There’s a dangerous myth that still lingers in how we teach, critique, and canonize writing, particularly with essays. It’s the idea that language is fixed, finalized, etched in stone. We’re taught in grammar school that the first draft must already point toward the final product. Then, revision is about perfection, not possibility.

But the essay was never meant to be a monument. Essay writing is meant to be a way of taking ideas for a trial run. We can think of an essay as a generous, stubborn attempt to pin down what cannot be pinned. Yet, how often are we expected to produce precision from the start—“clean” thoughts, “tight” arguments, a “strong” thesis—before we’ve even wandered around the idea? That’s not writing, at all, but a sort of posturing that disguises itself as composition.

Essays are more like experiments than exhibits. To write is to test your language for leaks. The moment you set words to page, you are not recording eternal truths—you are approximating, approaching, assembling. If you do it right, you leave space for what doesn’t quite make sense yet.

Language is malleable. It breathes, it decays, and it evolves. A phrase that felt sharp in 2012 may feel blunt, or even broken at times, in 2025. But in actuality, it’s a matter of verbal ecology, which is, according to Google, “the study of how a language interacts with its environment, including social and cultural factors, to evolve and change.” This includes the natural lifecycle of words in public. For example, here’s a line from an essay I once published called, “The Art of the Essay.”

“Despite what common sense may tell you, words are never the solid impressions in stone you may believe them to be.”

That line from an earlier version of myself still feels true.But even now, reading it again, I want to chisel it differently. That’s the gift and curse of writing. It invites endless re-entry. Honestly, that’s a terrifying thought. The allure of the “final product” is powerful. We want our words to be stone because stone feels permanent, authoritative, and safe. So, we crave the “destination” because the journey of endless re-entry is exhausting, and the vulnerability of a conversation is frightening. We want to build a monument to our ideas.

But, if your goal is to write something that never needs to be revisited, you might be aiming for a tombstone. Let’s stop teaching essays as if they’re destinations. We must start treating them like conversations, like thoughtforms made visible—temporary, meaningful, and always a little bit vulnerable.

The art of the essay isn’t about getting it right the first time, or even the second or third times. Writing an essay involves being honest enough with yourself to get it in motion. Words aren’t stone, after all. They’re more like threads than raw material to hack away at constantly. A writer is not a stonemason, but rather a sort of scientist.  Therefore, each essay we write is very much a product of trial and error over everything we’ve ever written.