Mini essays are exercises that make you a better writer

Mini Essays are helpful tools of self-learning and can help you become a better writer, while not allowing that extra work to not be wasted.

Mini essays are mini writing excercises

A youtuber by the name of Odysseus made a few lovely videos about mini essays. He identifies the main components of a mini essay that make something worthwhile, Not just for the reader, but for the future reference of the writer as well. Firstly, you wanna practice being concise. This theme of brevity reverberates throughout mini essays. It’s all in bite size, one idea, 20 minute writing time, write no longer than a screen worth of space. usually about 2 paragraphs, or 400 words max! And this makes it so easy to nibble on ideas when you need to reference something later.

Mini essays help you learn

So often I bash my head against a wall, not writing. As exurb1a puts it: “I missed the silly daydreams.” I need to get out of my own head, and just write. That starts with giving myself exercises. But mini essays are also useful tools for learning! Odysseus cites the Feynman technique; whereby teaching (or even just writing as if you’re teaching) then further entrenches you in your own understanding of the topic. But then you may be asking: How do I know if I’m teaching the topic well? Odysseus has a handy tool for this: forget! look away, and after 10 seconds, or a tea break or whatever, you come back,read it and, then try your best to read it as if you didn’t know anything on the topic. If you run into any roadblocks of understanding or really any mistakes at all, fix them, it’ll take like a minute.

What you can do with this power

Once you’re done, you have a high quality piece of brief writing that explains an idea to completion! I’ve purposely left this mini essay with loose ends. If you have any questions, I encourage you to go learn about it and then go write about it with your own mini essay, you can go anywhere from here! Bish bash bosh, you’ve got a mini essay, thank you for reading :)

~ Lewa💚