Term Papers and College Research Paper Writing

Essay writing is a very demanding form of expression that imposes a set of tight controls on both one’s writing and one’s thought.  Essays are to thoughts as pocket organizers are to a mass of slips of paper, receipts, jotted notes, phone numbers, bills, credit cards, etc.  One has a host of impressions and thoughts concerning this or that topic; writing an essay forces one to take those impressions and thoughts and put them into a structured, meaningful, logically consistent whole. 

A good essay can be very forceful.  It can be like an enormous train running down a track.  It can present one’s ideas about a given topic in such a way as make what one is trying to convey, one’s conclusions, appear as indisputable truths flowing out of a flawless logical demonstration.  A skilled essay has a feeling of inevitability about it. 

The ability to present one’s own ideas effectively is what most writing is about.  There are branches of literature where a certain elusiveness and obscurity are prized, but the vast majority of writing that is done in the world is enhanced by the qualities of clarity and logical precision.  Good writing expresses clear concepts about facts and organizes those facts in ways that correctly match premises with conclusions through the means of the use of valid inferences.  A good essay does just that.  If it is also written with a graceful and free flowing style or with eloquent language, so much the better, but the power of a good essay derives not so much from style, but from the power of the logic that it employs.  This is the very essence of good communication and good writing. 

I might add that essay writing teaches one a certain self-restraint with respect to style.  We would all like to be Shakespeare.  We would all like to express ourselves with style.  Essay writing teaches those of us who are not Shakespeare that we need not be Shakespeare, that there is an effective way to think and write that does not depend on rhetorical genius, but upon clarity and logic. It teaches us to give up vague, rhetorical lights of fancy and to substitute instead a tight, organized, and reasoned presentation of our point of view. In 99 out of 100 cases the latter will be more effective than the former. 

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