Quotation from Atwan 02

"For me, the ideal essay is not an assignment, to be dispatched efficiently and intelligently, but an exploration, a questioning, an introspection. I want to see a piece of the essayist. I want to see a mind at work, imagining, spinning, struggling to understand. If the essayist has all the answers, then he isn't struggling to grasp, and I won't either." -Alan Lightman.

In the above quotation, Alan Lightman gave an interesting definition of the word “essay”. An essay does not have to be an academic piece that is assigned by the teacher with multiple guidelines. One does not have to research a topic to find the answers to what he or she is looking for in order to write an essay. An essay is simply the inner workings of the writer in order to find the answers he or she was looking for in the first place. They must look inside themselves and discover the true meaning of whatever their topic is. I never would have defined an essay in this fashion, but since reading these “Atwan” excerpts for class, I have realized than an essay can be as simple as journal writing or as academic as a report. An essay does not need a structure such as the Five-Paragraph Essay, which is something new to me. Just one year ago in English class, when I heard the word “essay” I knew that my teacher was expecting five paragraphs in which I stated within the first paragraph exactly what the piece was about and how I would approach my topic. To put it simply, I already knew the answers in the conclusion of my essay before I even began writing my second paragraph. I was never fond of this bland way of writing and after reading this quote from Alan Lightman, along with many others, I have discovered that there are many ways to approach an essay. The best essays are those in which the writer struggles to understand his idea or thesis, yet keeps his audience interested through the twists and turns of his thoughts. I really agree with Lightman’s statement that “if the essayist has all the answers, then he isn’t struggling to grasp, and I won’t either.” An essay is not uniform in that a bit of the writer’s personality is put into the piece in order to make it unlike any other writing genre. An essay is unique and as Lightman put it, “an exploration”.