An essay often begins with a claim that feels too sharp, too certain, too easily said:
Every generation thinks the world is getting worse.
Before we argue about this statement, agree with it, disagree with it or dismiss it altogether, let’s leave it where it is for a moment and take a closer look. This is the kind of sentence that often starts an essay. It appears to know exactly what it means. It arrives fully formed, carrying assumptions, memories, frustrations and half-forgotten experiences. It invites us to take sides before we’ve stopped to ask where it came from or what it might contain.
Let’s stay with it a little longer. Who is speaking when this sentence is spoken? A parent comparing one era with another? A politician? A journalist? A neighbour over a garden wall? What experiences lie behind it? What disappointments, fears or observations give it shape? And what does “worse” mean? Worse for whom? Worse than when? The argument can wait. The first task is simply to look more carefully at what we have found. That, for me, is where the essay begins.
When I think about how a thought begins to loosen, I often find myself noticing how different writers have pressed on their own assumptions. Joyce followed a thought into the shifting machinery of consciousness, watching how it altered as it moved. Myles na gCopaleen turned a claim inside out through satire, exposing the soft spots it tried to hide. Butler was already engaged in a method of inquiry I recognized, staying with a statement until its buried premises began to show. Their approaches were distinct, but each treated a position not as something to announce, but as something to probe; a thread to follow and see where it leads.
That’s where many of my essays start. To essay is to attempt: to take a statement and follow its thread, not to inflame or reassure, but to understand what lies beneath it. What happens when we press on it, turn it around or look at it from another angle?
The essay is not where opinions go to be confirmed.
It is where they go to be examined.
But there are many approaches to essay writing. Some essayists are drawn to memoir, some to argument, some to literary expression, criticism or advocacy. Indeed, one of the ambitions behind essayism.org is to create a space where those different traditions, methods and assumptions can be examined in their own right. But what interests me here, on Essays, is examination: the attempt to understand something more clearly by testing it against experience, evidence and competing perspectives.
Butler did this with history. O’Nolan did it with absurdity. Joyce did it with consciousness. Their subjects differed, but each was willing to follow a thought beyond its slogans and certainties into more difficult and interesting territory. That is the work that interests me here. Not slogans. Not certainties. Not the performance of conviction for its own sake. Rather, the attempt to think through the things we say, especially the things we say too quickly.
An essay is a way of slowing down a thought long enough to see what it is made of. This site is where I will try to do that. To take a position, hold it up to the light and see what remains.
Sometimes the position will survive the examination. Sometimes it won’t. The value lies in the examination itself.
David Marshall
Skerries
30 January 2026
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