mini essays and why im going to start writing them

Just as the title says I’m going to start writing mini essays, but what are mini essays why am I writing them (and maybe why you should be writing them too). Mini essays or sometimes called microthemes (no don’t ask me why I can’t get access to the book article that mentions them) are small essays being around 100-500 words, with this number chosen to allow the whole essay to be typed on a 5”x8” notecard. However, I would just suggest that you use the number of words that you need.

Now that I have explained the basic length of a mini essay, you may be asking yourself “cool it’s a small piece of writing, but why should I be writing these”. The original idea behind mini essays was to create small piece of work that can be easily marked within large classes. Now you are asking yourself “why do I care if someone can easily mark my work, and I’m not even in a large class”. Don’t worry that’s only one application of mini essays they are primarily design to promote your own understanding in a given subject. So say you are learning about how to bake bread, instead of just taking notes on about it, you take those notes and write a small work trying to teach someone else how to bake bread. This type of writing where you are teaching someone else is going to help your own understanding of the subject itself due to requiring you to recall what you have previously learnt.

So why am I writing mini essays, well after 6 months of starting my PhD I had to write a proposal. However, I had gone roughly ~8 months without writing any long form content (i.e. reports). This time span caused my ability to write to atrophy. So in writing these mini essays I hope to keep my skills in writing honed. Although this is only the primary reason I will be writing mini essays. The second and more fun reason is I tend to focus learning on a wide and I do mean a wide variety of different subject and skill, and while researching each of these I tend to forget things never write them down then lose that knowledge. Therefor my plan is to write these mini essays in order to attempt to retain this information, at least for a slightly longer span of time. Additionally, I plan to write and host each of my mini essay on this very website, and you may ask “why would someone want to read the incoherent ramblings of a mad man”. Well with the things I tend to look into my bets are someone is bound to read and hopefully find that one piece of information they are missing for their understanding. Hosting the mini essays on my website also allows me to easily access them rather than have to open up a markdown file somewhere that I will inevitably lose. So that’s why I will be writing mini essays, so why don’t you.

Some additional resources you may want to read and I definitely reference within this mini essay: