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Katherine Alford
What should an essay be like?
Many would say persuasive. That's what we were taught... But I think we can aim for something more ambitious: an essay should be useful.
Above all, the essay must be correct. But it's not enough to be correct. It is easy to make a statement correct by making it vague. This is a common flaw in academic writing. Even if you know nothing about the subject, you won't make the mistake of saying that the problem is complex, that there are many factors to consider, that looking at it too simply would be a mistake, and so on.
Such statements are certainly correct, but they pay for a paper communicate nothing to the reader. A good text contains strong statements-so strong that to make them even a little stronger would be to turn them into lies.
For example, it would be more useful to say that Pikes Peak is near downtown Colorado than just somewhere in Colorado. But if I say that it is definitely in central Colorado, it will turn out that I exaggerated, since it is actually a little east of the middle.
Accuracy and correctness are like opposing forces. It is easy to https://payforessay.pro/essay-editing-service/ satisfy one while ignoring the other. Maintaining an academic style is bold but false; it is rhetoric and demagoguery. Useful writing is bold and truthful.
There are also 2 other things here: telling people something important and something that at least some of them don't already know.
Telling people what they don't know doesn't always mean surprising them. Sometimes it means telling them what they unconsciously knew but never expressed with words. It can actually provide more valuable insights because it tends to be more fundamental.
Let's put it all together. A useful essay tells people something true and important, something they didn't already know, and makes it as unambiguous as possible.
Notice that it's all a matter of level. For example, do my cpm assignment you can't expect an idea to be new to everyone. Any epiphany you had probably also had at least one of the 7 billion people living in the world. But it's really enough if the idea is new to a large number of readers.
The same goes for correctness, importance, and directness. In essence, these four components are like numbers that you can multiply to get an estimate of usefulness. I admit that this is a clumsy simplification, but a valid one nonetheless.
How can you be sure that what you say is true, new, and important? Believe it or not, there's a trick to it. I learned it from my friend Robert Morris, who is afraid to say stupid things. His trick is to say nothing unless he's sure it's worth hearing. So it's hard to get his opinion, but when he does, it's usually the right one.
More information:
Essay on "How do you understand the meaning of the word kindness?”
Essay on “My Favorite Place in Nature”
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