Post I: Discourse Surrounding the Essay

"In reading an essay, I want to feel that I’m communing with a real person, and a person who cares about what he or she’s writing about. The words sound sentimental and trite, but the qualities are rare. For me, an ideal essay is not an assignment, to be dispatched efficiently and intelligently, but and exploration, a questioning, an introspection. I want to see a piece of the essayist. I want to see a mind at work, imagining, spinning, struggling to understand. If the essayist has all the answers, then he isn’t struggling to grasp, and I won’t either. When you care about something, you continually grapple with it, because it is alive in you. It thrashes and moves, like all living things.
When I’m reading a good essay, I feel that I’m going on a journey. The essayist is searching for something and taking me along. That something could be a particular idea, an unraveling of identity, a meaning in the wallow of observations and facts. The facts are important but never enough. An essay, for me, must go past the facts, an essay must travel and move. Even the facts of the essayist’s own history, the personal memoir, are insufficient alone. The facts of the personal history provide anchor, but the essayist then swings in a wide arc on his anchor line, testing and pulling hard."

-Alan Lightman in 'The Ideal Essay'


While reading ‘The ideal essay’, I felt as if Lightman was speaking my mind. His thought on what an essay should consist of is what I have always wanted my essays to capture. For an author to grab my attention and more importantly, hold that attention, the words must go beyond the facts and paint some sort of a visual picture. Don’t get me wrong, the facts are usually vital in creating an essay, but for that essay to go above and beyond means creating your own way of writing to capture the audiences attention going into a greater depth than facts alone. As the author emphasizes the facts this enables the reader to want to know more, and understand that writing an essay can be clever and interesting. Reading an essay should be as if you’re on a journey, always wanting or needing something more. While reading a good essay, the journey should never be a dull one, as you do not want to let the reader down.
In all essays, it is important for me to see the authors’ creativity or personality through their writing. This enables me to fully grasp the material being read, furthering my ability to ask questions and understand the point he or she is trying to get across. I want to know more about the author through their writing to get a sense of their point of view about the essay.
An ideal essay is hard to come across. Essays either have too much information to fully grasp with little creativity or too much creativity with little information. While writing an essay, the author needs to remember that its better not knowing all the answers, ensuring that the reader will be asking questions and struggling to grasp the concept. Some may think this is a bad thing, in reality an essay should make you want to know more and think deeper about the concept or object, going beyond the facts. When given the opportunity to write an essay, don't think of it as an assignment, think of it as an opportunity to explore endless possibilities with your imagination to create a masterpiece for others to read. Lightman's view of an ideal essay helps me understand what real authors want to see in an essay.