What is an essay? The simple answer is that an essay is a group of paragraphs that are connected by an overall main idea. If I write 1000 words about the difference between Korean and Western food, but it is all in one paragraph, then I have not written an essay I have written one paragraph (and a paragraph that is really, really too long). However, if I write only 500 words about the difference between Korean and Western food, but those 500 words are divided into seven or eight paragraphs, then I have written an essay. Let s look at another idea about essays. Let s say I write five different paragraphs on one piece of paper. The first paragraph talks about why cats are good pets for people who live in apartments, the second paragraph is about a piece of art that my son did when he was very young, the third paragraph discusses the difference between Korean and Western food, the fourth paragraph talks about the origin of Keimyung s English Café, and the final paragraph is about the writing process. That s not an essay. It is five separate paragraphs, but there is no main idea that connects the paragraphs to each other. Similar to paragraphs, there are differences between formal and informal essays. Please understand the informal definitions first. An informal paragraph is really about the shape of the writing. An informal essay is a collection of those shapes, but there must be a connection to an overall main idea. Do you remember our earlier definition of composition? Composition is arranging ideas in certain patterns to create a specific response from an audience. We will talk about different types of mental patterns, but the shape of paragraphs presents an important visual pattern for readers. Put you in your essay! One key difference between the informal essay and the formal academic essay is the relationship between purpose and audience. In the informal essay, writers are often encouraged to use their own experiences and express their personal feelings. This usually makes the essay more effective, because the informal audience can understand why the author wanted to communicate with them. (In academic writing, however, the writer should be almost 100% objective in tone and content.) Show the reader your passion for the topic! Sample Informal Essay #1 Why Study Literature? He was sitting in the same chair as most of my other students and asking the same question I get asked at least once a semester: Why do we have to take literature classes? Why study literature? I don t think it is ironic that students who major in English Language & Literature ask that question, for there are several motivations behind the question, and it is a question American students have also asked. I even asked myself the same question back in the early 1980s, when I decided to change my major from psychology to literature.
So even though I have experience with the question, I m not sure if I have ever provided a satisfactory answer. Maybe that has to do with the motivations. Here, in Korea, most students are interested in the English Language part of the major, not the & Literature, and they are frustrated because most of the literature classes are taught in Korean, using translated texts. These students feel that studying literature, especially in Korean, is not practical for their future, and they re at least partly right: it would be more practical if the courses were taught in English. I remember a conversation with Hwang TongGyu, one of Korea s greatest living poets, earlier this year. We were discussing his career, which included teaching literature in several different countries as well as his tenure at Seoul National University. I asked him if he taught in English to his SNU students, and he seemed a little upset by the question. Of course! he said. Why do you ask you think my English is not good enough? I quickly responded by noting the situation at my university, and he was shocked and maybe even a little angry. So we changed the subject. Language skills are one thing, but as stated, even American students question the value of studying literature. How is it going to help me find a job? is one concern, but there s also the more general Why study literature at all? question. My first answer to these students isn t very satisfying to them, but I still defend it. It s a rule. Nobody likes to do something they are forced to do, and several of our students didn t really choose their major it was chosen for them by their parents or their circumstances (their test scores weren t high enough). But even so, I tell them, this is your major, so you have to take some of the literature classes. Then I tell them that everyone must do some things, some times, simply because they must be done. From games to governments, from the home to the workplace, there are rules that must be followed. All organizations have a system to guide its members. That doesn t mean blind obedience, I tell them. Authority should often be questioned, and sometimes should be defied. But learning how to operate within the framework of organization is a practical skill to develop. I also encourage the students to take advantage of the universe part of university. The university system was created to provide a wide range of educational experiences for the students, and I firmly believe that students should take some classes which are completely different from their focus. It is important to have a focus that is why majors exist but I tell students who only want to focus on one skill that specialized training is widely available (the Korean word is hagwon). I m very grateful for my astronomy and geology classes, for my art appreciation class, even for the few weeks I stayed in the physics class. I m not an expert in those areas, but when I hear the experts talk, I m glad that I have at least some background knowledge. But for me, the most overwhelming reason to study literature not just to read it, but to study it is that literature helps us to learn about our world and our self. Shakespeare died hundreds of years ago, but his evil Iago, his foolish Lear, his indecisive Hamlet and even his poems about love and beauty still speak to us. Those types of people still exist. Those feelings still exist. Reading literature from different times and different countries help us understand something of history and culture.
But most of all, the benefit of literature is that the reader will naturally question his or her own personality, will search the soul, for comparison and, hopefully, improvement. Could I be that heroic? What would make a person do something so cruel? Am I capable of being that kind of person? So, yes, study literature because you must (if you are an English Language & Literature major), but also study literature to expand your education and deepen your self- awareness and improvement. Even the last student who asked me that question later told me that he wanted to read more poetry during the winter break, because he said poetry makes him feel something that he couldn t really describe, but he wanted to explore that feeling. Then he laughed and said, I just want to read poetry, not study it, but I think his inspiration may be at least partly due to a class that he was forced to take. Discussion Informal Essays Is Why Study Poetry? a formal essay? No. There is no formal introduction or conclusion paragraph, there is no clearly- stated thesis statement, and the body paragraphs are not formal paragraphs with topic sentences and supporting ideas. But is it an essay? Why, yes it is. It fulfills the two requirements of an essay: (a) it is more than one paragraph (ten, in fact), and (b) it has one overall main idea (my reasons why people should study literature). It closely supports the main idea, but there is also a little break in unity with a discussion about whether or not English literature classes should be taught in English. What about purpose and audience? Sure, I carefully considered this topic for the intended audience of my blog: my students here at Keimyung university. I would not write this essay for other university professors. I might write this essay for American students but I wouldn t talk about teaching in English. I could write this for a very general audience, but I would not talk very much about university classes (I could focus more on the difference between reading literature and studying it, with or without a classroom). Did I use the writing process? Yes oh, yes. I began writing this essay in December 2015 by quickly writing down a few ideas in a notebook after a student left my office. A few days later, I decided to take the idea and brainstorm some ideas. Then I took the ideas and composed them into a formal outline. I actually wrote a formal academic essay first but you won t read that until the next section. A few weeks ago, I wanted to write about the same subject for my blog readers, but the formal essay wasn t the correct form for my audience, so I took most of the main ideas and wrote another draft of my original essay. What about writing approaches? The overall approach is argumentation and persuasion (I m saying people should study literature, and I m giving a few reasons why I believe that). But I drop in a little bit of narration by briefly telling a couple of stories, and I also use some cause-effect analysis by talking about why students ask the question. My very first draft was focusing on comparison and contrast (the difference between reading and studying poetry), but I decided to go with argumentation and persuasion instead.
Sample Informal Essay #2 The Transaction by William Zinsser Five or six years ago a school in Connecticut held a day devoted to the arts, and I was asked if I would come and talk about writing as a vocation. When I arrived I found that a second speaker had been invited Dr. Brock (as I ll call him), a surgeon who had recently begun to write and had sold some stories to national magazines. He was going to talk about writing as an avocation. That made us a panel, and we sat down to face a crowd of student newspaper editors and reporters, English teachers and parents, all eager to learn the secrets of our glamorous work. Dr. Brock was dressed in a bright red jacket, looking vaguely Bohemian, as authors are supposed to look, and the first question went to him. What was it like to be a writer? He said it was tremendous fun. Coming home from an arduous day at the hospital, he would go straight to his yellow pad and write his tensions away. The words just flowed. It was easy. I then said that writing wasn t easy and it wasn t fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed. Next Dr. Brock was asked if it was important to rewrite. Absolutely not, he said. Let it all hang out, and whatever form the sentences take will reflect the writer at his most natural. I then said that rewriting is the essence of writing. I pointed out that professional writers rewrite their sentences repeatedly and then rewrite what they have rewritten. I mentioned hat E.B. White and James Thurber were known to rewrite their pieces eight or nine times. What do you do on days when it isn t going well? Dr. Brock was asked. He said he just stopped writing and put the work aside for a day when it would go better. I then said that the professional writer must establish a daily schedule and stick to it. I said that writing is a craft, not an art, and that the man who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is fooling himself. He is also going broke. What if you re feeling depressed or unhappy? a student asked. Won t that affect your writing? Probably it will, Dr. Brock replied. Go fishing. Take a walk. Probably it won t, I said. If your job is to write every day, you learn to do it like any other job. A student asked if we found it useful to circulate in the literary world. Br. Brock said that he was greatly enjoying his new life as a man of letters, and he told several lavish stories of being taken to lunch by his publisher and his agent at Manhattan restaurants where writers and editors gather. I said that professional writers are solitary drudges who seldom see other writers. Do you put symbolism in your writing? a student asked me. Not if I can help it, I replied. I have an unbroken record of missing the deeper meaning in any story, play or movie, and as for dance and mime, I have never had even a remote notion of what is being conveyed.
I love symbols! Dr. Brock exclaimed, and he described with gusto the joys of weaving them through his work. So the morning went, and it was a revelation to all of us. At the end Dr. Brock told me he was enormously interested in my answers it had never occurred to him that writing could be hard. I told him I was just as interested in his answers it had never occurred to me that writing could be easy. (Maybe I should take up surgery on the side.) As for the students, anyone might think that we left them bewildered. But in fact we probably gave them a broader glimpse of the writing process than if only one of us had talked. For of course there isn t any right way to do such intensely personal work. There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps somebody to say what he wants to say is the right method for him. Some people write by day, others by night. Some people need silence, others turn on the radio. Some write by hand, some by typewriter, some by talking into a tape recorder. Some people write their first draft in one long burst and then revise; others can t write the second paragraph until they have fiddled endlessly with the first. But all of them are vulnerable and all of them are tense. They are driven by a compulsion to put some part of themselves on paper, and yet they don t just write what comes naturally. They sit down to commit an act of literature, and the self who emerges on paper is a far stiffer person than the one who sat down. The problem is to find the real man or woman behind all the tension. For ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not his subject, but who he is. I often find myself reading with interest a topic that I never thought would interest me some unusual scientific quest, for instance. What holds me is the enthusiasm of the writer for his field. How was he drawn into it? What emotional baggage did he bring along? How did it change his life? It is not necessary to want to spend a year alone at Walden Pond to become deeply involved with a man who did. This is the personal transaction that is at the heart of good nonfiction writing. Out of it come two of the most important qualities that this book will go in search of: humanity and warmth. Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it s not a question of gimmicks to personalize the author. It s a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest strength and the least clutter. Can such principles be taught? Maybe not. But most of them can be learned. Discussion First of all, William Zinsser is one of my writing gods. He began his career as a journalist, became an editor and then a professor. He also wrote one of the finest and most important books about writing: On Writing Well. His book was recommended to me by one of my professors, and the book taught me very much about composition. His essay is also not a formal essay, but there is a main idea although you must read 17 of the 22 paragraphs before you find the overall main idea.
That s right more than half of the essay is devoted to the introduction, the narrative about the conversation between two writers in front of students. Then we find out that the purpose of the story is not to talk about the discussion about the two writers! The main idea, Zinsser finally tells us, is For of course there isn t any right way to do such intensely personal work. There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps somebody to say what he wants to say is the right method for him. He also expresses another important idea: that good writers use humanity and warmth in order to keep their readers interested. What about audience? Did you have problems with some of the vocabulary, for example: vocation, avocation, Bohemian, man of letters, drudge, arduous? Zinsser was not writing for Korean university students learning English as a second language. This essay was actually the introduction to one of his books about writing. Zinsser thought his audience would be people who are really interested in writing, but also native English speakers and probably people with a well- developed vocabulary.