What is an Essay?

Essay is from the old French essai, which means “to try,” and the Latin exagium, “to weigh or evaluate.”

Definitions from the American Heritage Dictionary:
1.  n.  A short literary composition on a particular subject
2.  n.  An effort to perform or accomplish something; an attempt
3.  n.  A tentative effort
4.  v.  To try; to attempt
5.  v.  To put to the test; make trial of

Dictionary.com definition.

Here’s how writers over the years have defined the essay.

“Thus I guarantee no certainty, unless it be to make known to what point, at this moment, extends the knowledge that I have of myself.  Let attention be paid not to the matter, but to the shape I give it.”—Michel de Montaigne, “Of Books,” (in The Art of the Personal Essay)

Essays “are experiments in making sense of things … the closest thing we have, on paper, to a record of the individual mind at work.”—Scott Russell Anderson

“There is nothing resembling a standard essay: no set style, no set length, no set subject matter .. A certain modesty of intention resides in the essay.  It is a modesty of intention inherent in the French verb that gives the form its name—essayer: to try, to attempt, to taste, to try on, to assay … many words the essayist may avail himself of, he instinctively knows, or ought to know, that the last word cannot be his.”— Joseph Epstein

“A basic structural design follows every kind of writing.  Writers will in part follow this design, in part deviate from it, according to their skills, their needs, and the unexpected events that accompany the act of composition.”—E.B. White

“When writing an essay we should start without any fixed idea of where we are going to spend the night, or when we propose to come back; the journey is everything.”—Virginia Woolf

“An essay is “the shape of an ‘inner life’ in the act of reaching a decision … the essay gives the process preceding conviction.”—Thomas Harrison

“The genuine essayist … is the writer who thinks his way through the essay—and so comes out where perhaps he did not want to … he uses the essay as an open form—as a way of thinking things out for himself, as a way of discovering what he thinks … [an essay] is not meant to be the whole truth, the sociological truth, the abstract and neutral truth … in an essay it is not the thought that counts but the experience we get of the writer’s thought; not the self, but the self thinking.”—Alfred Kazin

“Is the essay literature or philosophy?  A form of art or a form of knowledge? The contemporary essay is torn between its belletristic ancestry and its claim to philosophical legitimacy.”—R. Lane Kauffman, “The Skewed Path: Essaying an Unmethodical Method” in: Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre

“The essay presupposes an independent observer, a specific object, and a sympathetic reader.”
“The essay offers personal experience, not disciplinary expertise.”
“The essay cultivates diversity where the disciplines seek unity.”
“Although the essay is not itself a “learned” work in the sense of contributing to a body of knowledge, the essayist often uses his own personal learning. … Ultimately, the essayist’s authority is not his learning, but his experience.”
“The essay offers knowledge of the moment, nothing more.”
“In the essay, the identity of neither self nor object is predetermined.  Both are changeable, and take a particular shape in conjunction, in configuration, with each other.  The essay is a reflection of and on the changing self in the world, not the pure, abstract, Cartesian construction of the self or Newtonian construction of the world, but a construction of, and response to, this time and place in the world, by this self.”—Graham Good, “The Essay as Genre” in: The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay