Category: Course Spotlights

What is an essay? The term essay is today used to describe an array of written products; the word is used almost interchangeably with other terms like paper, article, or composition. But the essay is a particular form, which people have been writing since the late 16th century, when the genre was formally invented with the publishing of Michel de Montaigne’s book titled Essais. This title roughly translates to, “an effort or trial,” and describes a particular form of inductive, digressive writing. In WRD 515: The Essay, MA in WRD students explore the history of the essay, from its origins

Until the mid-20th century, our understanding of rhetoric was dominated by the foundational theory of Greek thinkers, and focused mainly on a speaker addressing an audience for persuasive purposes. Out of this tradition, we find descriptions of rhetoric as something discrete and narrowly defined: Cicero calls it “speech designed to persuade” and Quintilian says that rhetoric is “a good man speaking well.”  However, during the cultural turn in the 1960s and 1970s rhetorical scholars took an interest in the work that rhetoric does in the everyday and in the world at large