This is more like a spec for essays, in software-speak, and you’ll find as you read through this (if you read through this), that I’ll keep stepping in and out of describing a good essay and describing how to write a good essay (not that I’m a good writer or anything, but hey, how do you write a great essay unless you know what a great essay is?).

Update: What’s in a good essay?

Elsewhere:

Obscurity--Knowledge is a queer thing, like Latin. For instance, what do you think the phrase ignotum per ignotius means? It is an explanation which is harder to understand than what it is meant to explain. [...]

Penmanship and me--Why do I even bother? Why do I take the trouble to sit down and write, of all things!, knowing fully well that what I articulate will probably not be as ground-breaking or as eloquent [...]

Short screeds, self syndicated--...wherein I hack into English, and get booted by the wordadmin. The problem I have with amateur link-and-run journalism is that it is long on linking but short on investigation, thereby weakening a key foundational checks-and-balance [...]

More to design than HTML--I'm no master sculptor or typographer; neither am I a master web designer. But I've tried to incorporate as much of common aesthetic sense and reason into my page design as possible--borrowing and learning from [...]