The Art of the Essay
The essay, as an art form, is wasting away. The Internet and academia have imprisoned it. It withers behind bars wrought from certain expectations for function over form, simplicity over style, and search engine optimization over substance. The essay has been chained, whipped, and subdued to serve only for generating attention, attracting web traffic, and explaining an idea without making it felt. Yet, if modern social movements wish to accomplish their goals, which requires motivating the emotions of our moment, we’ll need to make literary art forms essential elements of their movement molecules. To do that, we’ll need to free the essay from its prison, reinvigorate it, and unleash it on the world.
The simple, disappointing, unstated truth is that the Internet has whittled away at the place of writing as a respected artistic technique. In our age, everyone has become a writer, though only in the crudest sense of the term. That is to say, everyone writes. We tweet, text, caption, comment, email, and engage all through the most brutish forms of writing, which are to literary writing as stick figure comics are to photorealism. And since the invention of the blog, the issue has strived for new and depressing lows. Blogging allows any halfwit aspiring writer to cobble together a few poorly constructed paragraphs from half-thought-out sentences, slap it on their website, and call it a piece of published writing.
Yes, yes. I hear you.
“The Internet is the great equalizer.”
To some degree, I agree.
The Internet has removed barriers. It has allowed everyone entry to the amphitheater and removed the stands. It has made the whole world a stage. No longer are there distinctions between directors, playwrights, pit bands, actors, and audience members. We are all performers. With the separation between stands and stage erased, people can break into spaces they would’ve been locked out of otherwise. This ability is granted to those who have practiced and perfected their craft for days in the dark, and it has been granted to those artless individuals who have only ego, vanity, and a big mouth to carry them forward. And, unfortunately, on the great stage of the Internet, it is those who are the loudest – regardless of merit, talent, or intellect – who get the most attention and in whose favor the scales of social algorithms tip.
This reality has turned the great equalizer into the great amplifier. With social media on the mind, the artist no longer makes art purely for themselves in the way that best suits their styles. They create in a way intended to please ever-shifting algorithms, the most capricious gods we’ve ever worshipped. In attempts to please audiences and algorithms, we forget that artists have made their best works when they created for themselves first and set other considerations aside.
It's in this vein that Toni Morrison wrote the books that would earn her a novel prize. It’s in this vein that James Baldwin wrote essays and novels that galvanized a movement. It’s in this vein that voice has so often been given to the voiceless and long silences shattered.
Art has long been a tool for breaking silences, igniting passions, and inspiring actions that may otherwise remain unrealized. But social media and the Internet have unconsciously conspired to dampen the power of the oft-understated art form: the essay.
To call an essay art is antithetical to how most react to it. Because of our experiences in the academic environment – from the rolling plains of preschool and the jungle halls of high school to the endless desert of the university with its scattered oases – many of us respond to the essay with hesitation or disgust. When first introduced to it, we are told to follow the five-paragraph formula: one introductory, three body, and one concluding paragraph. Each with its own unique structure.
The introduction flows through a funnel from a near-universal hook down to the specific thesis the essay will explore. The body paragraphs are then built up in the cookie-cutter style of suburban and soviet development; a topic sentence leads to a concrete detail to a commentary sentence followed by more detail-commentary couplings until we reach a concluding sentence that restates the topic and sets the stage for the next, nearly identical body paragraph. After the body comes the conclusion, a mirror image of the intro: rephrase the thesis, broaden back out, end with a universalizing statement.
With the essay structure defined, the student is graded not on their ability to express original thought with fresh imagery nor on their ability to evoke emotion or cause contemplation. They are graded on their ability to stamp out work according to the stated rules with perfect grammar and syntax.
From then on, our students move through their remaining education perfecting an immalleable form that necessitates an artless, drab, and downright boring style that seeks to standardize written English. The goal: to assess writing with the same methods used for science and mathematics. This grading system is no more than a means to force students to adhere to strict standards of expression and to punish those who divert course and follow a path of free thought.
Following four years of writing five-paragraph pieces that rarely extend beyond two pages, the student enters college and is tasked with writing assignments that reach five, seven, or even ten or more pages. Confronted with this task, they attempt to adapt the only tool they’ve been given to reach new lengths. They go on with this until an exasperated professor – tired of reading the same, stamped-out essay – tells them that there’s another way. But at this point, the damage is done. New habits are hard to make, and bad ones even harder to break. Of course, with sufficient commitment, it can be done, but the students are rarely committed. They are concerned only with completing their assignments, leaving academics behind, and entering a world where they never have to read or write an essay again. All because it never occurred to them or their teachers that an essay could be interesting, enjoyable, and artistic.
Thus, we have a world where people flinch at the mention of the word “essay.” Not only does “essay” cause such near unanimous animosity, the adverse opinion has reduced the majority of essays to a style-less form in which the author both repeats themselves and repeats others to avoid the free thought that was once so freely punished.
The matter is made worse by the content marketers masquerading as writers. These so-called creatives craft blog posts to feed algorithms and satisfy the Internet’s insatiable need for information – never mind if that information is presented in a way that causes the reader to pause, think critically, feel something, and question their implicit assumptions. In fact, writing something that challenges the reader is discouraged in the Age of Information. Twenty-first century, internet-article readers don’t want to think. They want to be told what to think.
Given that, writers are offered advice that eliminates all artistry. Answer the reader’s inquiry directly. “Write as you speak.” Use simple sentences. Avoid language above a fourth-grade reading level. And so on. In short, never do anything which may cause your prose to be recognized for what it always had the potential to be: Art. This advice has stripped internet writing of all its substance.
However, I don’t mean to say that thought-provoking, artistic essays are lost to the halls of history forever. Writers, like Marcus Harrison Green, who still publishing essay collections (whether or not they sell) should give us hope. That William Zinsser’s book On Writing Well, with its defense of “Nonfiction as Literature,” has been repeatedly reprinted thirty years after its original publication should excite us. Albeit, Ann Handley’s wretched bestseller Everybody Writes with its insistence that “Writing is a Habit, Not an Art” – a statement half true and half blisteringly false – should instill fear in us. But we will do our best to ignore the way marketers manipulate language and logic to their own gain. Instead, let’s focus on what gives us hope and how we turn that hope into action.
The enduring impact of powerful essays and collections makes me hopeful. Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” and Walden; or Life in the Woods are excellent examples. As are Baldwin’s Nobody Knows my Name and The Fire Next Time, Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Paine’s Rights of Man, and Hamilton’s Federalist Papers. And the collection All We Can Save serves as a great contemporary case study.
The legacy of these works shows that prose pieces are a powerful tool for galvanizing efforts for change. In all their varying ways, these essays channeled the authors ideas and projected them with such ferocious light that they illuminated paths others around them could follow. They would even point the way far enough to guide later generations like ours until our own luminous writers hold their light high.
However, with reading on the decline and writing in a weakened state, it may take an especially bright fire for our way forward to be lit. This is where, for all its perils, the Internet comes to our rescue. With the Internet offering a channel to any and every would-be writer, we no longer need the singularly exceptional artist burning bright to guide our path. We need many writers honing their skills, casting off the expectations of academia and algorithms, and expressing their voices in a way that allows their experiences, emotions, and ideas to shine through. Through the combination of all these fires burning brighter together, we can cut through the fog of newsfeeds to point the way to a future where our descendants live in wonderful worlds almost unimaginable to us.
This is my edict for my fellow writers – whether aspiring, emerging, or otherwise – especially those involved in social movements. Let us resurrect the art of the essay. Let us write works that move minds and remake the world. Let us tell stories and put forth prophecies in the ways only we can.
