How to write an essay
An essay is a piece of writing that develops an idea or argument using evidence, analysis, and interpretation. There are many types of essays you might write. The content and length of an essay depends on your requirements. However, most essays should be argumentative, or rather they should aim to persuade the reader of a particular position or perspective on a topic.
To write like Montaigne, however, focus on a personal, meandering journey of self-discovery, exploring topics through free association, anecdotes, and skeptical self-questioning, rather than structured argument, using an informal, conversational tone to reveal the mind in motion and embrace contradictions as part of finding truth.
Montaigne's essays are intellectual self-portraits that together produce an autobiography. Contrary to Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, or Augustine’s Confessions, which are reflections upon a lifetime of learning, Montaigne is able to provide us with continuously altering snapshots of himself over the course of years, which furnish a diagram of the mind throughout its maturity.
It's very much a personal investigation out of which an author might to sketch a vision of himself : “I have no thought of serving either you or my own glory,” Montaigne tells us at the outset : “I am myself the matter of my book”, and that "you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject”.
Indeed, the project is that there is no project in which “the first feature produces the second”. Montaigne engages his style through what he calls, “la peinture de la pensée” (“the painting of thought”). The writer confronts the blank page as the blank canvas of the mind, and as the mind adjusts itself to a topic in the act of unpacking it, so do the “high” and “low” styles of the voice.
“The play is the thing,” says Hamlet, “wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king”. The prince’s attempt to catch his own conscience as much as the king’s. So in Montaigne’s writing is the awareness kept that his conscience could change at any moment, and change again. Thoughts move forwards as well as backwards, or back in on themselves, or spiral away before being retrieved later on
To write like Montaigne, however, focus on a personal, meandering journey of self-discovery, exploring topics through free association, anecdotes, and skeptical self-questioning, rather than structured argument, using an informal, conversational tone to reveal the mind in motion and embrace contradictions as part of finding truth.
Montaigne's essays are intellectual self-portraits that together produce an autobiography. Contrary to Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, or Augustine’s Confessions, which are reflections upon a lifetime of learning, Montaigne is able to provide us with continuously altering snapshots of himself over the course of years, which furnish a diagram of the mind throughout its maturity.
It's very much a personal investigation out of which an author might to sketch a vision of himself : “I have no thought of serving either you or my own glory,” Montaigne tells us at the outset : “I am myself the matter of my book”, and that "you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject”.
Indeed, the project is that there is no project in which “the first feature produces the second”. Montaigne engages his style through what he calls, “la peinture de la pensée” (“the painting of thought”). The writer confronts the blank page as the blank canvas of the mind, and as the mind adjusts itself to a topic in the act of unpacking it, so do the “high” and “low” styles of the voice.
“The play is the thing,” says Hamlet, “wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king”. The prince’s attempt to catch his own conscience as much as the king’s. So in Montaigne’s writing is the awareness kept that his conscience could change at any moment, and change again. Thoughts move forwards as well as backwards, or back in on themselves, or spiral away before being retrieved later on
