This Essay Has 750 Words

Unlocking the Power of a Lost Form

This essay has 750 words. It begins with an opening paragraph that starts the conversation, inviting you on a journey of understanding. Where will it end? We don’t know. But if the writing is good, we will keep reading.

Some essays persuade, others teach. All should change a person in some way. You might believe some pieces are meant only to entertain or inform. But I disagree. All writing should move a reader, even if that movement is subtle. Even entertainment is a sort of persuasion: you want to get the reader to laugh, to agree with your observations, to get lost in the power of the narrative. When someone gets to the end of your piece, they should have learned something, convinced by the points you made.

Every essay is about something, and that something is more than the details of what you’re writing about. What you are going for is affect, the change the reader will experience as a result of reading what you’ve written. This is not a user’s manual, after all. It’s an essay.

An essay is made of paragraphs, one right after the other, each containing a single idea. Every paragraph is comprised of sentences; and each sentence is a statement, an action point. After a while, the points you make start to accumulate, brimming to the surface like cream rising. You start to see the writer’s intent, understanding where they want to take you.

The paragraph breaks are like deep breaths taken in between stanzas of a song.

Occasionally, one-sentence paragraphs can be powerful.

But if you do this too much, it starts to become tedious and we yearn for something more substantial.

A paragraph gives you space to play, to say something more than a simple slogan can convey. It is a sandbox, a beat in scene where your reader can get lost in the musicality of the words for a while, enjoying the ride you are taking them on. Along this road of discovery, these little but significant demarcations become mile markers indicating we are headed somewhere. And we are making progress.

Sometimes when writing an essay, it’s good to include ourselves in the company of the reader, letting them know we’re all in this together. Other times, you want to speak directly to your audience, challenging them, even commanding them to do something important. Even other times, I like writing in the first-person, reminding the reader that the narrator is human too, someone who has had real, lived experiences that are relevant.

Why 750 words? Because in my view, that's the minimum amount of words you need to say something significant. You can’t tell the story of your childhood home or argue for the importance of organic gardening in just a sentence or two. Not even a handful of paragraphs will suffice for a job like that. You need an essay.

Furthermore, as a reader, it is a relatively easy amount of writing to contend with. It takes only a few minutes to consume, and that makes it a powerful form of communication.

Most importantly, though, learning to write a 750-word essay is good practice. All writing essentially breaks down into short-form pieces all stacked on top of each other. So before you write a book, you must begin with mastering the 750-word essay. Because if you can’t say it in several hundred words, you won’t be able to say it in 50,000.

In many ways, a book is a series of shorter essays woven together in one overarching argument. Anyone can have a good idea, but it takes more than that to write. To do so, you need more than passion or inspiration—you need practice. You would never jump out of an airplane without taking skydiving lessons, and you would never go snorkeling without first learning to swim. So this is that. This is practice. This is swimming.

In the same way that an essay is a compilation of paragraphs, a book is made up of 500- to 1500-word chunks. After that, the work wants to take a new direction, a different form. You can even feel yourself getting tired after roughly 750 words, wanting a break, knowing that something should soon be coming to a close.

Seven hundred and fifty words is the minimum amount of words you need to really say something and stick the landing. Beyond that, you start to say something else, something more.

And that’s when another essay begins.

P.S. There are still spots available for next week’s workshop on the fundamentals of short-form writing. Learn more and sign up here.

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© 2024 Jeff Goins
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