What Is an Essay?

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Daniel Kim
English 101
Prof. Buscemi

Essay #3 Rough Draft

An essay is a creative written piece in which the author uses different styles such as diction, tone, pathos, ethos or logos to communicate a message to the reader using either a personal experience, filled with morals and parables, or a informative text filled with educational terms. Educational terms could mean the usage of complicated and elevated words or simply information you would get in schools. Some authors, such as Cynthia Ozick, claim that an essay has no educational, polemical, or socio-political use. Others, such as Kathleen Norris, contend that an essay is like story-telling, and that the writer attempts to breathe life into the words on a page. “Breathing …show more content…
In the essay “First” by Ryan Van Meter, the author talks about his first romantic experience. The essay begins with the description of the setting. Ryan and his friend, Ben are sitting behind of a van facing backwards, on a cold and rainy day coming back from a dinner with their families. They were just five years old at the time, which brings a sense of innocence to the setting as well. Ryan is very descriptive of Ben and his facial features. He describes the feeling of falling for a brown eyed boy for the first time, and how his “jeans have dark squares stuck over the knees where he has worn through the denim” (177), and also about his shoelaces that are always undone. The author uses diction and carefully picks descriptive words such as “browned”, or “dark” in order to communicate a message to the reader. Ryan Van Meter uses his personal experience, to tell the audience that it is ok to be different. At that moment in the car, Ryan asked Ben if he wanted to marry him, and suddenly there was a silence in the car, and “no one spoke (speaks) for the rest of the ride.” Clearly, there was an awkward silence because their parents didn’t accept the fact that a boy was asking another boy in marriage, even though they were only five years old. Furthermore, Van Meter also uses pathos, because he plays with the emotions of the reader. By reading this essay the reader is able to relate to his story because everybody had their first crush, regardless of the
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