Essay

:For the town in France, see Essay, Orne.

The essay as a pedagogical tool

In recent times, essays have become one of the chief tools by which colleges judge the mastery and comprehension of material, and they are sometimes used as a part of the process by which the student body is selected as well. Academic essays are usually more formal and present the writer's own views as well as the comprehensive analysis of what has previously been written on a topic.

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Many students' first exposure to the genre is the "five paragraph essay": a highly structured form requiring an introduction (concluding with a thesis statement), three body paragraphs, each of which presents a main supporting point, and a conclusion, which restates the thesis and summarizes the supporting points. The form is controversial. It does allow the student writer to put some structure in place, at a stage when the main concern is mastering more "tactical level" issues such as unified paragraphs, transitions, thesis statements, and so forth, but its simplistic structure severely limits the author's range of expression and has given generations of students a stunted understanding of the richness and flexibility of the essay genre as a whole.

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