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The Secret Architecture of Great Essays
Essay Architecture is about the formal analysis of a piece. It’s not about a personal, cultural, or moral analysis of a piece, but, it does suggest that you want to shape an essay in a way os that we can see and wrestle with those dimensions.
Example: Imagine someone writes an essay about getting surgery to turn themselves into a cartoon character.
... See moreSome points to defend the POV that “essay quality is objective.”
Specific scope: You have to set the scope small enough to “essays.” Books, memoirs, newsletter and other written mediums have their own criteria. Songs and films are even more different. I think it’s important not to get bogged down in genre, and instead to see genre as a culturally a
The alchemy of the rewrite
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An essay is not the process of translating a fully-formed idea into words on a page; it is the process of discovering and testing an idea by challenging it with form, syntax, structure.