E: Essay Architecture

If you want to start a writing habit, don’t start with essays. Write paragraphs. Shaping and editing essays from a cold start is quite hard. Instead, practice riffing paragraphs over a huge range of ideas. Publish them all somewhere, but don’t blast them.

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.