When the word “essay” is heard, a picture of many words arranged in a paragraph strikes our minds. But in reality, composing an essay is not as easy as it pictures itself in our minds. Here, the use of the word “composing” is not unintentional. Creating an essay doesn’t just mean writing down random thoughts which occur sporadically in our brains. It is about using those thoughts, sorting them out, structuring the flow and finally painting them with colorful words so as to convey the essence of our thoughts in the best possible way to others. Though the creative hemisphere of the brain needs to be used the most while writing an essay, the logical hemisphere has to be put into work while composing it.
The official definition of essay says that it is “A short literary composition on a single subject, usually presenting the personal view of the author”. This brings about a lot of freedom, in the sense that it is going to be a personal view of the author, which allows all the creative juices and personal opinions to vent their way out. However, with freedom comes a lot of responsibility. Invariably the greatest catch in all the acts with freedom is “choice”. Freedom opens the doors to so many choices that handling them and picking the best can prove to be truly intimidating. The same is true when we are asked to compose an essay of our choice. At first it seems to be so easy. We just need to write a bunch of personal views about any subject under or over the sun. Again, the catch is that we need to choose a topic which can trigger the biggest bunch of personal views to fill up the empty sheets creatively. The choice of the topic is crucial for any essay and determines the whole course of composing it.
Once a topic is chosen, the intellect starts to fire it’s super fast bullets of haphazard thoughts, either through the access of memory or just out of thin air. However magical the thought forming process may appear, constructing an essay out of them is a complete logical procedure. Sometimes, writing down all the random thoughts and then arranging them works, while sometimes getting the overall structure of the essay first and then filling in the thoughts works and then there are sometimes when nothing works! This “nothing works” is what is apparently called as “a writer’s block” - when the thought generating system seems to become totally numb. Situations as this are usually handled by taking a break and coming back to writing later. In other scenarios where the thought process is either a slow stream or a giant waterfall, ordering them and consolidating them into meaningful chunks of data becomes important.
After the arbitrary thoughts have been formed into somewhat systematic units of information, the next task would be of beautification. Though the matter of the essay marks its core, the way it is presented decides whether or not the matter reaches its audience appropriately. The use of apt language, words, phrases and sentence structure turns a simple mass of information into an eloquent essay. Correct grammar and punctuation usage definitely multiply the essay’s acceptance quotient. Though adding of complicated words would make the essay difficult to comprehend, healthy use of vocabulary definitely will be the icing on the cake. Above all these, is the satisfaction the composer attains in building a beautiful piece of art work called “essay” which makes it special and worth it. Concluding with the same kind of satisfaction; cheers to essays!
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