I hadn't even asked myself what an essay was. So here's Aldous Huxley, taken from Wikipedia. Since he is dead, it doesn't really matter if he said it or not. After all, only those who profit from a reputation or memory should care about what becomes of it. Right?
"Like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay. But a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel. Montaigne's Third Book is the equivalent, very nearly, of a good slice of the Comédie Humaine. Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and at their best in the neighborhood of only one of the essay's three poles, or at the most only in the neighborhood of two of them. There are the predominantly personal essayists, who write fragments of reflective autobiography and who look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description. There are the predominantly objective essayists who do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme. … And how splendid, how truly oracular are the utterances of the great generalizers! … The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist" (Collected Essays, "Preface").
There are no absolutes in this world of ideas. I am at home on the personal pole, which has a deck chair and a sunny garden attached to it. I sit and recall, then thread my memories around the stuff I've picked out of books and videos.
Academic essays
Longer academic essays (often with a word limit of between 2,000 to 4,000 words) are often more discursive. They sometimes begin with a short summary analysis of what has previously been written on a topic, which is often called a literature review. Longer essays may also contain an introductory page in which words and phrases from the title are tightly defined. Most academic institutions will require that all substantial facts, quotations, and other supporting material used in an essay be referenced. Such references that appear throughout the text will refer to a bibliography at the end of the text. The reason for requiring references is that a teacher can then clearly distinguish between the original ideas and arguments of the student, and the secondary ideas and arguments the student has taken from their research and reading.
STATEMENT: futiiiiile!
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