Becoming a Great Essayist

See how the practice of writing essays has evolved over centuries yet has remained versatile, and examine the many uses of essays across the ages. Professor Cognard-Black uses examples from Aristotle to Michel de Montaigne to Edgar Allan Poe on how to look both inward and outward to find inspiration and build the story you most want to tell.

Look at the world around you with a new lens and discover how to convey those memories you've kept as an experience rather than just a recounting of facts. You'll travel down the streets of London with Virginia Woolf to explore her home as a stranger might, learning how taking on a new perspective can translate into compelling essays.

One of the most remarkable consequences of essay writing is the insights you discover about yourself. The nature of the essay doesn't allow for plot building or outlines - you simply sit and write, which means the story takes its own direction. Professor Cognard-Black encourages this process of discovery and shares stories of how many an essay she started turned into a different piece in the end.

Essays that present conflicting views are not uncommon; Socrates would commonly switch sides in order to test all parts of an argument, and many others have followed his example. Learn how writing essays that provide both sides of an argument, even if you support one side and oppose the other, can help you to develop an elasticity of mind, expand your range of ideas, and add to your credibility.

The most important artistic proof in any essay is ethos - the writer's ethical appeal or credibility. She demonstrates how to effectively use ethos along with logos or rationality to bring reasonableness into your essays, which vital to writing effectively. You'll examine the work of a pair of writers who mastered the reasonable essay: Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele.

Professor Cognard-Black explores the world of unreasonable essays, often written for the sake of humor or irony, or to be provocative, such as Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." You'll explore an example of an essay that showcases conflicting views yet remains reasonable, and then look at examples where unreasonable writers use demagoguery to play on readers' emotions.