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.

Photo by Erik Dungan on Unsplash

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. It’s an essay.

An essay is made up of paragraphs, one right after the other, each containing a single idea. Every paragraph is comprised of sentences; 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 to the top. You begin to see the writer’s intent, understanding where they want to take you.

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

Occasionally, one-sentence paragraphs can be powerful.

But if you do this too much, it starts to become tedious.

We yearn for something more substantial.

A paragraph gives you space to play, to say something more than a simple slogan. It is a sandbox, a beat in scene in which your reader can get lost, letting the musicality of the words take you some place you’ve never been.

Along this road of discovery, these small but significant demarcations become mile markers, indicating that you are are making progress and headed somewhere important.

Sometimes, it is good to write in the third person. Other times, you want to challenge your reader, speaking directly to them. Occasionally, it’s important to include ourselves in the company of the reader, letting them know we’re all in this together. And even other times, I like writing in the first-person, reminding the reader that the narrator is a person, too—someone who has had real experiences that may be relevant to others.

Why 750 words?

Because it is the minimum amount of words you need to say something. 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. You need an essay. And as a reader, it is a relatively small amount of writing to contend with. It takes only a few minutes to consume 750 words, and that makes it a powerful form of communication.

Learning to write a 750-word essay is good practice. Most writing breaks down into short-form pieces stacked on top of each other. So before you write a book, before you even write a chapter, you must begin by mastering the 750-word essay.

If you can’t say it in several hundred words, you won’t be able to say it in 50,000. Start small.

In many ways, a book is a series of shorter essays woven together. Anyone can have a good idea, of course 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. You would never bake your first cake without a recipe. And you would never go snorkeling without learning to swim.

So this is that. This is swimming. We all must learn to paddle.

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 750 words, wanting a break, knowing something should be coming to a close soon.

Seven hundred and fifty words is the minimum amount of words you need to say something and stick the landing. Beyond that, you start to say something else, something more. And that’s when another essay begins.

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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.