Essay vs Technical vs Creative
An essay is a special type of writing that blends a writer’s experiences with source materials. While all essays are elements of the writer’s thinking, the type of essay will determine voice (1st, 2nd, and 3rd person), audience, structure, and source-to-writer ratio.
If you are assigned an essay for a Freshman Composition course in college, your first essay for the course might allow 1st person voice (such as in a Narrative essay); however, after that ‘warm-up’ essay, instructors are expecting your academic essay writing to be in 3rd person voice. Typically, this transition writing—narrative—is a way for instructors to move students away from the ‘writing is all about me’ idea and push them toward the ‘I’ll convince you of my beliefs through persuasion, argument, analysis, and source development’. When a student grasps this second style (3rd person voice, professional flow of writing), he can develop any topic with skill and precision.
While all essays are known to have an author, and the author’s experiences, views, and thinking will be evident in an essay, an author never refers to himself, nor the paper, as if he is writing an assignment
No-nos for Essay Writing
1. In this paper…
2. As I showed in the last paragraph…
3. The purpose of this essay is to address my views on sexual education (sex-ed) in the public schools.
All three of the examples above are writing-content to be avoided in essay writing. Even if you are assigned a Narrative essay—an essay that calls for 1st and 3rd person voice—the writing will never contain aspects as shown in the examples above.
Item 1 contains one issue: it points to the writing as a ‘paper’. The reader knows this is a ‘paper,’ and the essay lacks professionalism and credibility as soon as the author writes “In this paper…”
Item 2 contains two issues: writer coming to the forefront of the essay by asserting “I did X, Y, or Z,” and by mentioning ‘in the last paragraph,’ the writer has made it seem as if the reader was not paying attention to what was being written since the author believes he must specifically identify what was happening in the last paragraph. Mention of a previous part of the essay reduces the essay’s professionalism.
Item 3 contains two issues: writer coming to the forefront and mentioning part of the reading. In a business proposal or memo, writings begin this way. However, an essay does not tell the reader what he is going to do or say. The author simply says it. Instead of “The purpose of this essay is to address my views on sexual education (sex-ed) in the public schools,” an essay would be written like this: “Sexual education in the public schools should be led by parents, with curriculum, guidance, and space provided by the school district”. This second statement is obviously the author’s views and the purpose has clearly been established (parents should lead the sexual-education classes in the public schools), yet the style of writing and the professionalism is correct in the second statement versus the first.
An essay assignment (using the Writing Process) always begins with the content framework of the author’s experiences and views (in prewriting/outlining), and then the author drafts the writing with source support to defend the content being presented or argued in the essay. These items (author’s experiences, 3rd person voice, specialized sources to lend credibility to the author’s assertions), plus a professional approach to the writing content, is what clearly separates academic essay writing from technical writing and creative writing.
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