Plutarch's peers were writing "rhetorics," which were these dry philosophical treatises that made really broad gestures about life and death and fate. Plutarch stepped out of the stream to create an essayistic form that relied on a digressive structure and down to earth anecdotes.
John D'AgataWhen I'm teaching, I'm not really doing my job if the student who's always comfortable doing wacko stuff all over the page keeps getting gold stars from me for doing wacko stuff all over the page. A riskier assignment for that student, who might be used to hiding behind a lot of formal armor, would be to try to do something straightforward, traditionally, in which they are much more directly laid bare for the reader.
John D'AgataYet there are some critics in the nonfiction world who still look at some of today's stranger interpretations of the essay and say "You don't belong here. That's not how we do things." I think that's problematic.
John D'Agata