Guidance for Contributors

This page brings together guidance for contributors and editors publishing on Essayism.org. It reflects the site’s current understanding of its intellectual foundations and of those elements that help readers and other internet users discover information relating to essayism.

Intellectual corner stones essayism.org aims to address.

What Is Essayism?
Why Do Humans Essay?
Essayism and Inquiry
Essayism and Democracy
Essayism and Journalism
Essayism and Montaigne
Essayism and Emerson
Essayism and Orwell
Essayism and Baldwin
Essayism and Didion
Essayism and Local Affairs
The Difference Between Opinion and Essayism
The Difference Between Reporting and Essaying
Essaying as Practice
Essaying Through Uncertainty
Writing to Discover
The Essayist as Citizen
The Future of the Essay
Why Communities Need Essayists
A Manifesto for Essayism

Readers and writers’ searches

To facilitate searching of material on essayism, but those using a search engine, rather than directly approaching essayism.org, it might be helpful if authors were to ensure that meta data correctly and honestly identified an essay, entry, post or other text, as being representative, or falling within one of the following notional clusters. Note these are initial notional clusters only:

Cluster: What is Essayism?

Articles such as:

What Is Essayism?
Essayism and the Essay Tradition
Why Essayism Is Not a Literary Style
Essayism as Inquiry
Essayism as Democratic Practice

This becomes the canonical explanation cluster.

Cluster: Essayists

Articles such as:

Montaigne and Essayism
Emerson and Inquiry
George Orwell as Essayist
Joan Didion and the Essayistic Mind
Brian Dillon and Modern Essayism

This creates external connections.

Cluster: Democracy

Articles such as:

Essayism and Civic Life
Essayism and Journalism
Essayism in Local Democracy
Why Communities Need Essayists

This appears very close to your long-term mission.

Cluster: Practice

Articles such as:

How to Practise Essayism
Essaying a Question
Following Inquiry Through Writing
The Difference Between Opinion and Essayism

These attract writers actively searching for ways of working.

Status

This page represents the current status of the guidance. It is not my role to supply all the answers, but rather to ensure that quite a few unfinished questions are placed on the table

David Marshall
Managing Editor, Essayism.org