More on... "What makes a good essay?"

According to both Encountering the Essay and Essayist on the Essay, the term essay is too broad of a topic to really be defined. Encountering the Essay chooses to describe it by listing what is commonly classified under the heading of “an essay”- such as celebrity profiles, interviews, reviews, reportage, scientific papers, or newspaper columns. Essayist on the Essay chooses to state what is not an essay- poetry or fiction writing. A good essay is “personal, reflective, and leisurely”. To me this means that if you are taking a story telling approach (opposed to the typical five paragraph) then your story must be true, and it must be delivered in an honest manner such that the topic is interesting, but not exaggerated beyond belief. Anne Dillard’s Stunt Pilot is also listed as an example of a good essay. This is because Dillard touches on the requirements and facts of an article but ands the literary demands such as metaphors and descriptions to enhance the essay quality. Finally the ideal essay is “searching for something and taking [the reader] along”.
In order to make my essay a good essay I need to do a number of things. First I need to make sure that I have a clear and defined purpose and audience. This will help me snag the readers interest and take them along and make them feel a part of the essay as if they were actually experiencing it. One of the qualities listed above that contributes to a good essay is meeting literary demands such as metaphors and descriptions. I do think that my draft has a lot of great description in it. I think description is great, but I also need to make sure that the description is focused and enhancing the writing by adding substance, not just length. The descriptions need to be telling about different things through the essay or describing the same thing in many different, creative ways. If it is too repetitious it is overkill and only takes away from the quality. Finally my essay needs more structure and sentence variety, but this can be easily fixed when moving on to the “up draft”.