simple, right? Well, not quite. The most important part of the process is picking up the word. Before zooming it up under the microscope, make sure to choose something roomy so you can define it under multiple angles. The definition essay outline will reflect those angles and scopes.

Descriptive essay

Perhaps the most fun to write, this essay focuses on describing its subject using all five of the senses. The writer aims to fully describe the topic; for example, a descriptive essay could aim to describe the ocean to someone who’s never seen it or the job of a teacher. Descriptive essays rely heavily on detail and the paragraphs can be organized by sense.

Illustration essay

The purpose of this essay is to describe an idea, occasion or a concept with the help of clear and vocal examples. “Illustration” itself is handled in the body paragraphs section. Each of the statements, presented in the essay needs to be supported with several examples. Illustration essay helps the author to connect with his audience by breaking the barriers with real-life examples – clear and indisputable.

Informative Essay

Being one the basic essay types, the informative essay is as easy as it sounds from a technical standpoint. High school is where students usually encounter with informative essay first time. The purpose of this paper is to describe an idea, concept or any other abstract subject with the help of proper research and a generous amount of storytelling.

Narrative essay

This type of essay focuses on describing a certain event or experience, most often chronologically. It could be a historic event or an ordinary day or month in a regular person’s life. Narrative essay proclaims a free approach to writing it, therefore it does not always require conventional attributes, like the outline. The narrative itself typically unfolds through a personal lens, and is thus considered to be a subjective form of writing.

Persuasive essay

The purpose of the persuasive essay is to provide the audience with a 360-view on the concept idea or certain topic – to persuade the reader to adopt a certain viewpoint. The viewpoints can range widely from why visiting the dentist is important to why dogs make the best pets to why blue is the best color. Strong, persuasive language is a defining characteristic of this essay type.

The Essay in Art

Several other artistic mediums have adopted the essay as a means of communicating with their audience. In the visual arts, such as painting or sculpting, the rough sketches of the final product are sometimes deemed essays. Likewise, directors may opt to create a film essay which is similar to a documentary in that it offers a personal reflection on a relevant issue. Finally, photographers often create photographic essays in which they use a series of photographs to tell a story, similar to a narrative or a descriptive essay.

Drawing the line – question answered

“What is an Essay?” is quite a polarizing question. On one hand, it can easily be answered in a couple of words. On the other, it is surely the most profound and self-established type of content there ever was. Going back through the history of the last five-six centuries helps us understand where did it come from and how it is being applied ever since.

If you must write an essay, follow these five important steps to works towards earning the “A” you want:

Understand and review the kind of essay you must write
Brainstorm your argument
Find research from reliable sources to support your perspective
Cite all sources parenthetically within the paper and on the Works Cited page
Follow all grammatical rules

Generally speaking, when you must write any type of essay, start sooner rather than later! Don’t procrastinate – give yourself time to develop your perspective and work on crafting a unique and original approach to the topic. Remember: it’s always a good idea to have another set of eyes (or three) look over your essay before handing in the final draft to your teacher or professor. Don’t trust your fellow classmates? Consider hiring an editor or a ghostwriter to help out!

If you are still unsure on whether you can cope with your task – you are in the right place to get help. HandMadeWriting is the perfect answer to the question “Who can write my essay?”

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The Anatomy of the Urban Dictionary

Emerging Technology from the arXiv archive page

The Urban Dictionary is a crowdsourced website that records new words and their meanings. It began life in 1999 as a parody of Dictionary.com but has since become an important resource on the Web. Indeed, judges in the U.K. famously used the site in 2005 to help them understand slang used by two rappers involved in a dispute.

Part of Urban Dictionary’s appeal is its informal approach, which allows both definitions and descriptions of words. It even allows opinions, which can sometimes be offensive. It captures new words quickly and registers many of the variations that emerge over time. A voting system allows users to show admiration or disdain, revealing words’ popularity.

Today, many millions of users rely on the site to keep them up to date with slang, common usage, and popular culture.

Of course, Urban Dictionary has its shortcomings. In the absence of style guides, editors, and moderators, the content can be vague and inaccurate. Also, little is known about the people who post new words and whether the entries reflect real changes in the language or just those that affect a small subset of people.

So just how good is the Urban Dictionary at capturing new words, and how does it compare with more conventional approaches to producing online dictionaries?

Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Dong Nguyen at the Alan Turing Institute in London and a few pals, who compare the Urban Dictionary and its content with Wiktionary, another crowdsourced dictionary. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of Urban Dictionary at this scale,” they say.

Wiktionary is an interesting comparison because it takes a much more formal approach to crowdsourcing. This is a sister site to Wikipedia, run by the same Wikimedia organization. It records only word definitions and employs guidelines about how these should be compiled. It also guides users as to what constitutes a definition. Moderators edit the content, control vandalism, and aim to generate high-quality results. Unsurprisingly, Wiktionary has also become an important online resource, one that researchers increasingly use for natural-language processing and so on.

Nguyen and co begin by analyzing the Urban Dictionary content in the broadest terms. They say it records 2,661,625 definitions for 1,620,438 words and phrases. Most words have just one definition, but a few have upwards of 1,000.

The word with the highest number of definitions is emo , with 1,204. And the top definition is this:

A terribly misconstrued and misused word. In contemporary culture it is utilized as a broad term to describe a multitude of children and teenagers who straighten their hair, have their hair in their face, perhaps dye it black, and wear tight clothing. Unfortunately this is completely inaccurate. Actual “emo” music existed in the late 80’s and was a subgenre of hardcore punk rock, after all, “emo” is a shortening of “Emotional hardcore punk rock.” The people in early emo bands dressed like regular people, everyday guys/girls who just played music that they enjoyed. Sadly, since the formulation and ongoing existence of Hot Topic, the term emo has been incorrectly characterized for a little more than a decade. You have to wonder how the original bands feel about the slandering and mass misunderstanding and misuse of their originality with those of the unoriginal.

By contrast, Wiktionary lists five definitions for emo :

A particular style of hardcore punk rock 2. An individual or group of people associated with that subculture and musical style. 3. Any form of guitar-driven alternative rock that is particularly or notably emotional 4. An individual or group of people associated with a fashion or stereotype of that style of rock. 5. A young person who is considered to be over-emotional or stereotypically emo.

The word with the next highest number of definitions on Urban Dictionary is love , with 1140. The other words in the top 10 by number of definitions are: god , urban dictionary , chode , C anada’s history , sex , school , cunt, and scene .

In terms of popularity, upvotes slightly outnumber downvotes. But, say Nguyen and co, “there is a wide variation among the definitions, with some having more than ten times more up votes than down votes and some the other way around.”

The team also compare the lexical coverage of Urban Dictionary and Wiktionary. It turns out that the overlap is surprisingly small—72 percent of the words on Urban Dictionary are not recorded on Wiktionary.

However, the team note that many words on Urban Dictionary are relevant to only a small subset of users. Many are nicknames or proper names such as Dan Taylor , defined as “A very wonderful man that cooks the best beef stew in the whole wide world.” These usually have only one meaning.

So to study more common words, the team also compared only those words that have two or more definitions. In that case, the overlap is much larger: just 25 percent of the definitions appear only on Urban Dictionary. For example, the word phased appears on both dictionaries as something being done bit by bit—in phases.

However, Urban Dictionary also describes several other meanings, such as “A word that is used when your asking if someone wants to fight” and “to be ‘buzzed.’ when you arent drunk, but arent sober.”

In this analysis, many more words appear only on Wiktionary, some 69 percent of them. Nguyen and co say that many of these are encyclopedic entries such as acacetins , dramaturge , and S hakespearean sonnets .

That leads the team to a clear conclusion. “In general, we can say that the overlap between the two dictionaries is small,” they say.

Urban Dictionary meanings also include opinions, unlike those on Wiktionary. One definition of beer is this: “Possibly the best thing ever to be invented ever. I MEAN IT.”

To work out what proportion of definitions these make up, the team had crowdworkers assess each to determine whether it was an opinion or a meaning and whether they were familiar with it.

They found that up to 50 percent of meanings for proper nouns were opinions and that the workers were unfamiliar with the majority of these uses. They also found definitions such as coffee, “a person who is coughed upon.”

In addition, crowdworkers found that much of the Urban Dictionary content was offensive, but that this cntent tended to get lower votes.

“We also found that words with more definitions tended to be more familiar to crowdworkers, suggesting that Urban Dictionary content does reflect broader trends in language use to some extent,” say Nguyen and co.

The work provides a unique window into a website that has come to play an important role in popular culture. That should set the scene for other studies. In particular, an interesting question is whether online dictionaries not only record linguistic change but actually drive it, as some linguists suggest.

Perhaps something for a future research project.

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Q. How do I reference and cite a dictionary or encyclopedia entry in APA format?

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Answered By: Gabe Gossett Last Updated: Jan 03, 2020 Views: 75694

In most cases you should avoid using dictionaries and encyclopedias as cited sources in your papers. However, there may be some cases where it would be appropriate. This is how you would do it in those cases.

If you have an author for the entry use their name for the in-text citation and at the start of your reference list entry. When you don't have an author, which is often the case for these types of sources, follow the guidelines on page 176 of the APA Manual under example 6.15. There it states that “when a work has no identifiable author, cite the first few words of the reference list entry.”

Example in-text citation without an author :

The Charleston Index is one method for determining the mortality rate for patients with multiple diseases (Comorbidity, 2012).

Example reference list entry for the above in-text citation (note: also an example of an online reference source ):

Comorbidity. (2012, November 24). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia . Retrieved 21:50, November 27, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comorbidity&oldid=524649802

Note: This is an example using Wikipedia, which is updated constantly. That is why there are more details than usual for the publication and retrieval date and time. For non-wiki reference works less detail is required.

Example in-text citation with an author :

Amnesty International was established in support of "prisoners of conscience" (Wong, 2012, p. 65).

Example reference list entry for the above in-text citation (note: also an example for a print source or source with a doi ):

Wong, W. (2012). Amnesty International. In H. Anheier, & M. Juergensmeyer (Eds.), Encyclopedia of global studies. (pp. 65-67). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452218557.n19

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Comments (6)

I am trying to figure out how to reference a word from the urban dictionary website. The word is Wifey. And is used in my assignment as follows: The other half of my rock a in d support system is a wonderful woman I call my Wifey! by Mistry on Jan 19, 2019
Hi Mistry, Citing the Urban Dictionary is tricky in that the APA Manual does not give specific guidance on citing from sources where there might be multiple definitions authored by different people. One thing that is important, however, is to make sure you are clear to your reader about which entry you are citing. What I recommend in this case is using the author handle, or name, for the author. Also, since Urban Dictionary changes often it is a good idea to include a retrieved on date. In making these recommendations I am looking at the following sections 7.02 and 7.11 in the APA Manual and the APA Style Blog entry on citing Wikipedia So your reference list entry might follow a format of Author name OR User handle (Date). Wifey. In Urban Dictionary. Retrieved January 28, 2019, from https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Wifey by Gabe [Research & Writing Studio] on Jan 28, 2019
Hi Gabe, I am trying to reference https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/well-being. Would this be right: Well-being. (n.d.). In English Oxford Living Dictionaries. Retrieved February 8, 2019, from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/well-being ? I am not sure if 2019 can be considered the publication date.. Please advise. Thank you! by Shugs on Feb 08, 2019
Hi Shugs, I think you have a pretty functional reference list entry there. I would personally lean towards using 2019 as the date since it is listed as the copyright in the footer myself. Also, while it doesn't hurt, for this source I don't think you need to have the accessed on date. In the example for this FAQ it is Wikipedia, which is often updated and therefore the access date and time helps the reader identify the information that you consulted. Regardsm Gabe by Gabe [Research & Writing Studio] on Feb 08, 2019
Hi, I wanted to ask how then do we cite 2 different terms from the same source in APA 7? by Grace on Dec 12, 2021
@Grace: That's a good question. Unfortunately, I don't see explicit guidance in the APA Manual on this particular question, but section 8.13 does provide some guidance that might help when citing a specific part of a source. The guidance is fairly open, stating "to cite a specific part of a source, provide an author-date citation for the work plus information about the specific part." You could use a page number, which might be the cleanest way to approach it. Otherwise, if you are clear in your narrative about which entry you are referring to, an author-date citation might suffice. The objective should be to make it clear to your reader where you are drawing your information from. by Gabe Gossett on Dec 14, 2021