Paul Heilker
Department of English
Virginia Tech
The Exploratory Essay
What is an essay? Despite the familiarity of the name, a true essay is probably unlike
anything you have written before in school. The word essay comes from the French
verb essai, “to try, to attempt,’ which, in turn, is based on the Latin verb exagium, “to
weigh,” or figuratively, “to weigh alternatives.”
The essay is tentative, incomplete, inconclusive. It does not try to prove a point. It does
not try to persuade the reader to adopt a certain point of view. An exact definition of
the essay has eluded writers and critics since the birth of the form over 400 years ago,
but here is what some of them have said:
The essay’s “purpose is not to convey information, although it may do that as well, but
rather to tell the story of the author’s thinking and experience.” ---Chris Anderson,
“Literary Nonfiction and Composition.”
The “form of the essay . . . acknowledges uncertainty and ambiguity . . . . [T]he essay is
by definition an attempt . . . . It doesn’t pretend that everything is clear and worked
out.” ---Chris Anderson, “Hearsay Evidence and Second-Class Citizenship.”
The “essay is the closest thing we have, on paper, to a record of the individual mind at
work and play . . . [is] the spectacle of a single consciousness making sense of a part of
the chaos” of experience. The essay works by “following the zigzag motions of the
inquisitive mind . . . . The writing of an essay is like finding one’s way through a forest
without being quite sure what game you are chasing, what landmark you are seeking.”
An “essay is a weighing out, an inquiry into the value, meaning, and true nature of
experience; it is a private experiment carried out in public.” ---Scott Russell Sanders,
“The Singular First Person.”
Essays “are experiments in making sense of things.” ---Scott Russell Sanders, The
Paradise of Bombs
“[E]ssays do not march smartly forward . . . . The itinerancy of the writing, its own being
in motion, generates and arranges thoughts, and they take form from their own
movement, not their mass.” Essayists “think less about writing than through it: they
watch it unfold and grasp its meaning as it emerges.” ---William Howarth
The essay does not seek “to fix, to define, to delimit, so that clarity and precision are
perfect within a certain scope,” nor does it press “toward assent, conformity,
submission, so that force of expression and argument are translated into belief and
action.” Rather, the essay “tries to open, to stimulate, to inject multiple overtones so
that insight is expanded and pleasure is aroused. This opening, stimulating, multiplying
vision is useful because it is opening, stimulating, multiplying, not because it is
practical.” ---Howard Brashers
The essayist writes “not so much with the hope of gaining adherence as of stimulating
and disturbing thought.” ---Walter Beale
The “genuine essayist . . . is the writer who thinks his way through the essay---and so
comes out where perhaps he did not wish to . . . . He uses the essay as an open form--as a way of thinking things out for himself, as a way of discovering what he thinks . . . .
[A]n essay is not meant to be the ‘whole truth,’ the sociological truth, the abstract and
neutral truth . . . [It is instead] an expression of the self thinking . . . . In an essay, it is not
the thought that counts but the experience we get of the writer’s thought; not the self,
but the self thinking.” ---Alfred Kazin
Essays are “not reports of objective truth but explorations of [the writer’s] own
attitudes and thoughts . . . . That struggle, that essaying to clarify the writer’s views,
should really be included in the definition of an essay.” ---Douglas Hunt
An “essay is the shape of an ‘inner life’ in the act of reaching a decision.” The “essay
give[s] shape to the process preceding conviction.” ---Thomas Harrison
“The essay makes visible the patterns of an individual’s thoughts. It allows us to see the
process of contemplation that results in understanding that in turn leads to action.” --Pamela Klass Mittlefehldt
In an essay, we do not see “writing as a demonstration of understanding---after a writer
has worked through his or her uncertainty,” but rather see “writing as a means of
achieving understanding, an achievement that demands the willingness to surrender
instrumental control.” ---Kurt Spellmeyer
An essay “neither . . . advances an argument . . . nor is . . . informative in the sense of
reducing the reader’s uncertainty about a topic or of supplying fresh data.” ---W. Ross
Winterowd
The essay’s “extreme indefiniteness is partly inherent in the nature of the thing:
etymologically, the word essay indicates something tentative, so there is a justification
for the conception of incompleteness and want of system.” ---Hugh Walker
When writing an essay, we “should start without any fixed idea of where we are going
to spend the night, or when we propose to come back; the journey is everything.” --Virginia Woolf
“The essayist is not sure of what he is going to find, which accounts for the digressive
form of his work . . . . [T]he essay is also a well-rounded piece of composition . . . in
which the artist’s point of view is constantly shifting while the object of perception
remains what it is . . . . [T]he essayist is sure of the result, namely an expansion of his
scope of vision, which he seeks to communicate . . . . [T]he goal of the essayist is not
truth in its finality, but wisdom as the sought-after prize of the search for truth . . . .
[T]he discourser expresses himself at fits and starts, following the meanderings of his
own thought in its attempt to describe a mercurial subject . . . . [T]he extremely
digressive form of the essay . . . follows its winding course as the various themes run
into each other almost imperceptibly . . . . Each peripheral theme is an outgrowth of an
idea previously expressed rather than an additional point introduced for the purpose of
maintaining the argumentative discussion on its determined course . . . . [T]he essay
itself is the image of structured thought in motion . . . . [T]he essay ceases to be an essay
when it can be predicted.” ---J. C. Guy Cherica
“Rarely does the . . . essay set out hiking boots afoot and compass in hand; instead it
meanders . . . . Instead of driving hard to prove a point, the essay saunters, letting the
writer follow the vagaries of his own willful curiosity. Instead of reaching conclusions,
the essay ruminates and wonders. Rather than being right or informative, it is
thoughtful.” ---Samuel F. Pickering, Jr.
“The hero of the essay is the author in the act of thinking things out, feeling and finding
a way; it is the mind in the marvels and miseries of its makings, in the work of the
imagination, the search for form . . . . [T]he essay interests itself in the narration of
ideas---in their unfolding---and the conflict between philosophies or other points of view
becomes a drama in its hands . . . . The essayist speaks one mind truly, but that is far
from speaking the truth . . . . The essay . . . turns round and round upon its topic,
exposing this aspect and that; proposing possibilities, reciting opinions, disposing of
prejudice and even of the simple truth itself---as too undeveloped, not yet of an
interesting age.” ---William H. Gass
“The essayist plays cat-and-mouse with his subject, circling it, toying with it, only
dispatching it after the life has gone out of it . . . . All essays share the characteristic of
indirection. Rather than a straightforward recitation of the available facts, the essayist
usually takes a more roundabout approach . . . . The rambling structure of . . . [an essay]
is really a form in its own right . . . . [The essayist] does not pour his substance into a
hollow form but carves out a form that is inseparable from the object he produces . . . .
The essay is never the final word on a subject . . . [because it] recognizes the fallibility of
human understanding the mutability of human affairs . . . . [E]ssays advertise
themselves to be fluid works-in-progress.” ---David W. Chapman
The essay “is a literary trial balloon, an informal stringing together of ideas to see what
happens . . . and it has no standard method.” ---O. B. Hardison, Jr.
“To essay is to experiment, to try out, to test---even one’s own cognitive powers and
limits. The word connotes a tentative, groping method of experience, with all its
attendant risks and pleasures . . . . Entering the road laid down by tradition, the essayist
is not content to pursue faithfully the prescribed itinerary. Instinctively, he (or she)
swerves to explore the surrounding terrain, to track a stray detail or anomaly, even at
the risk of wrong turns, dead ends, and charges of trespassing. From the standpoint of
more ‘responsible’ travelers, the resulting path will look skewed and arbitrary.” ---R.
Lane Kauffman
The “essay exploits the uncertainty of the writer’s situation, transforming uncertainty
into a fundamental quality of the essay form . . . . [T]he essay records the track of an
individual mind exploring and resolving a problem . . . . [T]he essay must be open to a
multiplicity of voices in order to become a means of understanding.” ---Thomas E.
Recchio
Working in the essay form “allows you to ramble in a way that reflects the mind at work
. . . . [I]n an essay, the track of a person’s thoughts struggling to achieve some
understanding of a problem is the plot, is the adventure. The essay must be willing to
contradict himself . . . to digress, and even to end up in an opposite place from where he
started . . . . The essay offers the chance to wrestle with one’s own intellectual
confusion.” ---Phillip Lopate
There is nothing “resembling a standard essay: no set style, no set length, no set subject
matter . . . . A certain modesty of intention resides in the essay. It is a modesty inherent
in the French verb that gives the form its name---essayer: to try, to attempt, to taste, to
try on, to assay. However many words the essayist may avail himself of, he instinctively
knows, or ought to know, that the last word cannot be his.” ---Joseph Epstein
The Essay “is the act of thinking through writing . . . . The essay not merely allows for but
actually celebrates---indeed is characterized by---surprise, interpretation, meandering,
and slow discovery.” We should note “the open-endedness, skepticism, and critical
spirit that characterizes the essay form: it resists easy definition (of itself, its subject
matter, its ‘conclusions,’) avoids coming to rest in some positive truth or absolute
knowledge, remains wary of systems and systematizing, and not only acknowledges but
also embraces and even celebrates . . . uncertainty and ambiguity.” The essay is the act
of “narrating a journey toward some understanding of a textual, personal, or political
problem.” ---G. Douglas Atkins
“Every essay is the only one of its kind. There are no rules for making beginnings, or
middles, or endings; it is a harder, more original discipline than that . . . . Setting out to
write an essay, you have no predetermined course to follow, no generic mold to fill or
rules of composition to draw on.” The essay “takes its characteristic outings, has a look
around, rambles on in its multiplicity of voices about this and that . . . [and] stays closer
to the largely tentative movements by which we make our individual ways through time
. . . . [T]he route is not planned beforehand . . . . The route is mapped in the going. And
except for a general familiarity with the terrain to be walked, there’s no anticipating
what will come your way; you set out to see what is out there to be seen.” The essay is
“not exhaustive or systematic, never more than an attempt, a go at something that
might be tried again on another occasion, in quite a different way. Every essay is, thus,
necessarily incomplete . . . . [I]t obeys no compulsion to tie up what may look like loose
ends, [and] tolerates a fair amount of inconclusiveness and indeterminacy.” ---Lydia
Fakundiny