Paul Graham’s ‘The Age of the Essay’ makes me wonder a little bit. Particularly in this semester, I have been hearing that in high school, people were taught to write essays in a way where they would make a point then argue for or against it, and honestly, I haven’t been able to relate. I haven’t thought of essays in that way since year 9 or 10. In year 10 and VCE, I started writing essays for all sorts of things, not just English, but Art, History, and even creatively. In English we  learned how to write an essay as a creative piece, only a short time was spent writing on literature, in the traditional sense. Particularly in Art essays, I found that they were not about convincing someone of something, they were more like reflection on your own ideas, with visual evidence supporting these ideas, but there is no right or wrong interpretation of art, so it was never about using the visual evidence as factual evidence. So to me essays didn’t really carry the connotation of  ‘an expository, argumentative piece of writing.’ actually much of the time, I don’t settle on a strong point that I argue in my essays, which is fine because from what I have heard, that would be wrong. Maybe I just went to a good high school.