Essays

Voltaire coined the term "essay", it comes from the latin word "essai" meaning "a path". That's how I imagine essays being, a sort of winding path that takes you from point A to point B and all along the while you're allowed to admire the scenery. The poorer examples have a very vapid surrounding, but essays I like are the ones that manage to spruce up what you see about you. Personally, I'm not a fan of pretension or Pedants so I really didn't like a lot of these essays, they seemed like they were an attempt to write an essay rather than to tell a story, to take the reader along on a trip. My favorite essay essay was "Sunday" by Henry Louis Gates, jr. I liked it because it seemed conversational and genuine. It wasn't caught up in form or anything, it could have easily been a story one hears when they are getting their haircut or waiting at a bus stop.
It read like it was being read, which is affective I think. What made it tangible was the attention to sensory details, specifically the ones about smell and taste. It might just be because I'm hungry, but when read about "fried chicken, mashed potatoes, baked corn (corn pudding)..." I was really hungry and I could imagine a quaint family dinner with a talkative family sitting down for the ritualistic Sunday Dinner. The use of vernacular speech made the already relate-able topic even more so and I'd rather read about this than hummingbirds or foxes or Cicero or whatever.