I’m at a rather fun point in my doctoral studies. Today, I get to spend my days working on my dissertation and serving as a Teaching Assistant for a class. In my TA duties here at Binghamton, I’ve been assigned two sections of 25 students each, so when they submit essays, I find myself grading 50 of those in the course of a few days. It’s a lot of work, and in the moment the grading inspires a variety of emotions in me, from joy at a wonderfully written essay to disappointment at one that could’ve done better with just a little more effort.

One of the greatest boons to my work as a teacher is that now, after 12 years in college and 27 years overall as a student, I’ve finally made sense of how to write an essay. This word, used so often in academic writing, never really clicked for me. I knew I was supposed to write a research paper that had a introduction, body, and conclusion, but never really got the structure my teachers and professors were going for beyond that. It took my own transition from student to teacher for me to really understand that an essay is an extended argument. 

It also took for me to start studying Renaissance French Humanism and Natural History for me to really understand the origins of the essay with Michel de Montaigne’s 1580 book of Essays, where the term originated. These were reflections on a variety of topics, from children’s education to cannibalism and everything in between. My own Wednesday Blog is in some ways a nod to Montaigne in format. Montaigne’s essays sought to describe his world as he saw it and understood it, in all its rich detail and complexity.

In the academic essays that I write, from the quick 3 to 5 page papers I used to write for my undergrad history classes at Rockhurst to my dissertation, which in many aspects is itself a long essay, all have the same core structure and spirit. Yes, at its barest bones the essay is made up of an introduction, body, and conclusion, but there’s so much more rich detail to a good essay than just that. 

This semester it really occurred to me that the introduction ought to be made up of three main things: something to catch the reader’s attention, a thesis statement laying out the essay’s argument, and a brief summary of the main points with some context in the existing literature included if you’re writing on a graduate or professional level. Any of my colleagues reading or listening to this will either find their eyes are glazing over here or are instead laughing that I only really figured this out this late in the game as I was writing my dissertation.

The body is more than just the main points of the essay, it’s the real meat of the work, the rich quotes and analyses of the sources, the connections made to other works in all their intricate splendor, the quotable lines that help the essay stick in the reader’s memory and look forward to reading more of your work in the future. I still would say though that the thesis remains more important than the body, after all the body isn’t going to make sense without a strong central argument, a beating heart at the core of the entire work. I often tell my students this and have even begun advising them to underline their thesis statements to help them keep that heart in mind as they continue to flesh out the rest of their written creation.

Finally, there’s the conclusion. It’s a summary of the main points of the essay, a restating of the thesis with the memory of the body fresh in the reader’s mind. The conclusion is a chance to leave your reader with a really strong impact from your essay, something to find them wanting more. 

For a while now I’ve often thought of the essay as a form functioning for scholarship and literature as the symphony functions for music. In both cases there are different styles and methods of elevating the pure form into an art that reflects the writer or composer’s personality and craft, that leaves the audience feeling something different, something that they can best describe as emblematic of that work’s author. In symphonic music there are clear distinctions between the classical composers like Haydn & Mozart and the romantic composers like Beethoven & Brahms. Sometimes, the best way to end an essay is to borrow an idea from the romantic symphonies and even the romantic operas of composers like Gounod and Wagner: let the main themes finish and then have a sigh to really round things off. If you listen to the finale of Wagner’s Götterdammerung, you’ll hear this very sigh, as if all the energy built up in the composition over the last few hours is nearly extinguished but has one last breath. If you can write an essay like that then bravo.

I’m writing this in the midst of an extensive round of edits to my dissertation, going line by line making corrections, clarifications, and all around tightening down my work until it really just elevates the core form of my thesis. In the last year since I started writing this dissertation, I’ve learned a great deal about how to do this job, and I hope I will in future avoid some of the great pitfalls that I’ve caught myself up in time and again in my studies.If you’re a fellow academic, or interested in academic writing, I highly suggest you go listen to my friend Kate Carpenter’s podcast Drafting the Past, which is all about the process of writing history. It’s a wonderful service to the profession that Kate’s doing. Enjoy your week!