---
title: Essay Writing
description: Essay writing covers the structural, argumentative, and stylistic elements of academic and personal essays. Learners will develop skills in thesis formulation, evidence integration, logical structuring, and revision to communicate complex ideas clearly and persuasively.
category: literature-writing
subcategory: non-fiction-writing
difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced
url: /subject/essay-writing
---

# Essay Writing

Essay writing covers the structural, argumentative, and stylistic elements of academic and personal essays. Learners will develop skills in thesis formulation, evidence integration, logical structuring, and revision to communicate complex ideas clearly and persuasively.

## Available Resources

2 Books • 2 Courses • 2 Websites

## Websites

### 1. Purdue OWL

Purdue University's Online Writing Lab section on academic essays, covering expository, argumentative, narrative and descriptive essays. Readers learn to build a thesis, structure paragraphs, use evidence and transitions, and plan an essay from prompt to conclusion.

**Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/essay_writing/index.html

**Tags:** academic-writing, essay-structure, thesis-statements, argumentative-essays

### 2. writersdigest.com

WritersDigest.com is a comprehensive resource for writers, featuring craft articles, writing prompts, market guides, contests, and publishing tips to help aspiring and established authors improve their craft and get published.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://writersdigest.com

**Tags:** websites, personal-development, communication

## Books

### 1. The Art of the Personal Essay

**Author:** Phillip Lopate

Phillip Lopate's anthology of personal essays spanning four centuries, from Seneca and Montaigne to Baldwin and Didion, with an introduction on the form. Readers see how voice, digression and candor work, and study models for their own first-person nonfiction.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/038542339X?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** personal-essay, creative-nonfiction, essay-anthology, literary-nonfiction

### 2. On Essays: Montaigne to the Present

**Author:** Thomas Karshan, Kathryn Murphy

A scholarly collection of chapters tracing the essay as a literary form from Montaigne and Bacon through Hazlitt, Woolf and contemporary writers. Readers gain a historical and critical understanding of how the essay developed and what distinguishes it from other prose genres.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0192848615?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** essay-history, literary-criticism, montaigne, nonfiction-prose

## Courses

### 1. Writing in the Sciences

**Author:** Kristin Sainani

Stanford's online course on clear scientific prose, taught by Kristin Sainani. Covers cutting clutter, active voice, paragraph structure, the parts of a research manuscript, peer review, grant writing and publication ethics, so learners can draft and revise papers that read clearly.

**Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Duration:** 8 weeks of study, 3-5 hours/week | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/sciwrite

**Tags:** scientific-writing, academic-writing, manuscript-preparation, peer-review, grant-writing, editing

### 2. Memoir and Personal Essay

Wesleyan University's four-module Coursera class with novelist Amy Bloom on writing personal essays: finding the idea worth telling, structuring the piece, selecting concrete detail, and revising. Peer-reviewed assignments produce a finished draft in roughly seven hours.

**Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/personal-essay

**Tags:** courses, humanities-social-sciences, creative-writing

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