Writing an essay is a dying art, mostly because the reader begins to squirm in his seat at the mere suggestion of the tedious boredom that essays conjure in the mind. But a newspaper editorial column is just an essay with a different title. Mark Twain was an incomparable essayist. Some of his essays ran for pages and pages. He, too, was a newspaper man. Coincidence?
The essay doesn’t have to be dry. It just has to be about something. That’s the only rule. Pick a subject, and write less than a book about it, and you’ve got yourself an essay. Some essays do fill an entire book, so there goes that theory. But those essays tend to be Master Theses and are usually dry. So don’t write on of those unless you really have to.
