The Ashbrook Scholars are encouraged to write essays. They have been doing it on a regular basis for a few years, and they are getting pretty good at it. (They also write theses, but that’s a different issue and, frankly, something easier to comprehend.) Essays are attempts: An essay is something you write to try to figure something out. Along comes

Paul Graham (he is identified as holding a computer science PhD from Harvard). He writes ten perfectly clear pages on what an essay is, and how to write one. I will not steal anything from it to try to give you the flavor of the thing: You should read the whole thing.(Thanks to Raef Major)