The Shape of the Essay Field
7th June 2025
An essay has to tell people something they don’t already know. But there are three different reasons people might not know something, and they yield three very different kinds of essays.
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The impact of an essay is how much it changes readers’ thinking multiplied by the importance of the topic. But it’s hard to do well at both. It’s hard to have big new ideas about important topics. So in practice there’s a tradeoff: you can change readers’ thinking a lot about moderately important things, or change it a little about very important ones. But with younger readers the tradeoff shifts. There’s more room to change their thinking, so there’s a bigger payoff for writing about important things.