ETYM French essai, from Latin exagium a weighing, weight, balance.
1. A tentative attempt.
2. An analytic or interpretive literary composition.
Short piece of nonfiction, often dealing with a particular subject from a personal point of view. The essay became a recognized genre with French writer Montaigne’s Essais 1580 and in English with Francis Bacon’s Essays 1597. Today the essay is a part of journalism: articles in the broadsheet newspapers are in the essay tradition.
Abraham Cowley, whose essays appeared 1668, brought a greater ease and freedom to the genre than it had possessed before in England, but it was with the development of periodical literature in the 18th century that the essay became a widely used form. The great names are Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, with their Tatler and Spectator papers, and later Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith. In North America the politician and scientist Benjamin Franklin was noted for his style.
A new era was inaugurated by Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia 1820; to the same period belong Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey in England, C A Sainte-Beuve in France, and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau in the US. From the 19th century the essay was increasingly used in Europe and the US as a vehicle for literary criticism. Hazlitt may be regarded as the originator of the critical essay, and his successors include Matthew Arnold and Edmund Gosse. Thomas Macaulay, whose essays began to appear shortly after those of Lamb, presents a strong contrast to Lamb with his vigorous but less personal tone.
There was a revival of the form during the closing years of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, in the work of R L Stevenson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Anatole France, Théophile Gautier, and Max Beerbohm. The literary journalistic tradition of the essay was continued by James Thurber, Mark Twain, H L Mencken, Edmund Wilson, Desmond MacCarthy, and others, and the critical essay by George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, F R Leavis, T S Eliot, Norman Mailer, John Updike, and others. + prikaži više

ETYM French papier, from Latin papyrus papyrus, from which the Egyptians made a kind of paper, Greek. Related to Papyrus.
1. A material made of cellulose pulp derived mainly from wood or rags or certain grasses.
2. A scholarly article describing the results of observations or stating hypotheses.
3. Medium for written communication.
Thin, flexible material made in sheets from vegetable fibers (such as wood pulp) or rags and used for writing, drawing, printing, packaging, and various household needs. The name comes from papyrus, a form of writing material made from water reed, used in ancient Egypt. The invention of true paper, originally made of pulped fishing nets and rags, is credited to Tsai Lun, Chinese minister of agriculture, AD 105.
Paper came to the West with Arabs who had learned the secret from Chinese prisoners of war in Samarkand in 768. It spread from Morocco to Moorish Spain and to Byzantium in the 11th century, then to the rest of Europe. All early paper was handmade within frames.
With the spread of literacy there was a great increase in the demand for paper. Production by hand of single sheets could not keep pace with this demand, which led to the invention, by Louis Robert (1761–1828) in 1799, of a machine to produce a continuous reel of paper. The process was developed and patented in 1801 by François Didot, Robert's employer. Today most paper is made from wood pulp on a Fourdrinier machine, then cut to size; some high grade paper is still made from esparto or rag. Paper products absorb 35% of the world's annual commercial wood harvest; recycling avoids some of the enormous waste of trees, and most papermakers plant and replant their own forests of fast-growing stock. + prikaži više

A major written assignment in a school or college course representative of a student's achievement during a term