The Deninition of an Essay

1. Definition of an Essay

The Definition of an Essay

The word essay comes from the French essai, a try or attempt. The essay is an attempt to communicate information, opinion, or feeling, and usually it presents an argument about a topic. In the university context, an essay is an exercise that gives the student an opportunity to explore and clarify thoughts about a subject.

An essay is a short piece of writing made up of several paragraphs joined together to discuss one single topic.The topic of an essay is relatively broad and complex; it cannot be discussed in detail in a single paragraph. Therefore, the writer needs to divide it into subtopics (fragment it) to be discussed separately in separate paragraphs.

e.g. Smoking is fatal habit that has bad effects on one’s health including lung cancer, risks of heart attacks and a damaged nervous system

(the topic ‘effects of smoking’ is divided into three subtopics, the underlined ones)