What makes an essay an essay?

Well, I read all of these essays early since I will be away from a computer over fall break and needed to do the assignment now.

They were very interesting. When I first read the assignment on the 3-week planner, I thought they were all going to be boring scientific or historical essays. I thought that because my topic, Asperger’s Syndrome, is going to be very scientific, with a lot of facts and figures. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were all narrative style essays that were entertaining and also educational.

So that gets me into what I think make these pieces fall into the category of “essay.” As I was reading, I picked out a few similarities that I saw.

One, the styles were similar. There were a lot of action verbs—and therefore a lot of action. They were all extremely descriptive and really poetically written using devices like metaphors and similes. I was impressed by how descriptive they all were. The one example that I keep thinking about is the description in The Stunt Pilot when they flew through a cloud and in front of them was a huge mountain of red, iron-laden rock.

Another stylistic point I noticed was that there seemed to be a turning point in each essay. The best example is from Silent Dancing when it goes from describing her life and her home to talking about how she overheard her mother talking about an abortion and it scared her for the rest of her childhood.

A third characteristic of the three essays that I picked up on was that each had their own educational bits and pieces. Some put them in separately from the story, some within the story. For example, there would be a paragraph in Silent Dancing about Puerto Rican culture to explain what is going on in the story. Also, there would be technical terms specific to the topic that would be explained in the reading. Again, I Silent Dancing the word “la mancha” was explained to mean “the stain,” which had to do with looking and seeming like an immigrant. In The Stunt Pilot, there were technical terms that had to do with maneuvers in flying.

Last, each had a certain controversy or point that hooked in the reader. For Silent Dancing, it was the abortion story. For Ali in Havana it was his disease and his experience with Castro. In Stunt Pilot it was how the pilots, both the crop dusting ones and the stunt ones, accepted death as routine in their jobs. Some people may find other controversies they though were more interesting, but those are what did it for me.

So in conclusion, what I found that linked these writings together as essays were: 1)style (descriptive and action words), 2) turning point, 3) informative, 4) a way to hook the audience.