Right. My high school rhetoric teacher used to label essays as “garbage” for not following structure or convention, often even for straying from expected narrat

Right. My high school rhetoric teacher used to label essays as “garbage” for not following structure or convention, often even for straying from expected narrative, while I was only interested in forming a unique or strong perspective. We may have both been wrong. I think the future of “essay” writing will be sort of like patents in that they will have to first identify a problem with a well-established viewpoint, then propose a solution, and fully describe its novelty by citing the prior works that form the boundary of the idea.