What is an Essay?

An essay is something that you write. Most of the time you don't enjoy it, but you write it anyway. It can be about anything-last year I wrote an essay about an art museum, and one about "The Outsiders." (I don't know how to underline on this thing, so please excuse the bad puncuation.) Mostly, essays are long papers or reports about some sort of issue. For example, my essay about the art museum was about how it was going to close and the people who ran it were going to sell all the art. That may not sound like an issue to some people, but it was an issue to me. Art is made for people to see it, and admire it, and be moved by it, not to make money for some economicly challenged school or be locked away in someone's dark, window-less hallway. Anyway, an essay is a paper with a length requirement about an issue, that might be important to you or it might not be, and is enjoyable for hardly anyone to write. An essay is, for most, an issue unto itself, a much bigger one to you, than the one you are writing about.