More ideas to consider when writing a definition essay:


There are many ways to categorize essays. Aldous Huxley, a leading essayist, determined that there are three major groups: personal and autobiographical, objective and factual, and abstract and universal. Within these groups, several other types can exist, including the following:
De Montaigne’s essay explores multiple topics, including his reasons for writing essays, his dissatisfaction with contemporary education, and his own victories and failings. As the father of the essay, Montaigne details characteristics of what he thinks an essay should be. His writing has a stream-of-consciousness organization that doesn’t follow a structure, and he expresses the importance of looking inward at oneself, pointing to the essay’s personal nature. Woolf’s feminist essay, written from the perspective of an unknown, fictional woman, argues that sexism keeps women from fully realizing their potential. Woolf posits that a woman needs only an income and a room of her own to express her creativity. The fictional persona Woolf uses is meant to teach the reader a greater truth: making both literal and metaphorical space for women in the world is integral to their success and wellbeing. A film essay (also essay film or cinematic essay) consists of the evolution of a theme or an idea rather than a plot per se, or the film literally being a cinematic accompaniment to a narrator reading an essay. From another perspective, an essay film could be defined as a visual basis combined with a form of commentary that contains elements of self-portrait (rather than autobiography), where the signature (rather than the life story) of the filmmaker is apparent. The cinematic essay often blends , , and using tones and editing styles. The genre is not well-defined but might include propaganda works of early filmmakers like , present-day filmmakers including , (, and ), (), () and . describes his recent work as "film-essays". Two filmmakers whose work was the antecedent to the cinematic essay include and . Méliès made a short film ( (1902)) about the 1902 coronation of King , which mixes actual footage with shots of a recreation of the event. Brecht was a playwright who experimented with film and incorporated film projections into some of his plays. made an essay film in his own pioneering style, released in 1974, called , which dealt specifically with art forger and with the themes of deception, "fakery", and authenticity in general. David Winks Gray's article "The essay film in action" states that the "essay film became an identifiable form of filmmaking in the 1950s and '60s". He states that since that time, essay films have tended to be "on the margins" of the filmmaking the world. Essay films have a "peculiar searching, questioning tone ... between documentary and fiction" but without "fitting comfortably" into either genre. Gray notes that just like written essays, essay films "tend to marry the personal voice of a guiding narrator (often the director) with a wide swath of other voices". The Cinematheque website echoes some of Gray's comments; it calls a film essay an "intimate and allusive" genre that "catches filmmakers in a pensive mood, ruminating on the margins between fiction and documentary" in a manner that is "refreshingly inventive, playful, and idiosyncratic". Video essays are an emerging media type similar to film essays. Video essays have gained significant prominence on , as YouTube's policies on free uploads of arbitrary lengths have made it a hotbed. Some video essays feature long, documentary style writing and editing, going deep into the research and history of a particular topic. Others are more akin to an argumentative essay in which a single argument is developed and supported throughout the video. Video essay styles have become especially prominent among creators such as and .

5: Research the word’s origins.

A strives to cover a topic with a linked series of . Photo essays range from purely photographic works to photographs with captions or small notes to full-text essays with a few or many accompanying photographs. Photo essays can be sequential in nature, intended to be viewed in a particular order—or they may consist of non-ordered photographs viewed all at once or in an order that the viewer chooses. All photo essays are collections of photographs, but not all collections of photographs are photo essays. Photo essays often address a certain issue or attempt to capture the character of places and events.

Here's a generic outline for a definition essay:

Well, beyond a jumble of words usually around 2,000 words or so - what is an essay, exactly? Whether you’re taking English, sociology, history, biology, art, or a speech class, it’s likely you’ll have to write an essay or two. So how is an essay different than a research paper or a review? Let’s find out!

Understanding the Definition Essay

In the visual , an essay is a preliminary drawing or sketch that forms a basis for a final painting or sculpture, made as a test of the work's composition (this meaning of the term, like several of those following, comes from the word s meaning of "attempt" or "trial").

Definition Essay About Friendship

Michel de Montaigne first coined the term essayer to describe Plutarch’s Oeuvres Morales, which is now widely considered to be a collection of essays. Under the new term, Montaigne wrote the first official collection of essays, Essais, in 1580. Montaigne’s goal was to pen his personal ideas in . In 1597, a collection of Francis Bacon’s work appeared as the first essay collection written in English. The term essayist was first used by English playwright Ben Jonson in 1609.

Here are some more extended definition essay topics:

An essay can be as short as 500 words, it can also be 5000 words or more. However, most essays fall somewhere around ; this word range provides the writer enough space to thoroughly develop an argument and work to convince the reader of the author’s perspective regarding a particular issue. The topics of essays are boundless: they can range from the best form of government to the benefits of eating peppermint leaves daily. As a professional provider of custom writing, our service has helped thousands of customers to turn in essays in various forms and disciplines.