Answer:
Yes We Write Essays Because of The following reasons
•The Essay as tried and tested Form that Everyone Knows
Everyone is familiar with the essay as a form. It plays a central role in our education -especially so in the Arts and Humanities. Students use it for exploration and demonstration of their knowledge and understanding of a topic. It is widely employed for assessment and examination by teachers. It also plays a central role in our learning and our general reading in terms of its use as a vehicle for the dissemination of new research, theses, proposals and theoretical work.
•For all that, not much theoretical discussion is ever given to the form itself. We all know something of its origins with Montaigne; his provocations and explorations of his subjectivity – but beyond that ..? Of its subsequent history, development and adoption as the academic form there appears to be little interest. Sure, the student can go to ‘student support’ to learn the formats and to practice writing the optimal essay in whatever topic, but rarely is there any thought given to its efficacy as an educational tool, the significance of that ‘central’ role it plays in organising knowledge and approaches to knowledge, nor to its possible and actual effects on controlling, setting and containing the scholarly and intellectual horizons. The essay indeed, has always been conceived not just as the shorter, but as the lesser valued form in comparison with the thesis, the dissertation and the full-length monograph.
•Yet the Essay is making a comeback
In recent years -if not decades – however, the essay has arguably come to a new prominence. For immediate evidence of new interest in the form we can turn, for example, to Brian Dillon’s Essayism a delightful book-length meditation on the form published in 2017, elegiac on the paradox of both the ‘mastery’ and the ‘partiality’ of the essay. Admittedly Dillon’s book deals particularly with the ‘literary’ essay, rather than the ‘scholarly’ type. Of course, the difference between these two types is never precisely clear-cut. - Is the philosopher Derrida’s 1999 essay ‘The Animal that Therefore I am’, for example, of the ‘literary’ or ‘scholarly’ type? A full-length book could be written on that question alone. Although, perhaps just to keep it blog-size, I could suggest that for the literary essayist, the question of style – not unrelated to that of the ‘partiality’ mentioned above – might figure more strongly…
•Revival of the Essay empowered by the Research Exercise?
At any rate there is also evidence for the thriving of the more scholarly essay and its role in academia and intellectual life in general. It would seem that this could be partly a result of the institution of Performance Based Research Funding Systems – like the REF in Britain – from the 1980s onwards. These national systems have obliged academics to demonstrate their competence via regular publishing of papers. Publishers have capitalised on this new culture (not least through the practice of not paying academics for their work and by charging very high prices for journals to academic libraries), and the production of academic journals, where essays are published, has flourished. The question of the value of the work in these publications and the standards to which they adhere has been widely debated. The point here though, is that there is a thriving culture, which situation tends towards the likelihood that more good, innovative, healthy, interesting and fruitful work - in this case in the essay form – will be published.
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