Essay Assay, Part I
Nail Every Essay Every Time
I’m using the word assay in today’s title (and Tuesday’s) as a verb in the metallurgic or biochemical sense—like a gene-expression assay—to make an assessment of what something is made up of, its component parts, to examine it and figure out what its nature is.
I wanted to call it Essay Essay both in the sense of it’s an essay about essays and also using the word essay both to mean “this composition made up of words” and also “an attempt.” But that was too “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo et cetera” so I didn’t do that; you’re welcome.
Sometimes the Shelf Life writes itself. No really, sometimes I do a little psychography. A little automatic writing. Blank out and let the spirits write Shelf Life. I mean, you’d have to be very dedicated to write three-hundred-and-some essays in a row. Or very crazy. Or both! Or at least you’d have to really like writing essays.
As it happens, I’m very dedicated, very crazy, and also really just like writing essays. You probably don’t have any other friends who write as many essays as I do. (If you do, please introduce us.) I thought today I’d write an essay about writing essays, since I do it so much. I can’t say I’m good at it but I’m better than I used to be. I know this because I can write one way faster than I used to be able to, and with way less preparation. I’m really proud of this skill, even though it has no practical use (except, you know, this).
Ray Bradbury famously said, and I have quoted in Shelf Life before, “If you can write one short story a week—it doesn't matter what the quality is to start, but at least you're practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones.” Instead of short stories I write essays and instead of 52 a year I write about a hundred. I don’t think they can all be bad—and neither does Ray Bradbury. There must be a few good ones in there.
Today I am going to walk you through the evolution of my essay writing process. None of the steps have really changed, I just do some of them automatically in my brain instead of explicitly now.
Okay but first: What’s an essay, exactly? I’m so glad you asked. An essay is:
A literary composition;
That tackles a specific subject;
From its author’s limited point of view; oh and
It’s probably short.
Essays can be formal or informal (I prefer in) and they can be argumentative, persuasive, narrative, or expository, or a combination of any. For reference:
An argumentative essay presents and then supports the author’s argument.
A persuasive essay attempts to persuade the reader to agree with the author’s perspective.
An expository essay imparts information.
A narrative essay tells a story.
Most Shelf Life articles are a combination of some or all of those bullets, probably because I’m disorganized.
Devise a Topic
So: You want to write an essay. The first step is to pick a topic you want to write about. If you’re an overachiever, pick like 100 topics and put them all in a spreadsheet. Now start a newsletter to deliver the essays you will write from these topics.
When you were in school, you probably had a mix of essays based on research and essays that you could just write off the top of your head. Right? Like you might be asked to write an essay on a historical topic for your history class and since you’re in the history class and not teaching the history class you probably have to do some reading and research to learn enough information to write an essay about it. Then, other times, you’d be asked to write a persuasive or argumentative essay about, for instance, a political topic. Are you for or against school vouchers? Why? This might require substantially less reading and research, especially if you are opinionated.
As an adult person (which I think most people reading probably are), you’ve probably amassed some expertise about something—from your job, from your hobbies, from personal experience, et cetera. You probably have what it takes to write an expository essay without having to do a whole lot of research first (you may still need to do some).
Like if you’re a college student and you want to write an essay on how widgets are made, you might have to do some research on how widgets are made. If you’ve spent the last five years as the general manager of a widget factory, you can probably write that essay off the top of your head.
Find the Start and End
The best advice I can give vis a vis essay writing is, after you have your topic, figure out what you want to accomplish in your essay on that topic and figure out where you have to begin to accomplish that. If you want to write an expository essay on how widgets are made, for example, your successful end state is that your reader understand how widgets are made. Easy! But you also have to find your beginning state, and for that you have to know a few more things.
How much are you going to write?
Who makes up your audience?
Let’s start with how much you’re going to write. Are you going to write for an hour? Two hours? Six hours? Five hundred words? A thousand? Two thousand? Ten pages? Five paragraphs? However much volume of content you intend to generate (whether that is in terms of how much text or how much time you will spend generating text), you will have to choose the beginning state of your essay such that it’s possible to get to your successful end state from there in the amount of words or time you have.
What I’m saying is, if you’re going to write a five-hundred-word essay on how widgets are made, don’t start with the history of widgets for people who have never heard of widgets before. You won’t even get to the modern-day widget-making process before you’re out of space.
Speaking of people who have never heard of widgets before, who’s your target audience? You can’t control who reads your essay once you publish it (see On Control), but you can control who you are targeting to read your paper. Every topic will have a range of people at different levels of familiarity with it. When you write an essay, you have to figure out who your target audience is so you can write at the right level of complexity, and presuming the correct amount of preexisting knowledge in your audience, to make the essay useful and digestible for them.
Around any topic, readers fall into “tiers” of their knowledge of that topic. Take widgets. Your first, innermost tier of people, the people who have the most knowledge of widgets, are probably the people who make widgets. The people who work in the widget factory. The people who design widgets and work in widget science to improve widgets. These people probably know everything there is to know about widgets.
Next you have people who use widgets a lot, like on a daily basis. They know less than the people who work in making widgets, but they still know a lot more than, say, a widget hobbyist—someone who uses widgets now and then. And that hobbyist knows more than the widget layperson who knows about the existence of widgets but maybe not much else.
The essay you write on how widgets are made will be very different if you’re writing it for widget makers than if you’re writing for interest widget laypeople. Also, the higher the level of your target audience’s familiarity with the subject, the more you have to know about it to write a useful essay. If I were a widget hobbyist, I could probably write a decent essay on widgets for a widget layperson, but I wouldn’t have much useful information to teach a widget maker.
Consider printing presses. As a publication production professional, I know an awful lot about printing presses compared to Regular Joe off the street. I’ve done a lot of printing press tours and press checks in my career, I work with printing press personnel every day. However, I have not even a tenth of the knowledge of printing presses as someone who works at the printing press. I have written about printing presses for authors, other production folks earlier in career than me, other publications staff who don’t work directly with the printing press, and interested laypeople. But I would not have much to offer to a person who works at the press that they don’t already know.
One day I am going to write a persuasive essay on why you should avoid using reflex blue in designs destined for the web press. But this is not that day.
Once you know who you’re writing for and how much you’re going to write (approximately or exactly), you can determine your starting point. If you have no limit on the amount of time and space—if your essay can turn into a book for all you care—then you can start with the history of widgets for people who don’t even know what a widget is, and work your way up from there. That’s a fairly comprehensive essay. It may not be of terrible interest to widget professionals, but it could find a wide audience of people who don’t know much about widgets and want to know more.
The less time or space you have, the less you can write. This means you have to impart less information for a general-knowledge audience, or that you must write for a higher-knowledge audience for whom you can omit basic information because they already know it.
On most topics, if not all topics, there is a smaller audience of experts who have nothing to learn on that topic than of less-familiar people who have something to learn.
Coming up next Tuesday is the thrilling conclusion to today’s essay, in which I’ll walk you through how I actually write an essay after I’ve determined my topic, starting point, and successful end point. I have now managed to write an entire essay on writing essays without actually getting to the part where we write an essay. Perhaps I am not the essay master I thought I was.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
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This library of essays are useful to have, because I could be in a conversation with someone about something, and I can refer them to one of your essays and end the conversation. It's a real saver!
Also someday when AI takes over there will be a lot of CF preserved in the training dataset of responses.