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Nature Essay for Students and Children

500+ words nature essay.

Nature is an important and integral part of mankind. It is one of the greatest blessings for human life; however, nowadays humans fail to recognize it as one. Nature has been an inspiration for numerous poets, writers, artists and more of yesteryears. This remarkable creation inspired them to write poems and stories in the glory of it. They truly valued nature which reflects in their works even today. Essentially, nature is everything we are surrounded by like the water we drink, the air we breathe, the sun we soak in, the birds we hear chirping, the moon we gaze at and more. Above all, it is rich and vibrant and consists of both living and non-living things. Therefore, people of the modern age should also learn something from people of yesteryear and start valuing nature before it gets too late.

Significance of Nature

Nature has been in existence long before humans and ever since it has taken care of mankind and nourished it forever. In other words, it offers us a protective layer which guards us against all kinds of damages and harms. Survival of mankind without nature is impossible and humans need to understand that.

If nature has the ability to protect us, it is also powerful enough to destroy the entire mankind. Every form of nature, for instance, the plants , animals , rivers, mountains, moon, and more holds equal significance for us. Absence of one element is enough to cause a catastrophe in the functioning of human life.

We fulfill our healthy lifestyle by eating and drinking healthy, which nature gives us. Similarly, it provides us with water and food that enables us to do so. Rainfall and sunshine, the two most important elements to survive are derived from nature itself.

Further, the air we breathe and the wood we use for various purposes are a gift of nature only. But, with technological advancements, people are not paying attention to nature. The need to conserve and balance the natural assets is rising day by day which requires immediate attention.

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Conservation of Nature

In order to conserve nature, we must take drastic steps right away to prevent any further damage. The most important step is to prevent deforestation at all levels. Cutting down of trees has serious consequences in different spheres. It can cause soil erosion easily and also bring a decline in rainfall on a major level.

Polluting ocean water must be strictly prohibited by all industries straightaway as it causes a lot of water shortage. The excessive use of automobiles, AC’s and ovens emit a lot of Chlorofluorocarbons’ which depletes the ozone layer. This, in turn, causes global warming which causes thermal expansion and melting of glaciers.

Therefore, we should avoid personal use of the vehicle when we can, switch to public transport and carpooling. We must invest in solar energy giving a chance for the natural resources to replenish.

In conclusion, nature has a powerful transformative power which is responsible for the functioning of life on earth. It is essential for mankind to flourish so it is our duty to conserve it for our future generations. We must stop the selfish activities and try our best to preserve the natural resources so life can forever be nourished on earth.

{ “@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “FAQPage”, “mainEntity”: [ { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “Why is nature important?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “Nature is an essential part of our lives. It is important as it helps in the functioning of human life and gives us natural resources to lead a healthy life.” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “How can we conserve nature?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “We can take different steps to conserve nature like stopping the cutting down of trees. We must not use automobiles excessively and take public transport instead. Further, we must not pollute our ocean and river water.” } } ] }

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Nature Writing Examples

by Lisa Hiton

From the essays of Henry David Thoreau, to the features in National Geographic , nature writing has bridged the gap between scientific articles about environmental issues and personal, poetic reflections on the natural world. This genre has grown since Walden to include nature poetry, ecopoetics, nature reporting, activism, fiction, and beyond. We now even have television shows and films that depict nature as the central figure. No matter the genre, nature writers have a shared awe and curiosity about the world around us—its trees, creatures, elements, storms, and responses to our human impact on it over time.

Whether you want to report on the weather, write poems from the point of view of flowers, or track your journey down a river in your hometown, your passion for nature can manifest in many different written forms. As the world turns and we transition between seasons, we can reflect on our home, planet Earth, with great dedication to description, awe, science, and image.

Journal Examples: Keeping Track of Your Tracks

One of the many lost arts of our modern time is that of journaling. While keeping a journal is a beneficial practice for all, it is especially crucial to nature writers. John A. Murray , author of Writing About Nature: A Creative Guide , begins his study of the nature writing practice with the importance of journaling:

Nature writers may rely on journals more consistently than novelists and poets because of the necessity of describing long-term processes of nature, such as seasonal or environmental changes, in great detail, and of carefully recording outdoor excursions for articles and essays[…] The important thing, it seems to me, is not whether you keep journals, but, rather, whether you have regular mechanisms—extended letters, telephone calls to friends, visits with confidants, daily meditation, free-writing exercises—that enable you to comprehensively process events as they occur. But let us focus in this section on journals, which provide one of the most common means of chronicling and interpreting personal history. The words journal and journey share an identical root and common history. Both came into the English language as a result of the Norman Victory at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. For the next three hundred years, French was the chief language of government, religion, and learning in England. The French word journie, which meant a day’s work or a day’s travel, was one of the many words that became incorporated into English at the time[…]The journal offers the writer a moment of rest in that journey, a sort of roadside inn along the highway. Here intellect and imagination are alone with the blank page and composition can proceed with an honesty and informality often precluded in more public forms of expression. As a result, several important benefits can accrue: First, by writing with unscrutinized candor and directness on a particular subject, a person can often find ways to write more effectively on the same theme elsewhere. Second, the journal, as a sort of unflinching mirror, can remind the author of the importance of eliminating self-deception and half-truths in thought and writing. Third, the journal can serve as a brainstorming mechanism to explore new topics, modes of thought, or types of writing that otherwise would remain undiscovered or unexamined. Fourth, the journal can provide a means for effecting a catharsis on subjects too personal for publication even among friends and family. (Murray, 1-2)

A dedicated practice of documenting your day, observing what is around you, and creating your own field guide of the world as you encounter it will help strengthen your ability to translate it all to others and help us as a culture learn how to interpret what is happening around us.

Writing About Nature: A Creative Guide by John A. Murray : Murray’s book on nature writing offers hopeful writers a look at how nature writers keeps journals, write essays, incorporate figurative language, use description, revise, research, and more.

Botanical Shakespeare: An Illustrated Compendium of All the Flowers, Fruits, Herbs, Trees, Seeds, and Grasses Cited by the World’s Greatest Playwright by Gerit Quealy and Sumie Hasegawa Collins: Helen Mirren’s foreword to the book describes it as “the marriage of Shakespeare’s words about plants and the plants themselves.” This project combines the language of Shakespeare with the details of the botanicals found throughout his works—Quealy and Hasegawa bring us a literary garden ripe with flora and fauna puns and intellectual snark.

What new vision of Shakespeare is provided by approaching his works through the lens of nature writing and botanicals?
Latin and Greek terms and roots continue to be very important in the world of botanicals. What do you learn from that etymology throughout the book? How does it impact symbolism in Shakespeare’s works?
Annotate the book using different colored highlighters. Seek out description in one color, interpretation in another, and you might even look for literary echoes using a third. How do these threads braid together?

The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland by Nan Shepherd : The Living Mountain is Shepherd’s account of exploring the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland. Part of Britain’s Arctic, Shepherd encounters ravenous storms, clear views of the aurora borealis, and deep snows during the summer. She spent hundreds of days exploring the mountains by foot.

These pages were written during the last years of WWII and its aftermath. How does that backdrop inform Shepherd’s interpretation of the landscape?
The book is separated into twelve chapters, each dedicated to a specific part of life in the Cairngorms. How do these divisions guide the writing? Is she able to keep these elements separate from each other? In writing? In experiencing the land?
Many parts of the landscape Shepherd observes would be expected in nature writing—mountains, weather, elements, animals, etc. How does Shepherd use language and tone to write about these things without using stock phrasing or clichéd interpretations?

Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation by Kyo Maclear : Even memoir can be delivered through nature writing as we see in Kyo Maclear’s poetic book, Birds Art Life . The book is an account of a year in her life after her father has passed away. And just as Murray and Thoreau would advise, journaling those days and the symbols in them led to a whole book—one that delicately and profoundly weaves together the nature of life—of living after death—and how art can collide with that nature to get us through the hours.

How does time pass throughout the book? What techniques does Maclear employ to move the reader in and out of time?
How does grief lead Maclear into art? Philosophy? Nature? Objects?
The book is divided into the months of the year. Why does Maclear divide the book this way?
What do you make of the subtitles?

Is time natural? Describe the relationship between humans and time in nature.

So dear writers, take to these pages and take to the trails in nature around you. Journal your way through your days. Use all of your senses to take a journey in nature. Then, journal to make a memory of your time in the world. And give it all away to the rest of us, in words.

Lisa Hiton is an editorial associate at Write the World . She writes two series on our blog: The Write Place where she comments on life as a writer, and Reading like a Writer where she recommends books about writing in different genres. She’s also the interviews editor of Cosmonauts Avenue and the poetry editor of the Adroit Journal .

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The workings of nature: naturalist writing and making sense of the world.

Genevieve Valentine

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"In every generation and among every nation, there are a few individuals with the desire to study the workings of nature; if they did not exist, those nations would perish."

-- Al-Jahiz, The Book of Animals

In 185 AD, Chinese astronomers recorded a supernova. Among more detached details of its appearance, there is this: "It was like a large bamboo mat. It displayed the five colors, both pleasing and otherwise."

The attempt to ground the unknown within the familiar — and the editorial aside of "otherwise" — cuts to the heart of naturalist writing. Nearly 2000 years later, Carl Sagan did the same in Cosmos , condensing astronomy to its component parts: facts and wonder.

We've been curious about the natural world since before recorded time; the history of naturalism is human history. By the ninth century, al-Jahiz's multi-volume History of Animals combined zoological folklore with scientific observation, including theories of natural selection. In the early 20th century, Sioux author Zitkala-Ša wrote landscapes intertwined with the personal, which became a model for the form. In 1962, Rachel Carson's ecological manifesto Silent Spring was a deciding factor in banning DDT.

The best naturalist writing delivers both a secondhand thrill of obsession and a jolt of protectiveness for what's been discovered. Some of it reveals as much about the author as the surroundings. (Carl Linnaeus' 1811 Tour of Lapland manuscript cuts off a paragraph about wedding customs mid-sentence, picking up again with a breathless catalog of marsh plants.) And naturalists themselves are shaped by the lure of landscapes on the page. Robert MacFarlane's Landmarks explores the British countryside using others' writing as an interior map that challenges him to approach familiar places in new ways.

We love reading about nature for the same reason naturalists love being ankle-deep in marshes: Nature provides enough order to soothe and enough entropy to surprise. It's also why so many involve a person in the landscape; understanding our place in the world is as important as understanding the world itself. We read the work of naturalists to capture that sense of discovery made familiar. They present worlds we've never seen, and make us care as if they were our own backyards.

Not every naturalist sets out to be an activist; this is a literary tradition as much as a scientific one. But there are threads that connect naturalist literature, across continents and centuries. It's driven by an environmental curiosity that integrates the scientific and the spiritual; facts inspire wonder, rather than quench it. And every piece of naturalist literature, from al-Jahiz to today, makes a case for preserving the world it sees.

The Invention of Nature

Some naturalists actually do try to encompass the world entire. In The Invention of Nature , Andrea Wulf follows Alexander Humboldt's expeditions in Latin America and European royal courts, painting a portrait of a man whose hunger for knowledge — and constant pontificating about it — bordered on caricature. Humboldt's legacy is the 'web of life' his work conveyed to a lay audience. That interconnectedness made him an early conservationist; by 1800 he was noting adverse effects "when forests are destroyed, as they are everywhere in America by European planters, with an imprudent precipitation."

But he wasn't the first to catalog the systems of life. A century before Humboldt, German-born naturalist Maria Sybilla Merian was in Surinam, recording her life's passion: butterflies, moths, and insects. Chrysalis , Kim Todd's biography of this amateur scientist who established the idea of a life cycle, aims for a sly impression of Merian, down to the subject matter: "Insects," Todd explains, "generally gave off a whiff of vice." Merian's engravings made life cycles palpable for a public who still believed rotten meat spontaneously transformed into flies; it was impressive enough to change assumptions about the natural world (though Merian's credit waned as male scientists began absorbing her work into their own).

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

To write about the world around us is to write about people, whether cataloging the unknown or coming to terms with one's backyard. This is the dynamic at the heart of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek , which carries a touch of the hymnal (and a grim streak that has a grandmother in Merian's engraving of a tarantula devouring a bird), and Barbara Hurd's Stirring the Mud , a love letter swamps, bogs, and "the damp edges of what is most commonly praised." And few naturalists write themselves into their landscapes quite so drily as M. Krishnan. The essays in Of Birds and Birdsong carry a sense of magical realism; always scientifically rigorous (his bird descriptions are those of a man looking for a particular friend in a crowd of thousands), Krishnan writes himself as a resigned meddler in avian affairs; he could try to be invisible among nature's bounty, but then who'd train his pigeons?

Of course, some writers have to fight to be seen on the landscape at all. Enter The Colors of Nature , an anthology of nature writing by people of color edited by Alison H. Deming and Lauret E. Savoy, providing deeply personal connections to — or disconnects from — nature. Jamaica Kincaid's "In History" considers naturalism in the aftermath of colonialism, asking a crucial question for naturalism in a global context: "What should history mean to someone who looks like me?" And Joseph Bruchac's travel diary is pragmatism shot through with hope; "Our old words keep returning to the land."

The Colors of Nature

For others, the internal landscape and that hope for the natural world must be rediscovered in tandem. In Braiding Sweetgrass , botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tackles everything from sustainable agriculture to pond scum as a reflection of her Potawatomi heritage, which carries a stewardship "which could not be taken by history: the knowing that we belonged to the land." That sense of connection, or the loss of it, is the spine of the book: mucking out a pond is a microcosm, agriculture becomes rumination on symbiosis, and mast fruiting of pecan trees parallels human and plant communities.

It's a book absorbed with the unfolding of the world to observant eyes — that sense of discovery that draws us in. Happily for armchair naturalists, mysteries of the natural world never stop unfolding; but increasingly, a sense of impending doom accompanies the delight of knowledge. Kimmerer mentions a language between trees as something awaiting more specific study; it arrives later this year in Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees . A no-nonsense writing style — he came, he studied, here's how to date a forest via its weevil population — frames a deeply conservationist argument: Trees harbor not only ecosystems, but feelings, vocabulary, and etiquette. Hidden Life is designed to be an arboreal Silent Spring .

For some places, however, no revelations are yet possible; the world being studied is simply too mysterious to be yet wholly understood. With meditative prose, 1986's Arctic Dreams chronicled Barry Lopez's expeditions in an ecosystem so punishing half an animal population can die every winter, and so otherworldly animal fat is preserved on bones after a century. "Something eerie ties us to the world of animals," he says, and it's both a warning and a promise. In The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Deep, Philip Hoare's marine obsession is similarly dreamlike; for him, what we know about whales and how they make us feel is deeply linked. After all, our 'discovery' of them is still in its first blush. Sperm whales were first filmed in 1984; "We knew what the world looked like before we knew what the whale looked like." The only absolute conclusion in his book is a stern one: Humanity's damaging effects on nature and its fascination with the unknown has been devastating; if we're going to keep whales long enough to know them, that fascination will have to take a more protective turn.

To write about the world around us is to write about people, whether cataloging the unknown or coming to terms with one's backyard. These narratives are crucial, especially now — stories of the worth of nature, even just as a mirror of ourselves, build a narrative in which nature's something worth saving. It's imperfect; making nature an object rather than a subject prevents us from seeing ourselves as part of natural patterns of cause and effect. But in The Colors of Nature, Aileen Suzara pins it down: "The landscape is a narrative, not a narrator, because it has no human voice." The human voice that looked at the dark and saw a dying star is heard 2000 years later. If we're going to have another 2000 years, there's no time like the present to start listening.

Genevieve Valentine's latest novel is Icon.

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Nature Writing is Survival Writing: On Rethinking a Genre

Michelle nijhuis thinks it’s time for some new perspectives.

If there were a contest for Most Hated Genre, nature writing would surely take top honors. Other candidates—romance, say—have their detractors, but are stoutly defended by both practitioners and fans. When it comes to nature writing, though, no one seems to hate container and contents more than nature writers themselves.

“‘Nature writing’ has become a cant phrase, branded and bandied out of any useful existence, and I would be glad to see its deletion from the current discourse,” the essayist Robert Macfarlane wrote in 2015. When David Gessner, in his book Sick of Nature , imagined a party attended by his fellow nature writers, he described a thoroughgoing dud: “As usual with this crowd, there’s a whole lot of listening and observing going on, not a lot of merriment.”

Critics, for their part, have dismissed the genre as a “solidly bourgeois form of escapism,” with nature writers indulging in a “literature of consolation” and “fiddling while the agrochemicals burn.” Nature writers and their work are variously portrayed, fairly and not, as misanthropic, condescending, and plain embarrassing. Joyce Carol Oates, in her essay “Against Nature,” enumerated nature writing’s “painfully limited set of responses” to its subject in scathing all caps: “REVERENCE, AWE, PIETY, MYSTICAL ONENESS.”

Oates, apparently, was not consoled.

The persistence of nature writing as a genre has more to do with publishers than with writers. Labels can usefully lash books together, giving each a better chance of staying afloat in a flooded marketplace, but they can also reinforce established stereotypes, limiting those who work within a genre and excluding those who fall outside its definition. As Oates suggested, there are countless ways to think and write about what we call “nature,” many of them urgent. But nature writing, as defined by publishers and historical precedent, ignores all but a few.

The nature-writing genre emerged in the late 1700s, during the peculiar moment when nature, as Europeans and North American intellectuals saw it, was no longer fearfully mysterious but not yet endangered. The scientific classification of species had brought some apparent order to undomesticated landscapes, allowing writers such as William Bartram, a botanist who traveled through the American South shortly before the Revolutionary War, to perceive not a tangle of flora and fauna but “an infinite variety of animated scenes, inexpressibly beautiful and pleasing.”

Such “appreciative aesthetic responses to a scientific view of nature,” as the writer and naturalist David Rains Wallace once described them, were products not only of their time and place but their culture and class. Scientific views of nature are not the only possible views, of course, and as many anthropologists and linguists have pointed out, the concept of “nature” as a collection of objects, separate from but subservient to humans, is also far from universal.

In the 19th century, many of the thinkers we now call nature writers took some exception to the genre’s original project. While Ralph Waldo Emerson famously saw human transcendence as the primary purpose of the non-human world, his rebellious protégé Henry David Thoreau was more interested in other forms of life for their own sake, and more willing to get his literal and metaphorical boots muddy. John Muir, though notoriously dismissive of the human history of the Sierra Nevada , had unusually egalitarian ideas about other species, considering even lizards, squirrels, and gnats to be fellow occupants of the planet.

As I learned while researching my book Beloved Beasts , a history of the modern conservation movement, the rise of the science of ecology in the early 20th century made it ever clearer that the boundaries between humans and “nature” were more linguistic and cultural than physical. Rachel Carson, who cited Thoreau as one of her primary influences, further expanded the nature-writing genre by tying the fate of other species to the fate of human bodies.

Any genre can only stretch so far, though, and the limitations of nature writing are inscribed in its very name. Nature writing still tends to treat its subject as “an infinite variety of animated scenes,” and while the genre’s membership and approaches have diversified somewhat in recent years, its prizewinners resemble its founders : mostly white, mostly male, and mostly from wealthy countries. The poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie calls them Lone Enraptured Males .

Meanwhile, writers in every genre and discipline are wrestling with the relationship between humans and the rest of life, recognizing that while writing about other species is often about wonder and uplift, it is also, inevitably, about survival—the survival of all species, including our own. Amitav Ghosh, whose novels often follow the connections among species and habitats—humans and snakes, tigers and dolphins, land and sea—recently published The Nutmeg’s Curse , his second book-length essay about the literature, history, and politics of climate change. (The first was The Great Derangement , published in 2016.)

Science-fiction writer Jeff VanderMeer returns again and again to the unstable boundaries between humans and other species, most recently in his novel Hummingbird Salamander . Margaret Atwood, a dedicated birdwatcher, wrote that the sight of red-necked crakes “scuttling about in the underbrush” in northern Australia inspired her dystopian MaddAddam trilogy . Historians such as Dina Gilio-Whitaker, the author of As Long as Grass Grows , and Nick Estes, the author of Our History Is The Future , document the damage done to Indigenous cultures and all species by centuries of capitalism and colonialism. These and many other works acknowledge that humans are both observers of and participants in the network of life on earth—and that our roles, while often destructive, can be constructive, too.

Today, the nature-writing genre reminds me of the climate-change beat in journalism: the stakes and scope of the job have magnified to the point that the label is arguably worse than useless, misrepresenting the work as narrower than it is and restricting its potential audience. The state of “nature,” like the state of the global climate, can no longer be appreciated from a distance, and its literature can no longer be confined to a single shelf. If we must give it a label, I say we call it survival writing. Or, better yet, writing.

__________________________________

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What is Nature Writing?

Definition and Examples

An Introduction to Punctuation
Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
B.A., English, State University of New York

Nature writing is a form of creative nonfiction in which the natural environment (or a narrator 's encounter with the natural environment) serves as the dominant subject.

"In critical practice," says Michael P. Branch, "the term 'nature writing' has usually been reserved for a brand of nature representation that is deemed literary, written in the speculative personal voice , and presented in the form of the nonfiction essay . Such nature writing is frequently pastoral or romantic in its philosophical assumptions, tends to be modern or even ecological in its sensibility, and is often in service to an explicit or implicit preservationist agenda" ("Before Nature Writing," in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism , ed. by K. Armbruster and K.R. Wallace, 2001).

Examples of Nature Writing:

At the Turn of the Year, by William Sharp
The Battle of the Ants, by Henry David Thoreau
Hours of Spring, by Richard Jefferies
The House-Martin, by Gilbert White
In Mammoth Cave, by John Burroughs
An Island Garden, by Celia Thaxter
January in the Sussex Woods, by Richard Jefferies
The Land of Little Rain, by Mary Austin
Migration, by Barry Lopez
The Passenger Pigeon, by John James Audubon
Rural Hours, by Susan Fenimore Cooper
Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, by Henry David Thoreau

Observations:

"Gilbert White established the pastoral dimension of nature writing in the late 18th century and remains the patron saint of English nature writing. Henry David Thoreau was an equally crucial figure in mid-19th century America . . .. "The second half of the 19th century saw the origins of what we today call the environmental movement. Two of its most influential American voices were John Muir and John Burroughs , literary sons of Thoreau, though hardly twins. . . . "In the early 20th century the activist voice and prophetic anger of nature writers who saw, in Muir's words, that 'the money changers were in the temple' continued to grow. Building upon the principles of scientific ecology that were being developed in the 1930s and 1940s, Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold sought to create a literature in which appreciation of nature's wholeness would lead to ethical principles and social programs. "Today, nature writing in America flourishes as never before. Nonfiction may well be the most vital form of current American literature, and a notable proportion of the best writers of nonfiction practice nature writing." (J. Elder and R. Finch, Introduction, The Norton Book of Nature Writing . Norton, 2002)

"Human Writing . . . in Nature"

"By cordoning nature off as something separate from ourselves and by writing about it that way, we kill both the genre and a part of ourselves. The best writing in this genre is not really 'nature writing' anyway but human writing that just happens to take place in nature. And the reason we are still talking about [Thoreau's] Walden 150 years later is as much for the personal story as the pastoral one: a single human being, wrestling mightily with himself, trying to figure out how best to live during his brief time on earth, and, not least of all, a human being who has the nerve, talent, and raw ambition to put that wrestling match on display on the printed page. The human spilling over into the wild, the wild informing the human; the two always intermingling. There's something to celebrate." (David Gessner, "Sick of Nature." The Boston Globe , Aug. 1, 2004)

Confessions of a Nature Writer

"I do not believe that the solution to the world's ills is a return to some previous age of mankind. But I do doubt that any solution is possible unless we think of ourselves in the context of living nature "Perhaps that suggests an answer to the question what a 'nature writer' is. He is not a sentimentalist who says that 'nature never did betray the heart that loved her.' Neither is he simply a scientist classifying animals or reporting on the behavior of birds just because certain facts can be ascertained. He is a writer whose subject is the natural context of human life, a man who tries to communicate his observations and his thoughts in the presence of nature as part of his attempt to make himself more aware of that context. 'Nature writing' is nothing really new. It has always existed in literature. But it has tended in the course of the last century to become specialized partly because so much writing that is not specifically 'nature writing' does not present the natural context at all; because so many novels and so many treatises describe man as an economic unit, a political unit, or as a member of some social class but not as a living creature surrounded by other living things." (Joseph Wood Krutch, "Some Unsentimental Confessions of a Nature Writer." New York Herald Tribune Book Review , 1952)
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Nonfiction Books » Nature » Nature Writing

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Nature Writing

Plants, Trees & Flowers
Rocks & Minerals
The Prehistoric World
The Solar System & Space

Last updated: May 06, 2024

Nature writing, celebrating and meditating on the non-human environment and our relationship with it, has a long literary pedigree, stretching back to the 18 th century. Beginning there, Lucy Newlyn discusses William and Dorothy Wordsworth , how brother and sister influenced each other’s writing and their commitment to writing about the every day and the sights and sounds of their environment. Laura Dassow Walls looks at Henry David Thoreau , an early advocate of simple living and ecology. T C Boyle chooses his best books on man and nature , and talks about why the Dodo didn’t have a chance and whether it really matters if lions, tigers and polar bears become extinct (it does).

Our nature interviews cover diverse parts of the world. Sarah Wheeler talks about the polar regions , and Michael Jacobs talks about the Andes . Paul Brassley discusses the English countryside and Hari Kunzru chooses his best books on the American desert .

Robert Macfarlane talks about wild places and Sara Maitland discusses silence . Jeremy Mynott looks at birdwatching and David George Haskell chooses his best books on trees .

More generally, Amy Liptrot chooses her best books on nature writing , Charles Foster his best nature books of 2017 , 2018 and 2019 , while M G Leonard chooses her the best nature books for kids .

The best books on Local Adventures , recommended by Alastair Humphreys

The forest unseen: a year's watch in nature by david george haskell, the path: a one-mile walk through the universe by chet raymo, on looking: eleven walks with expert eyes by alexandra horowitz, pilgrim at tinker creek by annie dillard, the backyard adventurer by beau miles.

Wonderful as it would be to climb Mount Everest or row across the Atlantic, not all of us will get the chance to go on an epic adventure. But that doesn't mean we can't go exploring. Alastair Humphreys , the British adventurer, explains the concept of 'local adventure' and recommends books that give a feel for what it's about and why it's worth pursuing.

Wonderful as it would be to climb Mount Everest or row across the Atlantic, not all of us will get the chance to go on an epic adventure. But that doesn’t mean we can’t go exploring. Alastair Humphreys, the British adventurer, explains the concept of ‘local adventure’ and recommends books that give a feel for what it’s about and why it’s worth pursuing.

The best books on The Scottish Highlands , recommended by Annie Worsley

The living mountain by nan shepherd, the poems of norman maccaig ed. ewen maccaig, sea room by adam nicolson, song of the rolling earth: a highland odyssey by john lister-kaye, at the loch of the green corrie by andrew greig.

The Scottish Highlands are known for the stark splendour of the landscape and the bellowing of the stags. They have inspired many classic works of poetry and nature writing, says Annie Worsley —the author of a memoir set on Scotland's rugged north west coast. Here, she recommends five books on the Scottish Highlands that portray the people and their place.

The Scottish Highlands are known for the stark splendour of the landscape and the bellowing of the stags. They have inspired many classic works of poetry and nature writing, says Annie Worsley—the author of a memoir set on Scotland’s rugged north west coast. Here, she recommends five books on the Scottish Highlands that portray the people and their place.

The Best Nature Memoirs , recommended by Victoria Bennett

Belonging: natural histories of place, identity and home by amanda thomson, among flowers: a walk in the himalayas by jamaica kincaid, thin places by kerri ní dochartaigh, trace: memory, history, race, and the american landscape by lauret savoy, upstream: selected essays by mary oliver.

Nature is intrinsic to our experience of being alive and reading about it allows us to connect not just with the natural world but with ourselves. Here Victoria Bennett , author of All My Wild Mothers, a memoir of grief and creating an apothecary garden, recommends five other nature memoirs, highlighting personal and reflective prose by writers including Lauret Savoy, Mary Oliver, and Jamaica Kincaid.

Nature is intrinsic to our experience of being alive and reading about it allows us to connect not just with the natural world but with ourselves. Here Victoria Bennett, author of All My Wild Mothers, a memoir of grief and creating an apothecary garden, recommends five other nature memoirs, highlighting personal and reflective prose by writers including Lauret Savoy, Mary Oliver, and Jamaica Kincaid.

Amy Liptrot chooses the best of Nature Writing

Ring of bright water by gavin maxwell, the drowned world by j. g. ballard, findings by kathleen jamie, feral: rewilding the land, the sea, and human life by george monbiot, the orkney book of birds by tim dean and tracy hall.

Amy Liptrot , whose bestselling memoir The Outrun won the 2016 Wainwright Prize for nature writing, talks to Five Books about her favourite writing about landscape—and how her immersion in island life helped her recover from alcoholism.

Amy Liptrot, whose bestselling memoir The Outrun won the 2016 Wainwright Prize for nature writing, talks to Five Books about her favourite writing about landscape—and how her immersion in island life helped her recover from alcoholism.

The best books on Sense of Place , recommended by Patrick Galbraith

South and west: from a notebook by joan didion, the crofter and the laird by john mcphee, the dark months of may by tom pickard, salmon: a fish, the earth, and the history of their common fate by mark kurlansky, jock of the bushveld by percy fitzpatrick.

Novelists, non-fiction writers and poets all attempt to create immersive and atmospheric settings in their books—what is called a 'sense of place' in literary terms. Here, the British journalist Patrick Galbraith selects five books that explore and evoke a sense of place—including works by Joan Didion, Mark Kurlansky and John McPhee.

Novelists, non-fiction writers and poets all attempt to create immersive and atmospheric settings in their books—what is called a ‘sense of place’ in literary terms. Here, the British journalist Patrick Galbraith selects five books that explore and evoke a sense of place—including works by Joan Didion, Mark Kurlansky and John McPhee.

The best books on Natural History , recommended by David George Haskell

The outermost house: a year of life on the great beach of cape cod by henry beston, dark emu: aboriginal australians and the birth of agriculture by bruce pascoe, a natural history of the future: what the laws of biology tell us about the destiny of the human species by rob dunn.

Natural history can offer a "portal into wonder and astonishment," says David George Haskell , the biologist and award-winning author of nonfiction works including Sounds Wild and Broken and The Forest Unseen . But natural history books, in the past, have also been guilty of reinforcing prejudices. Here he recommends five natural history books that celebrate the diversity of life.

Natural history can offer a “portal into wonder and astonishment,” says David George Haskell, the biologist and award-winning author of nonfiction works including Sounds Wild and Broken and The Forest Unseen . But natural history books, in the past, have also been guilty of reinforcing prejudices. Here he recommends five natural history books that celebrate the diversity of life.

The Best Books of Ocean Journalism , recommended by Laura Trethewey

The brilliant abyss: exploring the majestic hidden life of the deep ocean, and the looming threat that imperils it by helen scales, the outlaw ocean: journeys across the last untamed frontier by ian urbina, mapping the deep by robert kunzig, deep: freediving, renegade science, and what the ocean tells us about ourselves by james nestor, the wave: in pursuit of the rogues, freaks, and giants of the ocean by susan casey.

Humans have mapped only 25 percent of the seafloor, so the ocean is ripe for exploration and investigation. Environmental journalist and author Laura Trethewey recommends five books by 'ocean journalists' that explore the life, crime and science of the seas.

Humans have mapped only 25 percent of the seafloor, so the ocean is ripe for exploration and investigation. Environmental journalist and author Laura Trethewey recommends five books by ‘ocean journalists’ that explore the life, crime and science of the seas.

The best books on Islands , recommended by Gavin Francis

'the voyage of st brendan,' in the age of bede edited by j.f. webb and d.h. farmer, selkirk's island: the true and strange adventures of the real robinson crusoe by diana souhami, a woman in the polar night by christiane ritter, atlas of remote islands: fifty islands i have never set foot on and never will by judith schalansky.

Generations of writers, explorers and armchair travellers have found a focal point of fascination in the idea of the remote island. Why so? Gavin Francis , the award-winning writer, explains the everlasting appeal of the lonely isle – and why the fantasy is at least as powerful as the salt-sprayed reality – as he selects five of the best books on islands.

Generations of writers, explorers and armchair travellers have found a focal point of fascination in the idea of the remote island. Why so? Gavin Francis, the award-winning writer, explains the everlasting appeal of the lonely isle – and why the fantasy is at least as powerful as the salt-sprayed reality – as he selects five of the best books on islands.

The Best Books For Environmental Learning , recommended by Mitchell Thomashow

Braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants by robin wall kimmerer, earth's wild music: celebrating and defending the songs of the natural world by kathleen dean moore, the next great migration: the beauty and terror of life on the move by sonia shah, landmarks by robert macfarlane.

We are surrounded by nature but it's easy to miss it and spend time either in our heads or on screens. Here Mitchell Thomashow , a longtime teacher of environmental learning, picks books to broaden our vistas and help us see the natural world with fresh eyes.

We are surrounded by nature but it’s easy to miss it and spend time either in our heads or on screens. Here Mitchell Thomashow, a longtime teacher of environmental learning, picks books to broaden our vistas and help us see the natural world with fresh eyes.

The best books on Summer , recommended by Melissa Harrison

The summer book by tove jansson, the go-between by l p hartley, to the river: a journey beneath the surface by olivia laing, summer by ali smith, the hill of summer by j a baker.

Temperatures ratcheting, tinderbox conditions, a pressure cooker atmosphere... summer is a handy literary shorthand for rising tensions. But in the natural world, summer is a quiet time when the flowers die back and the fruits and seeds are ripening. Here, Melissa Harrison —the novelist, nature writer and podcaster—recommends five of the best summer books, for those who like to read in step with the seasons.

Temperatures ratcheting, tinderbox conditions, a pressure cooker atmosphere… summer is a handy literary shorthand for rising tensions. But in the natural world, summer is a quiet time when the flowers die back and the fruits and seeds are ripening. Here, Melissa Harrison—the novelist, nature writer and podcaster—recommends five of the best summer books, for those who like to read in step with the seasons.

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The Problem of Nature Writing

The Bible is a foundational text in Western literature, ignored at an aspiring writer’s hazard, and when I was younger I had the ambition to read it cover to cover. After breezing through the early stories and slogging through the religious laws, which were at least of sociological interest, I chose to cut myself some slack with Kings and Chronicles, whose lists of patriarchs and their many sons seemed no more necessary to read than a phonebook. With judicious skimming, I made it to the end of Job. But then came the Psalms, and there my ambition foundered. Although a few of the Psalms are memorable (“The Lord is my shepherd”), in the main they’re incredibly repetitive. Again and again the refrain: Life is challenging but God is good. To enjoy the Psalms, to appreciate the nuances of devotion they register, you had to be a believer. You had to love God, which I didn’t. And so I set the book aside.

Only later, when I came to love birds, did I see that my problem with the Psalms hadn’t simply been my lack of belief. A deeper problem was their genre. From the joy I experience, daily, in seeing the goldfinches in my birdbath, or in hearing an agitated wren behind my back fence, I can imagine the joy that a believer finds in God. Joy can be as strong as Everclear or as mild as Coors Light, but it’s never not joy: a blossoming in the heart, a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it. And so I would expect to be a person on whom a psalm to birds, a written celebration of their glory, has the same kind of effect that a Biblical psalm has on a believer. Both the psalm-writer and I experience the same joy, after all, and other bird-lovers report being delighted by ornithological lyricism; by books like J. A. Baker’s “ The Peregrine .” Many people I respect have urged “The Peregrine” on me. But every time I try to read it, I get mired in Baker’s survey of the landscape in which he studied peregrine falcons. Baker himself acknowledges the impediment—“Detailed descriptions of landscape are tedious”—while offering page after page of tediously detailed description. The book later becomes more readable, as Baker extolls the capabilities of peregrines and tries to understand what it’s like to be one. Even then, though, the main effect of his observations is to make me impatient to be outdoors myself, seeing falcons.

Sometimes I consider it a failing, a mark of writerly competition, that I’d so much rather take private joy in birds, and in nature generally, than read another person’s book about them. But I’m also mindful, as a writer, that we live in a world where nature is rapidly receding from everyday life. There’s an urgent need to interest nonbelievers in nature, to push them toward caring about what’s left of the nonhuman world, and I can’t help suspecting that they share my allergy to hymns of devotion. The power of the Bible, as a text, derives from its stories. If I were an evangelist, going door to door, I’d steer well clear of the Psalms. I would start with the facts as I saw them: God created the universe, we humans sin against His laws, and Jesus was dispatched to redeem us, with momentous consequences. Everyone, believer and nonbeliever alike, enjoys a good story. And so it seems to me that the first rule of evangelical nature writing should be: Tell one.

Almost all nature writing tells some kind of story. A writer ventures out to a lovely local wetland or to a pristine forest, experiences the beauty of it, perceives a difference in the way time passes, feels connected to a deeper history or a larger web of life, continues down the trail, sees an eagle, hears a loon: this is, technically, a narrative. If the writer then breaks a leg or is menaced by a grizzly bear with cubs, it may even turn into an interesting story. More typically, though, the narrative remains little more than a formality, an opportunity for reflection and description. A writer who’s moved to joy by nature, and who hopes to spread the joy to others, understandably wishes to convey the particulars of what incited it.

Unfortunately, no matter how felicitous the descriptions may be, the writer is competing with other media that a reader could be turning to instead, audiovisual media that actually show you the eagle or let you hear the loon. Ever since the advent of color photography and sound recording, lengthy descriptions have become problematic in all genres of writing, and they’re especially problematic for the evangelizing nature writer. To describe a scene of nature well, the writer is hard pressed to avoid terminology that’s foreign to readers who haven’t already witnessed a similar sort of scene. Being a birder, I know what a ruby-crowned kinglet sounds like; if you write that a kinglet is chattering in a willow tree, I can hear the sound clearly. The very words “ruby-crowned kinglet” are pregnant and exciting to me. I will avidly read an unadorned list of the species—black-headed grosbeak, lazuli bunting, blue-gray gnatcatcher—that a friend saw on her morning walk. To me, the list is a narrative in itself. To the unconverted reader, though, the list might as well say: Ira the son of Ikkesh of Tekoa, Abiezer of Anathoth, Mebunnai the Hushathite . . .

If birds are the writer’s focus, there do exist good stories about individual birds (the red-tailed hawks of Central Park) and individual species (the non-stop trans-Pacific flight of bar-tailed godwits), and I can tell, from the new-story links that nonbirding friends are forever forwarding to me, that reports of astonishing avian feats can overcome the public’s indifference to birds, at least momentarily. Whether such stories make converts—and I’ll say it here explicitly: my interest is in making converts—is less clear. The science of birds and their conservation should be interesting to anyone with a modicum of intellectual curiosity, but the world abounds with things to be curious about. The bird-science writer is painfully aware that he or she has only a few hundred words with which to hook a lay reader. One tempting approach to this challenge is to begin in medias res, by a campfire at some picturesque or desolate location, and introduce us to the Researcher. He will have a bushy beard and play the mandolin. Or she will have fallen in love with birds on her grandfather’s farm in Kentucky. He or she will be tough and obsessive, sometimes funny, always admirable. The danger with this approach is that, unless the Researcher emerges as the true subject of the piece, we readers may feel bait-and-switched—invited to believe that we’re reading a story about people, when in fact the story is about a bird. In which case, it’s fair to ask why we bothered getting to know the Researcher in the first place.

The paradox of nature writing is that, to succeed as evangelism, it can’t only be about nature. E. O. Wilson may have been correct in adducing biophilia—a love of nature—as a universal trait in human beings. To judge from the state of the planet, however, it’s a trait all too rarely expressed. What most often activates the trait is its display by people in whom it’s already activated. In my experience, if you ask a group of birders what got them into birds, four out of five of them will mention a parent, a teacher, a close friend, someone they had an intense personal connection with. But the faithful are few, the unpersuaded are many. To reach readers who are wholly wrapped up in their humanness, unawakened to the natural world, it’s not enough for writers to simply display their biophilia. The writing also needs to replicate the intensity of a personal relationship.

One of the forms this intensity can take is rhetorical. Speaking for myself, I’m a lot more likely to read an essay that begins “I hate nature” than one that begins “I love nature.” I would hope, of course, the writer doesn’t really hate nature, at least not entirely. But look at what the initial provocation accomplishes. Although it risks alienating the already persuaded, it opens the door to skeptical readers and establishes a connection with them. If the essay then reveals itself to be an argument for nature, the opening salvo also insures that the writing will be dynamic: will move from a point A to a very different point B. Movement like this is pleasurable to a reader. Fierce attitudes are pleasurable, even in the absence of forward movement. Give me the blistering prose of Joy Williams in “ The Killing Game ,” a jeremiad against hunters and their culture, or “ The Case Against Babies ,” as ferocious an anti-birth statement as you’ll ever read, in her perfectly titled collection “ Ill Nature .” Indifference, not active hostility, is the greatest threat to the natural world, and whether you consider Williams hilarious or unhinged, heroic or unfair, it’s impossible to be indifferent to her work. Or give me Edward Abbey’s “ Desert Solitaire ,” an account of his years in the Utah desert, in which he fans a simmering Thoreauvian misanthropy into white-hot fire and wields it against American consumer capitalism. Here again, you may not agree with the writer. You may wrinkle your nose at Abbey’s assumptions about “wilderness,” his unacknowledged privilege as a white American. What can’t be denied is the intensity of his attitude. It sharpens his descriptions of the desert landscape and gives them a forensic purpose, a cutting edge.

A good way to achieve a sense of purpose, strong movement from point A toward point B, is by having an argument to make. The very presence of a piece of writing leads us to expect an argument from it, if only an implicit argument for its existence. And, if the reader isn’t also offered an explicit argument, he or she may assign one to the piece, to fill the void. I confess to having had the curmudgeonly thought, while reading an account of someone’s visit to an exotic place like Borneo, that the conclusion to be drawn from it is that the writer has superior sensitivity to nature or superior luck in getting to go to such a place. This was surely not the intended argument. But avoiding the implication of “Admire me” or “Envy me” requires more attention to one’s tone of written voice than one might guess. Unlike the evangelist who rings doorbells and beatifically declares that he’s been saved, the tonally challenged nature writer can’t see the doors being shut in his face. But the doors are there, and unconverted readers are shutting them.

Often, by making an argument, you can sidestep the tonal problem. An essay collection that’s dear to me, “ Tropical Nature ,” by Adrian Forsyth and Ken Miyata, begins by serving up a set of facts about tropical rain forests. The facts are seemingly neutral, but they add up to a proposition: the rain forest is more varied, less fertile, less consistently rainy, more insidiously hostile, than the drenched and teeming “jungle” of popular imagination. It’s a very simple proposition. And yet, right away, there’s a case to be made in the ensuing essays—further expectations to be upended, new astonishments to be revealed. Wedded to an argument, the scientific facts speak far more compellingly to the glory of tropical nature than lyrical impressionism, and meanwhile Forsyth and Miyata, as neutral bringers of fact, remain immune to the suspicion of seeking admiration. The premise of Jennifer Ackerman’s best-selling “ The Genius of Birds ” is likewise simple and sturdy: that “bird-brained” ought to be a compliment, not an insult. Richard Prum’s 2017 book, “ The Evolution of Beauty ,” reached a wide audience by arguing that Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which mainstream evolutionary biologists ignored or denigrated for more than a century, can explain all sorts of non-adaptive traits and behaviors in animals. Prum’s book has its flaws—the prose is gluey, and Darwin’s theory was perhaps not quite as forgotten as Prum represents it to have been—but the flaws didn’t matter to me. The theory of sexual selection was an eye-opener, and I learned a lot of cool things about a group of tropical birds, the manakins, that I otherwise might never have known. Such is the power of a compelling argument.

For the nature writer who isn’t a polemicist or a scientist, a third avenue to intensity is to tell a story in which the focus is on nature but the dramatic stakes are emphatically human. An exemplary book in this regard is Kenn Kaufman’s “ Kingbird Highway .” Kaufman grew up in suburban Kansas in the nineteen-sixties, became an obsessive birder (nicknamed Kingbird), and conceived the ambition, after he dropped out of high school, of breaking the record for the most American bird species seen in a calendar year. The record is quickly established as the dramatic goal, the protagonist’s coördinating desire. And then, immediately, we’re presented with an impediment: the teen-aged Kaufman has no money. To visit every corner of the country at the right time of year, a birder needs to cover huge distances, and Kaufman decides he’ll need to hitchhike. So now, in addition to a goal and an impediment, we have the promise of a classic road adventure. (It’s important to note that, just as we don’t have to be pedophiles to connect with Humbert’s pursuit of Lolita, we don’t need to care much about birds to be curious about what happens to Kaufman. Strong desire of any kind creates a sympathetic desire in the reader.) As Kaufman makes his way around the country, he’s attentive to the birds, of course, but also to the national mood of the early seventies, the social dynamics of bird-watching, the loss and degradation of natural habitat, the oddball characters along the way. And then the book takes a beautiful turn. As life on the road exacts its toll on the narrator, he feels increasingly lost and lonely. Although seemingly a quest narrative, the book reveals itself to have been, all along, a coming-of-age story. Because we care about the teen-aged Kaufman, we stop wondering if he’ll break the record and start asking more universally relatable questions: What’s going to happen to this young man? Is he going to find his way home? What sets “Kingbird Highway” apart from many other “Big Year” narratives is that it ultimately ceases to matter how many species Kaufman sees in a year. It’s only the birds themselves that matter. They come to feel like the home that he’s been yearning for, the home that will never leave him.

Even if we could know what it’s like to be a bird—and, pace J. A. Baker, I don’t think we ever really will—a bird is a creature of instinct, driven by desires that are the opposite of personal, incapable of ethical ambivalence or regret. For a wild animal, the dramatic stakes consist of survival and reproduction, full stop. This can make for fascinating science, but, absent heavy-duty anthropomorphizing or projection, a wild animal simply doesn’t have the particularity of self, defined by its history and its wishes for the future, on which good storytelling depends. With a wild-animal character, there is only ever a point A: the animal is what it is and was and always will be. For there to be a point B, a destination for a dramatic journey, only a human character will suffice. Narrative nature writing, at its most effective, places a person (often the author, writing in first person) in some kind of unresolved relationship with the natural world, provides the character with unanswered questions or an unattained goal, and then deploys universally shared emotions—hope, anger, longing, frustration, embarrassment, disappointment—to engage a reader in the journey. If the writing succeeds, it does so indirectly. We can’t make a reader care about nature. All we can do is tell strong stories of people who do care, and hope that the caring is contagious. ♦

This is drawn from “ Spark Birds .”

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Essay On Nature | Nature Essay for Students and Children in 500 Words

February 13, 2024 by Prasanna

Essay On Nature: An Essay on Nature helps the students to understand the implications of the natural world. From the various flora and fauna to the expansive biomes, nature has a lot to offer. However, ever since humans and showed up, the planet has started to change drastically. Nature seems to be getting sparser every year, animals disappear, and trees get cut down only to be replaced by skyscrapers.

Hence, it is crucial to enable students to understand that nature should be conserved. And there is no better way to do it than to write an essay on nature. Furthermore, the earlier that students are educated about the plight of nature, the better the chances that future generations act on the matter. Read on about Essay on Nature Conservation, Importance of Nature, Beauty of Nature and for School Children and Kids. Explore the “do’s” and “don’ts” when writing an essay on nature:

You can also find more Essay Writing articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

Essay On Nature – Important Points to Note

When writing an essay on nature, or any essay for that matter, remember the following:

Before starting the essay, do your research. This will help you create quality content.
Write an introductory paragraph for the essay
Reduce the use of jargons unless the topic is very technical
Write in points wherever possible
Break up the content into digestible chunks
Use dates, names and factual figures
End the essay with a conclusion
Read through the essay to find and remove grammatical issues or factual errors.

“Look deep into Nature and then you will understand everything Better” – Nature Essay

Essay On Nature – Sample 1 (250 Words)

Nature, in its broadest sense, is a term that refers to the physical world and life in general. It encompasses all life on earth, including humans. However, it does not include human activities. The term nature is derived from the Latin word, “Natura”, which translates to “essential qualities” or “innate disposition.” Nature seems to be getting sparser every year, animals disappear, and trees get cut down only to be replaced by skyscrapers

As stated above, nature includes not just life, but a host of other non-living physical entities. These include the atmosphere, climate, weather, water and even abstract factors like the aesthetic beauty of nature. Nature did not arise spontaneously; hence if we were to make an accurate timeline, it would encompass billion of years of progress and evolution.

The earth is thought to have formed when gravity pulled the stellar gas, dust and debris together, eventually forming a planet. And like the other terrestrial planets in the solar system, the earth is made up of a central core and a rocky mantle. But before the earth got to this stage, scientists believe that the earth’s surface was entirely covered by hot molten rock or magma. Only after a few billion years did it start cooling down, creating the solid crust that we are familiar with today.

Just like the non-living components of nature, life did not arise instantaneously. It took billions of years for the earliest precursors of life to show up. However, these “organisms” were nothing more than a self-replicating molecule. However, from this precursor, life has evolved into the multitude of lifeforms that we see today. Today, the complex interaction between living things and non-living things contributes to the concept of nature.

500 Words Nature Essay

Nature can be understood as a “phenomena” that encompasses the physical world and the life which interacts with it. It includes humans and every other form of life present on the planet. The word nature has its roots in Latin. It is derived from the word “Natura” which means “essential qualities”. However, in ancient times, the word was a literal synonym for “birth”.

Today, the word “nature” refers to wildlife and geology. This means it includes the realm that includes all forms of life and the many processes associated with non-living objects. In most cases, nature also refers to the forests and the wildlife living within. Other definitions indicate places with the absence of human intervention as nature too.

The evolution of nature is not spontaneous; it took billions of years of geological time for its formation. According to scientists, the earth was formed nearly 4.54 billion years ago. Before this time, the earth was a giant, swirling mass of gas and debris orbiting the sun. The early earth was a completely different place. The atmosphere was completely devoid of oxygen, and there was no water on its surface. It was a hellish place with extremely high temperatures.

The landscape was littered with molten magma and thick plumes of toxic smoke. Life was nowhere in sight, and it would not emerge for several billion years more. As the earth cooled down, water condensed and fell as rain. However, it rained for such a long time that the basins and troughs began to fill up with water. This event created the very first oceans of the world. However, the earth was still devoid of life and oxygen was non-existent in the atmosphere.

One of the biggest unsolved mysteries today is the origin of life. There are fossils to support the earliest organisms, but nothing was known of how they came about. Scientists have put forth many speculations and hypotheses stating the origin of life. One of the most popular is the Deep-sea Hydrothermal Vents Theory. It states that the earliest precursors to life originated from underwater volcanic vents. These volcanic vents spewed out minerals that were abundant in many nutrients required for early life forms. However, this is just a speculation that there is no conclusive evidence supporting the same.

The first undisputed evidence of life emerged some 3.7 billion years ago. These were similar to today’s cyanobacteria – which were microscopic single-celled organisms. Since then, life has had billions of years to evolve. And when life emerged from the seas on to dry land, major evolutionary leaps were made. The first-ever land plants appeared followed by the invertebrates. Vertebrates made their way on to land much later, evolving into magnificent life forms such as the dinosaurs. On the geological timescale, we humans evolved only recently. The fossils of our earliest ancestors are over 200,000 years old.

Conclusion on Nature Essay

However, our technology and progress have had a detrimental effect on the planet. Our climates are changing and temperatures and rising. We are losing our polar icecaps, and as a result, ocean levels are rising. All these factors can cause destruction in the near future if we do not keep a check on our carbon footprint and deforestation. Essay on Nature In Hindi, Marathi, Telugu and Kannada will update soonly.

FAQ’s on Essay On Nature

Question 1. What is nature?

Answer: Nature encompasses the physical world and the life which interacts with it.

Question 2. What is the importance of nature?

Answer: Without nature, the natural balance in the ecosystem is lost. This can lead to many detrimental effects such as global warming, greenhouse effect, rising sea levels, increased natural calamities.

Question 3. How does nature help us?

Answer: Nature provides a lot of resources. Some of these resources are life-saving and others are of significant commercial value. It also keeps a check on the adverse effects of human activities.

Question 4. Are humans nature?

Answer: Humans and all other lifeforms are a part of nature. But human activities are not a part of nature.

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A Summary and Analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Nature’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Nature’ is an 1836 essay by the American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). In this essay, Emerson explores the relationship between nature and humankind, arguing that if we approach nature with a poet’s eye, and a pure spirit, we will find the wonders of nature revealed to us.

You can read ‘Nature’ in full here . Below, we summarise Emerson’s argument and offer an analysis of its meaning and context.

Emerson begins his essay by defining nature, in philosophical terms, as anything that is not our individual souls. So our bodies, as well as all of the natural world, but also all of the world of art and technology, too, are ‘nature’ in this philosophical sense of the world. He urges his readers not to rely on tradition or history to help them to understand the world: instead, they should look to nature and the world around them.

In the first chapter, Emerson argues that nature is never ‘used up’ when the right mind examines it: it is a source of boundless curiosity. No man can own the landscape: it belongs, if it belongs to anyone at all, to ‘the poet’. Emerson argues that when a man returns to nature he can rediscover his lost youth, that wide-eyed innocence he had when he went among nature as a boy.

Emerson states that when he goes among nature, he becomes a ‘transparent eyeball’ because he sees nature but is himself nothing: he has been absorbed or subsumed into nature and, because God made nature, God himself. He feels a deep kinship and communion with all of nature. He acknowledges that our view of nature depends on our own mood, and that the natural world reflects the mood we are feeling at the time.

In the second chapter, Emerson focuses on ‘commodity’: the name he gives to all of the advantages which our senses owe to nature. Emerson draws a parallel with the ‘useful arts’ which have built houses and steamships and whole towns: these are the man-made equivalents of the natural world, in that both nature and the ‘arts’ are designed to provide benefit and use to mankind.

The third chapter then turns to ‘beauty’, and the beauty of nature comprises several aspects, which Emerson outlines. First, the beauty of nature is a restorative : seeing the sky when we emerge from a day’s work can restore us to ourselves and make us happy again. The human eye is the best ‘artist’ because it perceives and appreciates this beauty so keenly. Even the countryside in winter possesses its own beauty.

The second aspect of beauty Emerson considers is the spiritual element. Great actions in history are often accompanied by a beautiful backdrop provided by nature. The third aspect in which nature should be viewed is its value to the human intellect . Nature can help to inspire people to create and invent new things. Everything in nature is a representation of a universal harmony and perfection, something greater than itself.

In his fourth chapter, Emerson considers the relationship between nature and language. Our language is often a reflection of some natural state: for instance, the word right literally means ‘straight’, while wrong originally denoted something ‘twisted’. But we also turn to nature when we wish to use language to reflect a ‘spiritual fact’: for example, that a lamb symbolises innocence, or a fox represents cunning. Language represents nature, therefore, and nature in turn represents some spiritual truth.

Emerson argues that ‘the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.’ Many great principles of the physical world are also ethical or moral axioms: for example, ‘the whole is greater than its part’.

In the fifth chapter, Emerson turns his attention to nature as a discipline . Its order can teach us spiritual and moral truths, but it also puts itself at the service of mankind, who can distinguish and separate (for instance, using water for drinking but wool for weaving, and so on). There is a unity in nature which means that every part of it corresponds to all of the other parts, much as an individual art – such as architecture – is related to the others, such as music or religion.

The sixth chapter is devoted to idealism . How can we sure nature does actually exist, and is not a mere product within ‘the apocalypse of the mind’, as Emerson puts it? He believes it doesn’t make any practical difference either way (but for his part, Emerson states that he believes God ‘never jests with us’, so nature almost certainly does have an external existence and reality).

Indeed, we can determine that we are separate from nature by changing out perspective in relation to it: for example, by bending down and looking between our legs, observing the landscape upside down rather than the way we usually view it. Emerson quotes from Shakespeare to illustrate how poets can draw upon nature to create symbols which reflect the emotions of the human soul. Religion and ethics, by contrast, degrade nature by viewing it as lesser than divine or moral truth.

Next, in the seventh chapter, Emerson considers nature and the spirit . Spirit, specifically the spirit of God, is present throughout nature. In his eighth and final chapter, ‘Prospects’, Emerson argues that we need to contemplate nature as a whole entity, arguing that ‘a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments’ which focus on more local details within nature.

Emerson concludes by arguing that in order to detect the unity and perfection within nature, we must first perfect our souls. ‘He cannot be a naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit’, Emerson urges. Wisdom means finding the miraculous within the common or everyday. He then urges the reader to build their own world, using their spirit as the foundation. Then the beauty of nature will reveal itself to us.

In a number of respects, Ralph Waldo Emerson puts forward a radically new attitude towards our relationship with nature. For example, although we may consider language to be man-made and artificial, Emerson demonstrates that the words and phrases we use to describe the world are drawn from our observation of nature. Nature and the human spirit are closely related, for Emerson, because they are both part of ‘the same spirit’: namely, God. Although we are separate from nature – or rather, our souls are separate from nature, as his prefatory remarks make clear – we can rediscover the common kinship between us and the world.

Emerson wrote ‘Nature’ in 1836, not long after Romanticism became an important literary, artistic, and philosophical movement in Europe and the United States. Like Wordsworth and the Romantics before him, Emerson argues that children have a better understanding of nature than adults, and when a man returns to nature he can rediscover his lost youth, that wide-eyed innocence he had when he went among nature as a boy.

And like Wordsworth, Emerson argued that to understand the world, we should go out there and engage with it ourselves, rather than relying on books and tradition to tell us what to think about it. In this connection, one could undertake a comparative analysis of Emerson’s ‘Nature’ and Wordsworth’s pair of poems ‘ Expostulation and Reply ’ and ‘ The Tables Turned ’, the former of which begins with a schoolteacher rebuking Wordsworth for sitting among nature rather than having his nose buried in a book:

‘Why, William, on that old gray stone, ‘Thus for the length of half a day, ‘Why, William, sit you thus alone, ‘And dream your time away?

‘Where are your books?—that light bequeathed ‘To beings else forlorn and blind! ‘Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed ‘From dead men to their kind.

Similarly, for Emerson, the poet and the dreamer can get closer to the true meaning of nature than scientists because they can grasp its unity by viewing it holistically, rather than focusing on analysing its rock formations or other more local details. All of this is in keeping with the philosophy of Transcendentalism , that nineteenth-century movement which argued for a kind of spiritual thinking instead of scientific thinking based narrowly on material things.

Emerson, along with Henry David Thoreau, was the most famous writer to belong to the Transcendentalist movement, and ‘Nature’ is fundamentally a Transcendentalist essay, arguing for an intuitive and ‘poetic’ engagement with nature in the round rather than a coldly scientific or empirical analysis of its component parts.

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What is nature writing?

What we talk about when we talk about nature writing.

“Nature writing can be defined as non-fiction or fiction prose or poetry about the natural environment.” This is actually its definition on Wikipedia.

For the purposes of this prize, we're accepting only non-fiction prose submissions (see last week's resources on breaking down the brief ), but in general, nature writing can mean many more things and cover lots of different ideas. As such, there’s a whole variety of approaches to writing a book in this genre. Different types of nature writing books can include: factual books such as field guides, natural history told through essays, poetry about the natural world, literary memoir and personal reflections.

Typically, nature writing is writing about the natural environment. Your book might take a look at the natural world and examine what it means to you or what you’ve encountered in the environment. You could frame this idea through a personal lens.

Perhaps you want to take a more focused or factual approach and look at individual flora and fauna in detail. Recent books that we’ve enjoyed have looked at topics such as beekeeping, owls, social and cultural history, trees, swimming, cows and have offered personal observation and reflection on their chosen topics.

You might be writing about the landscape, from farming to remote islands or city life. You may want to write about the fauna and flora of a whole region, or just one animal or a single tree. You don’t need to go out into the wilderness to write about nature and you don’t need to be hiking for three months in a remote area either. Most importantly, we believe the best books on nature writing convey a clear sense of place and mainly focus on the natural world and our human relationship with it.

The Nan Shepherd Prize aims to find the next big voice in nature writing from emerging writers, and we can’t wait to read about what nature means to you.

Read an academic paper on New Nature Writing here .
‘Land Lines’ was a two-year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and is a collaboration between researchers at the Universities of Leeds, Sussex and St Andrews. The project carried out a sustained study on modern British nature writing, beginning in 1789 with Gilbert White’s seminal study, The Natural History of Selborne, and ending in 2014 with Helen Macdonald’s prize-winning memoir, H is for Hawk. You can look at their website here .
Read about nature writing throughout history (this is a US perspective) here .
Read about which nature books have inspired today’s contemporary nature writers here .
Read this guide to nature writing from Sharmaine Lovegrove, publisher of Dialogue Books, who teamed up with the Forestry Commission to find undiscovered nature writers here .

Over @NanPrize we’ve been sharing examples of our favourite nature writing books, so if you want to see some specific examples of recent favourites, that might be a good place to start. We’ve also got a collection here which will give you an idea as to what books we like to publish in the nature writing genre.

13 Essays About Nature: Use These For Your Next Assignment

Essays about nature can look at the impact of human behavior on the environment, or on the impact of nature on human beings. Check out these suggestions.

Nature is one of humanity’s greatest gifts. It provides food, shelter, and even medication to help us live healthier, happier lives. It also inspires artists, poets, writers, and photographers because of its beauty.

Essays about nature can take many different paths. Descriptive essays about the beauty of nature can inspire readers. They give the writer the chance to explore some creativity in their essay writing. You can also write a persuasive essay arguing about an environmental topic and how humans harm the natural environment. You can also write an informative essay to discuss a particular impact or aspect of the natural world and how it impacts the human beings who live within it.

If you need to write a nature essay, read on to discover 13 topics that can work well. For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers .

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1. How Happiness Is Related to Nature Connectedness

2. why protecting nature is everyone’s responsibility, 3. how technological advancements can help the environment, 4. why global warming is a danger for future generations, 5. how deforestation impacts the beauty of nature, 6. the relationship between plants and human beings, 7. the health benefits of spending time in nature, 8. what are the gifts of nature, 9. the importance of nature to sustain human life, 10. the beauty of non-living things in nature, 11. does eco-tourism help or hurt the natural world, 12. how sustainability benefits the natural environment, 13. does agriculture hurt or help nature.

Exposure to nature has a significant positive impact on mood and overall mental health. In other words, happiness and nature connectedness have a close link. Your nature essay can explore the research behind this and then build on that research to show why nature conservation is so important.

This essay on nature is important because it shows why people need the natural environment. Nature provides more than just the natural resources we need for life. Spending time in the fresh air and sunshine actually makes us happier, so behaviors that harm nature harm your potential happiness.

Planet earth is a precious gift that is often damaged by the selfish activities of human beings. All human beings have the potential to hurt the natural environment and the living creatures in that environment, and thus protecting nature is everyone’s responsibility. You can build this into an essay and explore what that responsibility may look like to different groups.

For the child, for example, protecting nature may be as simple as picking up trash in the park, but for the CEO of a manufacturing company, it may look like eco-friendly company policies. For an adult, it may look like shopping for a car with lower emissions. Take a look at the different ways people can protect nature and why it is essential.

Technology is often viewed as the enemy of nature, but you can find technological advancements helping rather than harming nature. For example, light bulbs that use less energy or residential solar panel development have reduced the average home’s amount of energy. Your essay could explore some inventions that have helped nature.

After looking at these technologies, dive into the idea that technology, when used well, has a significant positive impact on the environment, rather than a negative one. The key is developing technology that works with conservation efforts, rather than against them.

Essays About Nature: Why global warming is a danger for future generations

Global warming is a hot topic in today’s society, but the term gets used so often, that many people have tuned it out. You can explore the dangers of global warming and how it potentially impacts future generations. You can also touch on whether or not this problem has been over-blown in education and media.

This essay should be full of facts and data to back up your opinions. It could also touch on initiatives that could reduce the risks of global warming to make the future brighter for the next generation.

Much has been written about the dangers of deforestation on the overall ecosystem, but what about its effect on nature’s beauty? This essay topic adds an additional reason why countries should fight deforestation to protect green spaces and the beauty of nature.

In your essay, strike a balance between limiting deforestation and the need to harvest trees as natural resources. Look at ways companies can use these natural resources without destroying entire forests and ecosystems. You might also be interested in these essays about nature .

People need plants, and this need can give you your essay topic. Plants provide food for people and for animals that people also eat. Many pharmaceutical products come from plants originally, meaning they are vital to the medical field as well.

Plants also contribute to the fresh air that people breathe. They filter the air, removing toxins and purifying the air to make it cleaner. They also add beauty to nature with their foliage and flowers. These facts make plants a vital part of nature, and you can delve into that connection in your nature essay.

Spending time in nature not only improves your mental health, but it also improves your physical health . When people spend time in nature, they have lower blood pressure and heart rates. They also produce fewer damaging stress hormones and reduced muscle tension. Shockingly, spending time in nature may actually reduce mortality rates.

Take some time to research these health benefits, and then weave them into your essay. By showing the health benefits of nature exposure, you can build an appreciation for nature in your audience. You may inspire people to do more to protect the natural environment.

Nature has given people many gifts. Our food all comes from nature in its most basic form, from fruits and vegetables to milk and meats. It provides the foundation for many medicines and remedies. These gifts alone make it worth protecting.

Yet nature does much more. It also gives the gift of better mental health. It can inspire feelings of wonder in people of all ages. Finally, it provides beauty and tranquility that you cannot reproduce anywhere else. This essay is more descriptive and reflective than factual, but it can be an exciting topic to explore.

Can humans live without nature? Based on the topics already discussed, the answer is no. You can use this fact to create an essay that connects nature to the sustenance of human life. Without nature, we cannot survive.

One way to look at this importance is to consider the honey bee . The honey bee seems like a simple part of the natural world, yet it is one of the most essential. Without bees, fruits and vegetables will not get pollinated as easily, if at all. If bees disappear, the entire food system will struggle. Thus, bees, and many other parts of nature, are vital to human life.

Have you ever felt fully inspired by a glorious sunset or sunrise? Have you spent time gazing at a mountain peak or the ocean water crashing on the shoreline and found your soul refreshed? Write about one of these experiences in your essay.

Use descriptive words to show how the non-living parts of nature are beautiful, just like the living creatures and plants that are part of nature. Draw from personal experiences of things you have seen in nature to make this essay rich and engaging. If you love nature, you might also be interested in these essays about camping .

Ecotourism is tourism designed to expose people to nature. Nature tours, safaris, and even jungle or rainforest experiences are all examples of ecotourism. It seems like ecotourism would help the environment by making people more aware, but does it really?

For your essay, research if ecotourism helps or hurts the environment. If you find it does both, consider arguing which is more impactful, the positive side or the negative side. On the positive side, ecotourism emphasizes sustainability in travel and highlights the plight of endangered species, leading to initiatives that protect local ecosystems. On the negative side, ecotourism can hurt the ecosystems at the same time by bringing humans into the environment, which automatically changes it. Weigh these pros and cons to see which side you fall on.

For more help with this topic, read our guide explaining what is persuasive writing ?

Sustainability is the practice of taking care of human needs and economic needs while also protecting the natural environment for future generations. But do sustainable practices work? This essay topic lets you look at popular eco-friendly practices and determine if they are helpful to the environment, or not.

Sustainability is a hot topic, but unfortunately, some practices labeled as sustainable , aren’t helpful to the environment. For example, many people think they are doing something good when tossing a plastic bottle in the recycling bin, but most recycling centers simply throw away the bottle if that little plastic ring is present, so your effort is wasted. A better practice is using a reusable water bottle. Consider different examples like this to show how sustainability can help the environment, but only when done well.

Essays About Nature: Does agriculture hurt or help nature?

Agriculture is one way that humans interact with and change the natural environment. Planting crops or raising non-native animals impacts the nature around the farm. Does this impact hurt or help the local natural ecosystem?

Explore this topic in your essay. Consider the impact of things like irrigation, fertilization, pesticides, and the introduction of non-native plants and animals to the local environment. Consider ways that agriculture can benefit the environment and come to a conclusion in your essay about the overall impact.

If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

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Nature Essay

Essay About Nature

Nature refers to the interaction between the physical surroundings around us and the life within it like atmosphere, climate, natural resources, ecosystem, flora, fauna, and humans. Nature is indeed God’s precious gift to Earth. It is the primary source of all the necessities for the nourishment of all living beings on Earth. Right from the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the house we live in is provided by nature. Nature is called ‘Mother Nature’ because just like our mother, she is always nurturing us with all our needs.

Whatever we see around us, right from the moment we step out of our house is part of nature. The trees, flowers, landscapes, insects, sunlight, breeze, everything that makes our environment so beautiful and mesmerizing are part of Nature. In short, our environment is nature. Nature has been there even before the evolution of human beings.

Importance of Nature

If not for nature then we wouldn’t be alive. The health benefits of nature for humans are incredible. The most important thing for survival given by nature is oxygen. The entire cycle of respiration is regulated by nature. The oxygen that we inhale is given by trees and the carbon dioxide we exhale is getting absorbed by trees.

The ecosystem of nature is a community in which producers (plants), consumers, and decomposers work together in their environment for survival. The natural fundamental processes like soil creation, photosynthesis, nutrient cycling, and water cycling, allow Earth to sustain life. We are dependent on these ecosystem services daily whether or not we are aware.

Nature provides us services round the clock: provisional services, regulating services, and non-material services. Provisional services include benefits extracted from nature such as food, water, natural fuels and fibres, and medicinal plants. Regulating services include regulation of natural processes that include decomposition, water purification, pollution, erosion and flood control, and also, climate regulation. Non-material services are the non-material benefits that improve the cultural development of humans such as recreation, creative inspiration from interaction with nature like art, music, architecture, and the influence of ecosystems on local and global cultures.

The interaction between humans and animals, which are a part of nature, alleviates stress, lessens pain and worries. Nature provides company and gives people a sense of purpose.

Studies and research have shown that children especially have a natural affinity with nature. Regular interaction with nature has boosted health development in children. Nature supports their physical and mental health and instills abilities to access risks as they grow.

Role and Importance of Nature

The natural cycle of our ecosystem is vital for the survival of organisms. We all should take care of all the components that make our nature complete. We should be sure not to pollute the water and air as they are gifts of Nature.

Mother nature fosters us and never harms us. Those who live close to nature are observed to be enjoying a healthy and peaceful life in comparison to those who live in urban areas. Nature gives the sound of running fresh air which revives us, sweet sounds of birds that touch our ears, and sounds of breezing waves in the ocean makes us move within.

All the great writers and poets have written about Mother Nature when they felt the exceptional beauty of nature or encountered any saddening scene of nature. Words Worth who was known as the poet of nature, has written many things in nature while being in close communion with nature and he has written many things about Nature. Nature is said to be the greatest teacher as it teaches the lessons of immortality and mortality. Staying in close contact with Nature makes our sight penetrative and broadens our vision to go through the mysteries of the planet earth. Those who are away from nature can’t understand the beauty that is held by Nature. The rise in population on planet earth is leading to a rise in consumption of natural resources. Because of increasing demands for fuels like Coal, petroleum, etc., air pollution is increasing at a rapid pace. The smoke discharged from factory units and exhaust tanks of cars is contaminating the air that we breathe. It is vital for us to plant more trees in order to reduce the effect of toxic air pollutants like Carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, etc.

Save Our Nature

Earth’s natural resources are not infinite and they cannot be replenished in a short period. The rapid increase in urbanization has used most of the resources like trees, minerals, fossil fuels, and water. Humans in their quest for a comfortable living have been using the resources of nature mindlessly. As a result, massive deforestation, resultant environmental pollution, wildlife destruction, and global warming are posing great threats to the survival of living beings.

Air that gives us oxygen to breathe is getting polluted by smoke, industrial emissions, automobile exhaust, burning of fossil fuels like coal, coke and furnace oil, and use of certain chemicals. The garbage and wastes thrown here and there cause pollution of air and land.

Sewage, organic wastage, industrial wastage, oil spillage, and chemicals pollute water. It is causing several water-borne diseases like cholera, jaundice and typhoid.

The use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers in agriculture adds to soil pollution. Due to the mindless cutting of trees and demolition of greeneries for industrialization and urbanization, the ecological balance is greatly hampered. Deforestation causes flood and soil erosion.

Earth has now become an ailing planet panting for care and nutrition for its rejuvenation. Unless mankind puts its best effort to save nature from these recurring situations, the Earth would turn into an unfit landmass for life and activity.

We should check deforestation and take up the planting of trees at a massive rate. It will not only save the animals from being extinct but also help create regular rainfall and preserve soil fertility. We should avoid over-dependence on fossil fuels like coal, petroleum products, and firewood which release harmful pollutants to the atmosphere. Non-conventional sources of energy like the sun, biogas and wind should be tapped to meet our growing need for energy. It will check and reduce global warming.

Every drop of water is vital for our survival. We should conserve water by its rational use, rainwater harvesting, checking the surface outflow, etc. industrial and domestic wastes should be properly treated before they are dumped into water bodies.

Every individual can do his or her bit of responsibility to help save the nature around us. To build a sustainable society, every human being should practice in heart and soul the three R’s of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. In this way, we can save our nature.

Nature Conservation

Nature conservation is very essential for future generations, if we will damage nature our future generations will suffer.

Nowadays, technological advancement is adversely affecting our nature. Humans are in the quest and search for prosperity and success that they have forgotten the value and importance of beautiful Nature around. The ignorance of nature by humans is the biggest threat to nature. It is essential to make people aware and make them understand the importance of nature so that they do not destroy it in the search for prosperity and success.

On high priority, we should take care of nature so that nature can continue to take care of us. Saving nature is the crying need of our time and we should not ignore it. We should embrace simple living and high thinking as the adage of our lives.

FAQs on Nature Essay

1. How Do You Define Nature?

Nature is defined as our environment. It is the interaction between the physical world around us and the life within it like the atmosphere, climate, natural resources, ecosystem, flora, fauna and humans. Nature also includes non-living things such as water, mountains, landscape, plants, trees and many other things. Nature adds life to mother earth. Nature is the treasure habitation of every essential element that sustains life on this planet earth. Human life on Earth would have been dull and meaningless without the amazing gifts of nature.

2. How is Nature Important to Us?

Nature is the only provider of everything that we need for survival. Nature provides us with food, water, natural fuels, fibres, and medicinal plants. Nature regulates natural processes that include decomposition, water purification, pollution, erosion, and flood control. It also provides non-material benefits like improving the cultural development of humans like recreation, etc.

An imbalance in nature can lead to earthquakes, global warming, floods, and drastic climate changes. It is our duty to understand the importance of nature and how it can negatively affect us all if this rapid consumption of natural resources, pollution, and urbanization takes place.

3. How Should We Save Our Nature?

We should check deforestation and take up the planting of trees at a massive rate. It will save the animals from being extinct but also help create regular rainfall and preserve soil fertility. We should avoid over-dependence on fossil fuels like coal, petroleum products, and firewood which release harmful pollutants to the atmosphere. We should start using non-conventional sources of energy like the sun, biogas, and wind to meet our growing need for energy. It will check and reduce global warming. Water is vital for our survival and we should rationalize our use of water.

Nature Essay

500+ words essay on nature.

Nature is the most precious gift of God to us. Nature is like our mother; it nourishes and nurtures us. All our basic necessities are fulfilled by nature. Whether it’s the air we breathe, the land we live on, the water we drink or the food we eat, it all comes from nature. God has only gifted earth with nature; that’s why life is possible on earth. Without nature, the existence of living things would not be possible. Other planets are not blessed with this gift. So, we should be thankful to God for this beautiful nature and the existence of life on earth. Here, students can find the 500+ Words Essay on Nature. This essay will guide them in writing a good Essay on Nature and work as a sample essay for them. By going through it, students can create their own Nature Essay in English.

Nature is the natural, physical, material world or universe. “Nature” can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the cosmic. Our planet is rich in nature. Natural things look beautiful and attractive. Nature has flowing rivers, beautiful valleys, high mountains, singing birds, the oceans, the blue sky, different seasons, the rain, the beautiful moonlight etc. The beauty of nature is matchless. The blessings of nature on human beings are innumerable.

Importance and Role of Nature

If there were no nature, we wouldn’t be alive. Humankind is dependent on nature. We get oxygen to breathe from plants and trees. Thus, our respiratory system is regulated by nature. Not only this, nature has some magical healing powers which help patients suffering from various diseases to recover faster. Every minute spent in the lap of nature gives a refreshing and rejuvenating feeling. It lowers the cortisol, commonly known as the stress hormone. Even placing some nice plants around the work window will lead to lower stress. Nature enhances our brain’s activity and makes us concentrate better and be more focused. This makes our brains more creative and imaginative. Spending time in nature will provide a healthier and longer life.

Nature is very powerful and unique. Nature is also considered a source of education. We can learn humility from trees, the sturdiness from the mountains, and to smile from flowers and buds to keep smiling in tough phases of life.

The natural cycle of our ecosystem is very necessary. Ecosystems contain biotic or living parts, as well as abiotic factors or nonliving parts. Biotic factors include plants, animals, and other organisms. Abiotic factors include rocks, temperature, and humidity. Every factor in an ecosystem depends on every other factor, either directly or indirectly. We must take care of all the components of the ecosystem as it fulfils all our needs.

Nature Conservation

The resources provided on the earth are limited. If we continue to deplete the resources at this pace, then they will soon exhaust. Urbanisation and development have resulted in excessive use of resources. For example, we are cutting trees to make houses, roads, and railway tracks. We are mining minerals and fossil fuels for transportation activities. We are extensively using water for agriculture and other activities. Our comfort has led to the destruction of nature. Deforestation, global warming, wildlife destruction, environmental pollution, ecosystem imbalance etc., are the consequences that threaten biodiversity and life on earth. To overcome them, we need to conserve nature.

Conserving nature means protecting, preserving and restoring biodiversity. We can do so by taking care of small things such as making use of: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle. It will help in reducing waste management. We should plant trees in our surroundings and increase the greenery around us. Conserving water and saving it is also a way of conserving nature. We can also conserve rainwater by adopting the rainwater harvesting method. We must use and promote alternative energy sources such as solar energy and wind energy and thus adopt sustainable development concepts. We can conserve nature by taking care of small activities at home. These activities include switching off the lights, fans, and AC when not in use, switching to public transport and carpooling, composting waste at home, using recyclable bags and containers, and educating our children about climate change and nature conservation.

We hope students must have found this Essay on Nature helpful in improving their writing section. For more study material and the latest updates on CBSE/ICSE/State Board/Competitive exams, keep visiting BYJU’S. Moreover, download the BYJU’S App to get interactive study videos.

Frequently Asked Questions on Nature Essay

Why is the conservation of nature important.

Humankind is completely dependent on nature and we are now depleting nature of all its resources. It is extremely important to understand that without nature, it would be impossible for any species to thrive on Earth.

What steps can we take to conserve nature?

All of us need to take at least small, minimal efforts from our side like recycling plastic, reducing wastage of all forms and keeping our house and surroundings clean.

How can we control the depletion of nature?

As much as possible, avoid purchasing unnecessary items as this will lead to waste accumulation. Avoid goods made from animal skin(leather), etc and try to reuse and recycle plastic and non-biodegradable items

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Nature - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Into the wild nature.

There is no doubt that nature has given back to mankind. Everything individuals have anticipated that would continue was given by the ordinary world around us: food, water, medicine, materials for shelter, ect. Individuals, on the other hand, have caused issues that will keep on influencing the nature around us, for example, contamination through the improvement and advancement of technology. So, the real question is do we need nature or does nature need us, because as it seems that nature […]

Conservation of Nature is the Solution to the Problem of Climate Change

Not so long ago, people talked about global impacts with the help of models and projections. Today, we don’t need to talk about projections; we can witness changes that are happening right now. For over the last one hundred and fifty years, we have changed the balance of our planet completely. We have burnt huge amounts of fossil fuels and cut down forests, which would naturally absorb carbon dioxide from the air providing us with clean air to breathe in. […]

Relationship between Humans and Animals

Humans and animals across the globe have had coexistence together for quite a while now and this has been amazing since the relationship is great. The relationship between the two groups of which they are different beings can be described from two angles of both the positive and the negative parts. This essay simply examines the given theoretical arguments that create the relationship between the humans and animals to be smooth. In the modern society, humans have taken the step […]

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The Competitive Exclusion Principle: Nature’s Balancing Act

Nature, with its myriad of organisms and complex ecosystems, has always astounded scientists and laymen alike. Among the many phenomena observed in natural habitats, one principle stands out for its clarity and significance: the Competitive Exclusion Principle (CEP). This principle, also known as Gause's law, named after the Russian ecologist Georgii Gause, provides a fascinating insight into how species interact and coexist, or don't, in shared habitats. At its core, the Competitive Exclusion Principle posits a straightforward idea: two species […]

The Aqueous Rhapsody: a Whimsical Journey through the Water Cycle in Nature

Introduction The water cycle, a majestic and intricate performance orchestrated by nature, is like an enchanting melody that continually serenades our planet. This symphony of processes ensures the perpetual renewal and circulation of Earth's most precious resource: water. In this essay, we embark on an imaginative voyage through the whimsical steps of the water cycle, exploring its captivating choreography and the profound significance it holds for our world. The Sun's Uplifting Overture - Evaporation Our journey commences with the celestial […]

Before the Flood

Before the flood is the product of one of the incredible three-year journey, research which took place within the co creator and the director of fisher Stevens. This film is based on climate change documentaries and in most of the instances it is streamed for free on YouTube, PlayStation and Facebook and one can view it on amazon hence being of high demand. DiCaprio spent three years traveling in the globe to meet some of the key leaders, climate scientists […]

Nature Frosty Ballet: Unveiling the Enigma of Martian Weather and the Average Temperature on Mars

Mars, the captivating red orb in our celestial neighborhood, beckons the curiosity of space enthusiasts and scientists alike. Beyond its rusty exterior and enigmatic landscapes, the weather conditions on Mars constitute a cosmic ballet that weaves a tale of extremes and peculiarities, unfolding in a realm that is both harsh and fascinating. In the grand theater of Martian weather, the average temperature on Mars emerges as a metric that encapsulates the planet's climatic temperament. Unlike the temperate zones of Earth, […]

Exploring the Wonders of Abiotic Things in the World of Nature

Introduction In the vast tapestry of our natural world, there exists a category of entities that often goes unnoticed, overshadowed by the grandeur of living organisms and the intricate ecosystems they inhabit. These entities, known as abiotic things, play a crucial role in shaping and sustaining the environment. Abiotic things encompass a wide range of non-living components, from the air we breathe to the rocks beneath our feet, and even the celestial bodies that grace our night sky. In this […]

Comparison of the Story and Poem “There Will Come Soft Rains”

The short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury and Sara Teasdale’s poem take place after a nuclear war. The stories can be compared through reference to man dying and nature continously being carried on. The story and poem express the fire which creates horrible effects on life such as people, animals and the home. Both authors are dealing with what occured to the cities and each person after a war. The two authors incorporate how human beings […]

Nature’s Enigma: Unveiling the Mysteries of the ‘Old Man of the Woods

The unusual wild fungus known as the "Old Man of the Woods" (Strobilomyces strobilaceus) is prized for both its unusual look and fascinating ecological purpose. This article explores the traits, environment, and ecological importance of this intriguing fungus, providing an insight into the varied and sometimes mysterious field of mycology. Members of the Boletaceae family, the 'Old Man of the Woods' is named for his shaggy, scale-covered crown, which resembles an old man's wrinkled forehead. Because of its important ecological […]

Mount Fuji: the Resilience Nature Amidst Volcanic Forces

Celebrates and very handsome guy stratovolcano Fuji a mountain serves a show natural beauty and importance Japan tilled. However, under his calmness facade is history volcanic activity, that has, influenced an area and mimiced a country. Above a cape his long history, Fuji a mountain has a file eruptions, each of that has affecting buckle area and people. Eruption Hoei, that took place in 1707, was above all eruption more last. This catastrophic catastrophe had far-reaching things on one fasten […]

Protecting Endangered Species

At the beginning of 2018, researches have calculated 801 different types of animals that have gone completely extinct of which 65 of them are extinct in the wild. Researches have calculated about 3,879 different types of animals that are critically endangered. People say protecting endangered animals is a waste of money, time, and has no benefits for us but here is why we should protect endangered species. Protecting endangered species would help raise environmental awareness to protect and bring order. […]

Gaea: the Earth Goddess – Unveiling Nature’s Eternal Beauty and Power

Within the realm of myth and legend, there exists a figure whose presence resonates with unparalleled reverence and wonder - Gaea, the Earth Goddess. She stands as an iconic symbol within the category of ancient mythology and nature deities, embodying the profound significance and timeless mysteries of the natural world. In this essay, we embark on an exploration of the enduring uniqueness of Gaea, the Earth Goddess, and her symbolic representation of the earth's awe-inspiring power and eternal beauty. Gaea, […]

Echoes of Nature Wilderness: Exploring Jack London’s ‘The Call of the Wild’

Jack London's literary masterpiece, "The Call of the Wild," stands as a timeless ode to the indomitable spirit of the wilderness and the primal instincts that lie dormant within us. Set against the backdrop of the Klondike Gold Rush, this novel is a visceral journey into the heart of nature, where the rugged landscapes of the Yukon serve as both a crucible and a sanctuary for the protagonist, Buck. Buck, a domesticated dog thrust into the brutal world of sled […]

In Nature’s Embrace: Understanding the Koalas’ Eucalypt Habitat

The koala's endearing quirks have made it a national icon of Australia and a symbol of the country's abundance of wildlife. Because of their cute appearance and calm demeanor, koalas are quite appealing. Furthermore, these species are very important to the ecosystems in which they reside. This article examines the geographical features of the koala's native habitat, delving into the animal's incredible adaptations to its surroundings as well as the threats it faces in today's ever-changing world. Koalas are endemic […]

Nature’s Marvel: Exploring the Volga River in Russia

The Volga is not just the longest river in Europe but also a symbol of Russia's rich cultural heritage and modern economic success. The Volga, which is around 3,530 kilometers long, has been an important part of Russia's social and economic structure for millennia. This article examines the Volga River's cultural, economic, and historical importance, looking at how it has influenced and been influenced by the large country of Russia. The Volga River begins its journey in the Valdai Hills […]

Autumn is my Favorite Season

Each person has their own favorite season. Some people like winter, which brings New Years, skiing, snowballing. Others admire the spring, sometimes the awakening of nature from sleep. Sometimes, when streams ring and drops cry. Someone simply adores summer: vacations, swimming in rivers, walks with friends. And I like autumn. I think autumn is the most beautiful time. The leaves of the trees change their color, if in the summer they were green, now they glow with golden, crimson, orange […]

When Nature Unleashes: the Phenomenon of Torrential Downpour

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The Albino Peacock: a Dance of Nature’s Rarities

Within the realm of nature, few sights captivate the human imagination quite like the peacock’s iridescent display. This magnificent bird, known for its radiant tail and spirited dance, is a symbol of beauty and vanity in numerous cultures. However, nature has its way of tweaking its own masterpieces, and thus we have the albino peacock, a creature that swaps the traditional riot of colors for a pristine, almost ethereal, white visage. Albinism, at its core, is a congenital disorder characterized […]

Deforestation and Global Warming

Over the years industrial plants have filled up Earth’s vast atmosphere with dark, blackened smoke for the pleasure and benefits of the human race at the extent of nature. Over the years vehicles have accumulated, along with population growth on the Earth's ground and in turn so have the poisons stemming from those vehicles. Over the years humans have carelessly dumped trash on the sides of streets or near river banks, and to this day it is now seen that […]

Why Tulane: Undergraduate Admission

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Endangered Species: West African Lions

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Global Warming: how to Prevent

What is Global warming? How is it affecting our planet? How is it affecting the plants, animals and humans? Is it even something we should worry about? Global warming is defined as a gradual increase in the overall temperature of the earth's atmosphere, and it is something we should be very worried about. We are already seeing the consequences of global warming, but how long until we are at our breaking point? Global warming is defined by the gradual increase […]

The Movie Called “The Lorax”

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What does the Human Future Hold for Us?

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Animal Lover and Visit to the Animal Park

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Importance of Water

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Kinds of Pollution: the Future of Environment

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New nature writing genre brings wild and tricky aspects of climate crisis to life

Lecturer in Literature, University of Essex

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James Canton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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We live in an age of climate emergency and eco-anxiety. This is, after all, the Anthropocene – a geological period defined by the bootprint of humans on Earth. Bearing witness to our place in the world is critical now more than ever but writing about nature during an eco-crisis without implying utter despair is a challenging feat.

Since 2009, I have taught a Masters in wild writing that explores literature, landscape and the environment. Students are encouraged to find their own path – creative and critical – into the ways we as humans engage with the natural world, the places we inhabit and the creatures we share the Earth with. Field trips – the outdoor classroom – are a central part of the practice of study. We are of nature, we remind ourselves – never separate, never apart, not even in the square construct of the seminar room. To exist as a human is to be in nature. Nature is not somewhere we step in and out of. That is a vital truth.

Since that course first launched, writing about nature has evolved. In 2008, journalist Jason Cowley acknowledged that the genre of nature writing was undergoing a transformation. In a special issue of the literary magazine, Granta, dedicated to new nature writing, he explained that “the best new nature writing is an experiment in forms: the field report, the essay, the memoir, the travelogue”.

Going to Ground: An anthology of nature and place, edited by nature writer Jon Woolcott, is a fine collection of just such writing. Genuinely engaging, the collective of more than 30 new and established writers offer bright, fresh voices on our sense of place, our place in nature.

Book cover, yellow words in caps at bottom Going to Ground black and white shot of bird of prey flying low over farm landscape

The pieces gathered here – both prose and poetry – are all tales of the Anthropocene. They tell of scarred lands, sacred lands. They saw light first in the previous decade as offerings for The Clearing – an online magazine that helped promote fresh perspectives on nature writing, including portraits of the post-industrial alongside political and reflective musings on our modern landscapes.

These are visions first seen in earlier works such as Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside (published in 1973), which, according to legendary landscape writer and wanderer Iain Sinclair , was “the unacknowledged pivot between the new nature writers and those others, of a grungier dispensation, who are randomly (and misleadingly) herded together as ‘psychogeographers’”. Sinclair should know – being one of the best known of that herd.

The contributions to Going to Ground read as a series of stepping stones – fitting for an anthology largely framed around the archipelago of our isles. Writer Graham Mort takes us to a “landscape draining of its purpose”, tracing generations of elders through the moor towns of North Yorkshire – Settle, Hawes, Muker – seeing the natural in the industrial. He writes poetically about “dippers on the beck/ limestone crags dotted with juniper”.

Like so many of these writings, a mosaic of memories emerges that is patched together from the land.

J.C. Niala takes us beyond Britain to Kenya where ancient human cave dwellers lived “an intricate dance with the elephants” that came to those dark spaces at night to mine salt with their tusks. The magic in that vision helps Niala clear the ghost of COVID haunting her journey.

Two of the greats of the new nature writing movement are present here, too. Kathleen Jamie’s Findings (2005) stepped between the quotidian world of domesticity, of laundry and kids’ school runs and soaring moments of enchantment in nature. Here, in Going to Ground, Jamie guides us to the value of paying heed, attending, noticing the natural world. “How do we lose the world?” she questions. “Little by little.”

Instead of ignoring the world around us, we can “seriously notice” – step outside and “smell autumn in the wind”. By doing so, we move beyond being passive consumers in “the simplest act of resistance and renewal”. Be engaged, be present, she urges.

In a chapter titled Bird Island, writer and birder Tim Dee watches gannets preparing to launch from “the edge of their earthly domain, the grit-and-guano trampled runway to the sky”. This image works well as a metaphor for the efforts of this fine band of nature writers gathered in this delightful anthology – each one seeking to step beyond exhausted stamping grounds, sensing the need for fresh perspectives on the landscapes of the Anthropocene.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like? Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 30,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

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“ American Earth can be read as a survey of the literature of American environmentalism, but above all, it should be enjoyed for the sheer beauty of the writing.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Unique, much-needed . . . If you choose but one environmental book this season, make it American Earth .” — Booklist (starred review)

“One of the penalties of an ecological education,” Aldo Leopold once wrote, “is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” Since his death in 1948, fighting a grass fire on a neighbor’s farm, the world’s wounds—and our efforts to heal them—have become more broadly evident, and Leopold is now widely acknowledged as a writer and thinker well ahead of his time. Here for the first time, all the essential works of this pioneering forester, wildlife manager, ecologist, and environmental visionary are gathered in a single volume.

The collection opens with Leopold’s classic A Sand County Almanac (1949), a book often hailed—along with Thoreau’s Walden and Carson’s Silent Spring —as a foundational work of the modern environmental movement. Illustrated with Charles W. Schwartz’s original drawings, Leopold’s unpretentious, quietly lyrical prose records the turn of the seasons around the “Shack” he built with his family on an abandoned Wisconsin farm, and recounts a lifetime of experiences in wild places across North America. An unexcelled miniaturist, Leopold captures the essence of an entire landscape or ecological drama in carefully observed details. The tracks of a small mammal in the snow or the presence of a seemingly unremarkable flower on the side of a road provoke deep revelations in thought and attitude, awakening a faculty of insight he calls “the ecological conscience.” The book culminates with his revolutionary “land ethic”: a manifesto for bringing humanity into right relationship with the natural world that continues to influence and inspire.

A Sand County Almanac is joined here by over fifty uncollected articles, essays, speeches, and other writings that chart the evolution of Leopold’s ideas over the course of three decades. In early pieces, he explores the distinctive terrain and distinct ecological challenges of the Southwest, where he took his first job with the U.S. Forest Service, and where his efforts led to the first officially designated wilderness area in the United States. Later essays describe his attempts to bring farmers, conservation agents, and sportsmen together to protect native flora and fauna; his contributions to the emerging ecological sciences; and his changing ideas about predators and wildlife management.

As a special feature, the volume also presents a freshly prepared version of Leopold’s extraordinary field journals (some of which were first published in Round River ), newly transcribed from the original manuscripts, expanded with unpublished texts, and accompanied by over a hundred of his original drawings, photographs, and maps. Written in camp during wilderness trips with family and friends, and at his celebrated “Shack,” the journals capture the enthusiasms of a lifelong outdoorsman. They vividly demonstrate what Leopold hoped to teach his students: “how to read land.” This volume also includes a selection of almost a hundred letters both personal and professional—all but a few published here for the first time.

A newly researched chronology and notes offer details about Leopold’s life, the conservation movement, and the contemporary contexts of his work. An “Index of Animals and Plants” supplements a general index.

See the contents for this volume (PDF)

Curt Meine , editor, serves as Senior Fellow for the Center for Humans & Nature and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. He is the author of the definitive biography Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work and Correction Lines: Essays on Land, Leopold, and Conservation . He lives in Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin.

Project support for this volume was provided by the Gould Family Foundation.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund .

“Reading across these 800-odd pages of Leopold’s writings—hunting journals (with accompanying sketch-maps and photographs); letters; essays; lectures and fragments of memoir, all superbly selected and annotated by Curt Meine—you watch the flex and growth of his ideas, from his early attachment to wilderness as a place of frontiersman test to his communitarian vision of the land ethic. You see, too, how relevant his writing remains, 65 years after his death.”— The Wall Street Journal

This first Library of America volume of Emerson’s writing covers the most productive period of his life, 1832–1860. Our most eloquent champion of individualism, Emerson acknowledges at the same time the countervailing pressures of society in American life. Even as he extols what he called “the great and crescive self,” he dramatizes and records its vicissitudes.

Here are the indispensable and most renowned works, including “The American Scholar” (“our intellectual Declaration of Independence,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes called it), “The Divinity School Address,” considered atheistic by many of his listeners, the summons to “Self-Reliance,” along with the more embattled realizations of “Circles” and, especially, “Experience.” Here, too, are his wide-ranging portraits of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and other “representative men,” and his astute observations on the habits, lives, and prospects of the English and American people.

This volume includes Emerson’s well-known Nature; Addresses, and Lectures (1849), his Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), plus Representative Men (1850), English Traits (1856), and his later book of essays, The Conduct of Life (1860). These are the works that established Emerson’s colossal reputation in America and found him admirers abroad as diverse as Carlyle, Nietzsche, and Proust.

Emerson’s enduring power is apparent everywhere in American literature: in those, like Whitman and some of the major twentieth-century poets, who seek to corroborate his vision, and among those, like Hawthorne and Melville, who questioned, qualified, and struggled with it. Emerson’s vision reverberates also in the tradition of American philosophy, notably in the writings of William James and John Dewey, in the works of his European admirers, such as Nietzsche, and in the avant-garde theorists of our own day who write on the nature and function of language. The reasons for Emerson’s durability will be obvious to any reader who follows the exhilarating, exploratory movements of his mind in this uniquely full gathering of his work.

Not merely another selection of his essays, this volume includes all his major books in their rich entirety. No other volume conveys so comprehensively the exhilaration and exploratory energy of perhaps America’s greatest writer.

Joel Porte (1933–2006), volume editor, won the Bowdoin Prize in 1962 for his essay on Emerson, and was granted the Distinguished Achievement Award by the Emerson Society in 2006. He authored many studies of nineteenth-century and modern literature, including Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict, The Romance in America , and Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Time .

“The Emerson who speaks to us through these essays understood America as few have done before or since. By nature a dualistic thinker, he fully realized the polarities of American experience—between action and reflection, self-reliance and community, unity and diversity, idealism and materialism, past and future…. In doing so, he tried to forge a new identity for the new representative American—serene, self-confident, democratic, progressive and pluralistic.” — St. Petersburg Times

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This Library of America edition collects for the first time in one volume the four full-length works in which Henry David Thoreau combined his poetic sensibility, classical learning, philosophical austerity, and Yankee love of practical detail into literary masterpieces on humanity’s communion with nature.

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is based on a boat trip Thoreau took with his brother in 1839 from Concord, Massachusetts, to Concord, New Hampshire. Ten years in the writing (it was the book he retired to Walden to work on) and incorporating essays, passages from his journal, and some of his best poems, it is a superbly crafted achievement, its texture enriched by the idealism of the Transcendentalists, the delighted wordplay of an imaginative linguist, the individualism of a young America, and the earthiness of a lover of nature.

Walden is a personal declaration of independence, a social experiment, and a voyage of spiritual discovery, set within the seasonal cycle of a year’s “Life in the Woods.” “Simplify, simplify” is the beat of its “more distant drummer”—to abandon waste and illusion, to get to the bottom of life’s essential needs, and to practice a new economy for humane living. Its witty and pointed rhetoric brings together language and nature, the human and nonhuman in unusual conjunctions that resonate with symbolic meanings. A manual of self-reliance as well as a masterpiece of style, it is one of the most fervently loved classics of American literature.

The Maine Woods is an account of three trips taken by boat and canoe in 1846, 1853, and 1857 through an unexplored interior bypassed by westward expansion. It describes the virgin rivers and forests of Maine, the customs of woodsmen and Indian guides, the hunting of moose, and the effects of the timber industry and encroaching settlement. An early and eloquent plea for conservation by a far-sighted naturalist, its close observation of the American wild becomes an examination of “the motives which carry men into the wilderness.”

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Published: 01 August 2024

The use of interactional metadiscourse markers by Saudi EFL male and female college students: the case of a gender-sensitive topic

Ghuzayyil Mohammed Al-Otaibi ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9369-2602 1 &
Abeer Abdulhadi Hussain 1

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 11 , Article number: 988 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Language and linguistics

A few studies have explored the use of interactional metadiscourse markers in argumentative writing by male and female college students. More importantly, none explored the topic of metadiscourse resources with respect to gender-sensitive topics. Thus, the present study aims at examining the exploitation of interactional metadiscourse markers by Saudi male and female English as a Foreign Language (EFL) college students in their writing about ‘Who are Better Drivers, Men or Women?’. The study is corpus-based on students’ essays. The corpus consists of four sub-corpora: (a) men favouring men, (b) men arguing for women, (c) women arguing for men and (d) women writing in favour of women. We followed a qualitative and quantitative approach to data analysis. Using AntConc and Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse model of interactional markers, the results reveal that female writers employed attitudinal lexis, hedges, self-mentions and boosters more than male writers. As for the variables of gender and stance choice, females arguing for men’s driving significantly utilised hedges more than the other three groups. Additionally, female writers writing in support of female drivers significantly used self-mentions more than male writers arguing for men’s driving. This study shows that sensitive topics may cause a difference in the distribution of metadiscourse markers used by people of both genders, and it provides some pedagogical implications for EFL instructors and curriculum developers.

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Challenging gender stereotypes: representations of gender through social interactions in English learning textbooks

Introduction.

Writing is a complicated skill that requires more than full understanding of the grammar rules in the target language. Efficient writing necessitates knowledge of writing as a social and communicative activity. It involves cognitive, psychomotor and linguistic abilities (Bazerman, 2009 ; Byrnes and Manchón, 2014 ). The communicative function of writing becomes even more evident in argumentative writing where the author has to carefully utilise appropriate rhetorical structures that reflect conventional practices in a community for the purpose of persuading someone. It requires logical reasoning, sequencing thoughts and linguistic features to build some relationship with readers (Hyland, 2005 ; Jones, 2011 ).

As noted above, writing becomes more challenging if the task involves argumentation. Though argumentative writing, defined as a piece of writing that ‘attempts to support a controversial point or defend a position on which there is a difference of opinion’ (Richards and Schmidt, 2002 , p. 337), is one of the most common genres (Hyland, 1999 ), it is the most difficult for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners and English as a Second Language (ESL) learners (Lee and Deakin, 2016 ; Yoon, 2021 ). It requires taking a position in an argument over a controversial topic for the purpose of persuading a group of people of the validity of one’s claim. More importantly, it involves agreeing or disagreeing with previous, current and prevailing opinions (Swales, 1990 ). Thus, EFL and ESL learners have to employ argumentative writing resources used by professional writers, such as evidentiality (Chafe and Nichols, 1986 ), metadiscourse markers (Crismore, 1989 ; Hyland, 2005 ), stance (Biber, 2006a ; Biber and Zhang, 2018 ) and voice (Thompson, 1996 ). Speaking of metadiscourse markers and their benefits, Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ) argued that metadiscourse is a useful linguistic resource that enables authors to communicate their attitude towards a specific proposition to their readers.

Metadiscourse has been labelled stance (Biber and Finegan, 1989 ; Hyland, 1999 ), evaluation (Hunston and Thompson, 2000 ), attitude (Halliday, 1994 ), appraisal (Martin, 2000 ), epistemic modality (Hyland, 1998 ) and metadiscourse markers (Crismore, 1989 ; Hyland, 2005 ; Hyland and Tse, 2008 ). The term metadiscourse has been proposed by Harris ( 1959 ) to describe how texts’ recipients perceive a piece of writing as intended by writers or speakers. As noted by Hyland ( 2005 ), metadiscourse refers to ‘self-reflective expressions used to negotiate interactional meanings in a text, assisting the writer (or speaker) to express a viewpoint and engage with readers as members of a particular community’ (p. 37). It is the umbrella term that includes linguistic elements used to establish a rapport between the writer and reader and signal the writer’s stance. Stance involves the writer’s position or attitude towards the content being discussed. Stance can be studied from the perspectives of evaluation, attitude, appraisal theory and epistemic modality (Xie et al., 2024 ). Evaluation performs three functions: (a) it expresses a language user’s opinion and reflects the value system of people and their community; (b) it constructs and maintains relations between producer and receiver of the language; and (c) it organises discourse. Appraisal and attitude are related concepts in that both refer to linguistic features language users utilise to express their subjective attitude towards an entity. The words horrible and fantastic are typical examples. Epistemic modality refers to speakers or authors’ confidence or lack of confidence about their message, which can be expressed through hedges and boosters (Pearson and Abdollahzadeh, 2023 ).

There is a dearth of studies that have examined metadiscourse markers in the argumentative writing of EFL and ESL students (El-Dakhs, 2020 ; Papangkorn and Phoocharoensil, 2021 ; Yoon, 2021 ). Though some research (cf. Zare-ee and Kuar, 2012 ) showed that there are differences in writing between male and female EFL writers, only few (Aziz et al., 2016 ) have explored the distribution of metadiscourse markers in argumentative essays written by male and female writers. This necessitates further exploration of this area, especially if some researchers such as El-Dakhs ( 2020 ) and Yoon ( 2021 ) suggest that topic choice may affect students’ utilisation of metadiscourse markers. Further, Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ) explain that the use of metadiscourse resources may differ across gender and discipline and that the relationship between gender and language is never predictable. Hence, we chose to analyse essays written by Saudi male and female EFL students on a gender-sensitive topic like the superiority of either gender in driving cars. Middle Eastern women are expected to be less assertive when they argue for themselves (cf. Zare-ee and Kuar, 2012 ). Alanazi et al., ( 2023 ) reported that though Saudi women are allowed to play more powerful roles than before, they ‘still perceive themselves as lacking in assertiveness and leadership skills compared to men’ (p. 3).

There are a number of social factors that forced Saudi women to develop a less assertive personality. Before the new reforms, for example, Saudi women were not allowed to travel without the permission of a male guardian (Alanazi et al., 2023 ). As for women’s right to drive cars, Saudi women were not permitted to drive for decades. Although Saudi women were given the chance to hold high-status occupations such as doctors, managers and academics, they had to rely on a male chaperone or driver to get them around (Saleh and Malibari, 2021 ). The ban on car driving by women was lifted in 2018 following King Salman’s 2017 statement (BBC, 2017 ). In addition, as part of the Saudi 2030 Vision, the Saudi government encouraged women to drive, issued a number of legislative reforms and launched a few programmes to ensure women’s empowerment and equality with men (Saudi Vision 2030, 2023 ). When the researchers were collecting the data for the present study, more than 3 years passed and as most of the community allowed their female relatives to drive, there were a few Saudi citizens who were reluctant and doubtful of the whole experience. Thus, the topic of who is better at driving cars is a bit sensitive and debatable nowadays. Based on the argument above, gender, topic and stance choice may have an effect on the type, frequency and distribution of interactional metadiscourse resources. Thus, the present study addresses the following questions:

How do Saudi EFL students of male and female writers use interactional metadiscourse markers in their argumentative writing about car driving?

How do Saudi EFL students use interactional metadiscourse markers when writing about a gender-sensitive topic?

How do male writers use metadiscourse markers to argue in favour of their own driving or in favour of women driving?

How do female writers use metadiscourse markers to argue in favour of their own driving or in favour of men driving?

Review of literature

Recent research on the use of interactional metadiscourse markers by EFL writers has focused more on research articles (Al-Zubeiry and Assaggaf, 2023 ), including abstracts (Alghazo et al., 2021 ; Assassi, 2023 ; Assassi and Merghmi, 2023 ) and discussion sections (Asadi et al., 2023 ; Merghmi and Hoadjli, 2024 ), dissertations and theses (Fendri, 2020 ; Jabeen et al., 2023 ), virtual lectures (Rabab’ah et al., 2024 ), etc. However, a small number of studies have explored interactional metadiscourse markers in argumentative writing by undergraduates. In addition, studies examining the distribution of interactional metadiscourse markers in writings by both genders considered reviews, opinion columns, dissertation acknowledgements, consultations and disciplines. This section elaborates on the findings of some key studies.

Studies on the use of metadiscourse markers in argumentative writing

Studies on metadiscourse use in argumentative writing have been conducted by Mahmood et al. ( 2017 ), Papangkorn and Phoocharoensil ( 2021 ) and El-Dakhs ( 2020 ). Researchers examined the frequency and distribution of metadiscourse markers in relation to some variables such as those of proficiency (El-Dakhs, 2020 ; Handayani et al., 2020 ; Yoon, 2021 ), nativeness (El-Dakhs, 2020 ; Lee and Deakin, 2016 ; Papangkorn and Phoocharoensil, 2021 ), learning context (El-Dakhs, 2020 ), topic variation (Yoon, 2021 ) and first language (L1) differences (Yoon, 2021 ). Some researchers such as El-Dakhs ( 2020 ) recommend exploring other factors such as culture, prompts and essay types.

Considering topic selection as a variable, Yoon ( 2021 ) examined metadiscourse features in writing samples by EFL students with different L1 backgrounds (i.e. Chinese, Korean and Japanese). Besides L1 differences and topic choice, the last variable that has been examined was the effect of L2 proficiency (A2, B1.1 and B1.2) on students’ use of interactional markers. Students were asked to write about two topics: the importance for college students to have a part-time job and banning smoking at restaurants. The researcher’s analysis of the data showed no significant two-way interaction effect between L1 background and L2 proficiency nor between L2 proficiency and topic. However, Yoon ( 2021 ) demonstrates a significant interaction between different topics and L1 differences. Since El-Dakhs ( 2020 ) and Yoon ( 2021 ) drew attention to the effect of topic choice as a variable, there is a need to explore the effect of a gender-sensitive topic on undergraduates’ argumentative essays with a focus on stance selection. Additionally, the importance of the present study stems from the fact that there are few studies that have addressed the use of metadiscourse markers with respect to topic and stance variation.

Gender-based differences in the use of interactional metadiscourse markers

Previous studies (Morris, 1998 ; Zare-ee and Kuar, 2012 ) focusing on differences in writing between male and female ESL students show that female writers in general perform better than male writers and more specifically in terms of their adherence to writing guidelines. However, Zare-ee and Kuar ( 2012 ) and Yeganeh and Ghoreyshi ( 2015 ) argue that male EFL Iranian writers are more assertive and argumentative in their writing compared to female students. Zare-ee and Kuar ( 2012 ) explain that the difficulty in expressing a more assertive attitude is mainly because of cultural reasons, where Iranian women are expected to be less talkative and a bit submissive.

Research addressing the role of gender in the use of metadiscourse markers has been conducted with undergraduates (Mokhtar et al., 2021 ; Pasaribu, 2017 ), professional writers (Latif and Rasheed, 2020 ; Zadeh et al., 2015 ), EFL males and females writing argumentative (Aziz et al., 2016 ) and personal essays (Puspita and Suhandano, 2023 ). More importantly, Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ) have investigated metadiscourse resources in reviews written by natives of both genders. In other words, they have analysed reviews of philosophy and biology books written by male and female reviewers. The books themselves are written by professional writers of both genders. Nevertheless, despite the many studies on gender and metadiscourse markers, such studies have revealed conflicting results.

As some (Latif and Rasheed, 2020 ; Mokhtar et al., 2021 ; Zadeh et al., 2015 ) found that male writers use boosters more than female writers, others (Pasaribu, 2017 ; Latif and Rasheed, 2020 ) reported that females hedge more than males. Nonetheless, Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ) and Puspita and Suhandano ( 2023 ) note that male writers hedge more when they write a review or a personal essay. In addition, Pasaribu ( 2017 ) argues that males foreground themselves in academic writing. Further, Zadeh et al. ( 2015 ) reported that female writers used a more engaging style compared to male writers. Moreover, Azlia ( 2022 ) notes that female speakers employed hedges, boosters and attitudinal resources more than male speakers in TED Talks (i.e. talk videos by influential people). In terms of disciplines, Azher et al. ( 2023 ) argued that professional female writers hedged more in social sciences, whereas males used more boosters in humanities. In addition, Farahanynia and Nourzadeh ( 2023 ) found that engagement and attitude markers were commonly used by female researchers in applied linguistics. On the other hand, boosters and self-mentions were significantly found in male writers’ research articles in the same discipline. Nevertheless, Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ) and Zadeh et al. ( 2015 ) claim that male writers use engagement markers more than female writers when they write about biology and translation. Moreover, Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ) state that male reviewers produce more evaluative critiques when they review writings by male writers. This illustrates that topic choice, discipline and stance towards or against one gender play a role in the frequency and distribution of metadiscourse markers in writings by both gender members.

Studies on the use of interactional metadiscourse markers by Arabs

Studies on the use of interactional metadiscourse markers by Arabs have focused on professional writers (Alghazo et al., 2021 ; Alsubhi, 2016 ) and postgraduates (Ahmed and Maros, 2017 ; Alotaibi, 2018 ; Fendri, 2020 ; Merghmi and Hoadjli, 2024 ). They considered the genres of column writing, academic consultations, research article abstracts, dissertation acknowledgements, dissertation discussion sections, full dissertations and internship reports. Speaking of gender as a variable in acknowledgements, Alotaibi ( 2018 ) reported that there are no differences between the two genders in terms of boosters and attitudinal resources. However, Saudi female writers used boosters more in recognition of moral support, whereas men utilised boosting devices more frequently when they acknowledged academic assistance. The opposite is true in case of both genders’ use of attitude markers. Saudi females used attitude markers more in thanking for academic assistance. Moreover, Alsubhi ( 2016 ) notes that Saudi male writers hedge more when they write a column. Yet, Alsubhi ( 2016 ) found that female columnists used self-mentions and engagement markers more than male columnists. In addition, Ahmed and Maros ( 2017 ) state that females used hedging devices more than males in verbal consultations. Further, focusing on the discussion sections in applied linguistics master’s theses, Merghmi and Hoadjli, ( 2024 ) reported that boosters are mainly associated with Algerian male postgraduates, whereas hedges are linked with their female counterparts. Focusing on genre as a variable, Fendri ( 2020 ) found that Tunisian EFL academic writers used hedges more in dissertations but employed more of self-mentions, engagement resources and attitudinal lexis in internship reports. As for language as a variable, English abstracts include more of hedges and engaging resources compared to those written in Arabic (Alghazo et al., 2021 ). As shown above, no study has explored the use of interactional metadiscourse markers by EFL Arab college students.

Based on the review above, only one study (i.e. Yoon, 2021 ) explored the use of interactional metadiscourse markers in relation to two different neutral topics. However, there is only one (Aziz’s et al., 2016 ) that focused on gender differences in using such markers in argumentative essays by EFL students. Further, there is only one important study by Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ) that explored the use of metadiscourse resources across gender and disciplines. Hence, because of this methodological gap, there is a need to examine differences between male and female writers in using metadiscourse markers in relation to a gender-sensitive topic, especially if the topic is about one gender’s ability in driving cars. Hence, this study aims at exploring the use of metadiscourse markers across genders and stances on a gender-sensitive topic.

The methodology used in this study was both quantitative and qualitative, a mixed-methods approach. In the quantitative analysis, we looked at the frequency of metadiscourse markers, while in the qualitative stage, we explored the context in which each metadiscourse marker occurred to code each marker with respect to interactional metadiscourse categories. In the qualitative phase, we also interpreted the occurrence of the most frequent metadiscourse markers. In other words, the explanatory sequential mixed methods model was selected because the phase of interpretation of significant occurrences followed that of counting frequencies (Toyon, 2021 ).

Participants

A total of 144 (59 males and 85 females) undergraduate students majoring in English translation participated in the study. During their intermediate and high school years, they all studied English as a foreign language as a compulsory subject. In other words, participants received an average of around 6 years of English instruction.

Data collection tool

To investigate how the participants employed metadiscourse markers, a writing task on a gender-sensitive topic was given. The writing task took the form of an argumentative essay, consisting of four paragraphs in which students had to argue whether Saudi men drive better than Saudi women or whether Saudi women drive better than Saudi men. The students were required to write an argumentative essay (i.e. an introduction, two body paragraphs, a conclusion) of no less than 400 words on that trendy topic and choose a stance and present arguments that would convince the reader (their instructor) as to why Saudi men are superior drivers to women and vice versa. The corpus was collected during the Autumn Semester of 2021 when students took this task as part of their final exam for the course of Academic Writing (TRAJ 221), offered as a compulsory course to Level-Four students.

Data collection procedure

Prior to the final exam, students received instruction in different types of writings including the argumentative essay, mainly on how they develop and organise ideas, but they did not receive any explicit instruction in using metadiscourse markers. Further, before starting the procedure of data collection, students of all groups were given a writing exam of a different argumentative topic to make sure that there were no significant differences between the groups in terms of their writing ability. Essays were corrected by experienced writing instructors. Students’ scores were analysed using Independent Samples t Test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Results of the statistical tests are given in the Results Section.

After the essays had been collected, they were typed by the researchers and sorted according to the stance taken by the writers, i.e. into four sub-corpora. The following table shows the details of these corpora.

As illustrated in Table 1 , the corpus compiled was composed of 144 essays and 46,453 tokens (i.e. the total number of words in the corpus). The essays were written by 59 males and 85 females. The total number of words in the corpus by male writers is 14,888 words, and the total number of that of female writers is 31,565 words. Table 1 also shows the number of word tokens and types (i.e. unique word forms in a corpus) in each sub-corpus.

Apparently, the number of participants contributing to the corpus of male writers (i.e. 59 students) is smaller than that of female writers (i.e. 85 students). Hence, the number of words in the corpus of male writers is also proportionally smaller than the corpus of female writers. This is mainly because the number of male students registering for the course is smaller than that of female students. To account for such differences, the researchers normalised frequencies by dividing the raw frequencies of tokens by the number of words in a corpus; and then, multiplying the total by 1000 words.

Analytical framework

Hyland’s ( 2005 ) analytical framework was used to examine metadiscourse use. In spite of the subjective nature of metadiscourse identification, Hyland’s ( 2005 ) model has proved its objectivity and comprehensiveness. Researchers (cf. Alghazo et al., 2023 ; Alqahtani and Abdelhalim, 2020 ; Peng and Zheng, 2021 ; inter alia) relied heavily on this framework for their metadiscourse research. Hyland’s ( 2005 ) model of interaction is made up of two dimensions: interactive and interactional. The interactive dimension is concerned with guiding the reader through the text using transitions (i.e. expressing relations between clauses using in addition , but , etc.), frame markers (e.g. markers referring to discourse acts such as to sum up , finally , etc.), endophoric markers (e.g. markers referring to different information mentioned in different parts of a text such as see the table below , as noted above , etc.), evidentials (i.e. markers referring to information sources, e.g. according to , X stated , etc.) and code glosses (i.e. markers clarifying meaning, e.g. such as , in other words , etc.). However, the interactional dimension involves the reader in the argument through the use of hedges (i.e. markers that withhold one’s commitment towards a proposition, e.g. may , perhaps , etc.), boosters (i.e. markers that emphasise certainty in a proposition, e.g. certainly , definitely , etc.), attitude markers (i.e. resources used to express one’s attitude towards a proposition, e.g. I agree , surprisingly , etc.), self-mentions (i.e. resources that give explicit reference to the text’s author(s), e.g. we , I , etc.) and engagement markers (i.e. resources meant to establish a relationship with the reader, e.g. note, consider, etc.). Since the latter dimension is concerned with reader-writer interaction, it has been the focus of many studies (see Hyland, 2000 , 2005 ; Park and Oh, 2018 ). By the same token, the focus of this study is only on interactional discourse resources.

Analytical software

The data were analysed with the concordance software, AntConc, developed by Laurence Anthony, which permitted counting frequencies of hits and examining context as it proved to be necessary to do so because not all hits had metadiscourse value. For instance, the word ‘pretty,’ which could have been counted as an attitude marker, was in fact a booster in the sentence: It is easier for them to master it pretty quickly. Another example is the word ‘way’ which was found to be a booster in the sentence: Men are way better at driving. The researchers used mainly the Word List Feature, which provides information on word frequency and the Keyword-in-Context Feature, which helps in showing concordances or contexts of words in question (Anthony, 2022 ). The Programme was used by several researchers (cf. Ardhianti et al., 2023 ; Khattak et al., 2023 ) in their metadiscourse analysis.

Reliability

The two researchers initially coded 25% of the data (i.e. the corpus of essays written by male Saudis). For this sub-corpus, the categorisation of words and their frequency results have been verified and checked against reliable resources on Hyland’s ( 2005 ) Model of Metadiscourse Markers. However, 20% (i.e. part of the written corpus by female Saudis) of the data was used to measure inter-rater reliability. Inter-rater reliability is defined as the extent to which two coders (i.e. the researchers) agree on assigning the same code to the same data item (Krippendorff, 2004 ). Cohen’s kappa was used to achieve inter-rater reliability. It is calculated by counting instances of agreement and disagreement given by both coders. In other words, it helps in computing the average number of agreements for a certain amount of data. Cohen’s kappa was selected because it reduces the possibility of assigning the same category to the same item by mere chance.

The results showed that the researchers agreed to include 1215 of the tokens and excluded 107 of them. Nevertheless, the first researcher included 64 of the occurrences, whereas the second chose to include only 34. Results of Cohen’s kappa (0.647) showed substantial agreement. Disagreement between researchers was on coding some words which have been coded differently by previous researchers such as cannot as a booster (Yoon and Römer, 2020 ) or as a hedge (Hyland, 2005 ), specifically as a code gloss (Hyland, 2005 ) or as a booster (Yoon and Römer, 2020 ), should as a hedge (Hyland, 2005 ) or as a booster (Macintyre, 2013 ; Yoon and Römer’s, 2020 ), find as an engagement marker (Hyland, 2005 ) or as a booster (Yoon and Römer’s, 2020 ), still as a transition marker (Hyland, 2005 ) or as a booster (Macintyre, 2013 ), see as think and see as find . However, as mentioned above, we followed Hyland’s Model and checked context in case of any doubts.

Data analysis

The basic features of the data in the study, such as minimum, maximum, skewness, kurtosis, mean and standard deviation (M ± SD), were described using descriptive statistics. Secondly, inferential statistics was used to measure the difference between the writing groups in the study. First, prior to conducting any statistical analysis, the assumptions of parametric statistics were inspected using the Shapiro-Wilk test, which was used to check the statistical significance of the normal distribution of continuous variables. Depending on the outcomes of the test, parametric or non-parametric statistics were used.

More importantly, in the present study, Independent Samples t Test, an inferential statistical test (Ruxton, 2006 ), was used to compare the means of both groups of participants (i.e. male and female writers). Independent Samples t Test is essential to make sure that there were no significant differences between male and female students in terms of their writing ability based on a test given to them before starting the process of data collection. Independent T Test was also performed to determine whether or not there was a statistically significant difference in the number of words (i.e. boosters, attitude markers, hedges, engagement markers and self-mentions) used by the two groups of male and female writers in support of their point of view. Additionally, we used one-way ANOVA, another inferential statistical test (Alexander et al., 2019 ), to compare the four independent samples (i.e. the four groups of writers) in terms of their writing ability. If a significant difference between the four groups is found, the LSD (least significant difference) test will be used. It will help pinpoint exactly which groups are different from each other. It does this by figuring out the smallest difference between any two groups’ averages that will be considered statistically significant (Ruxton, 2010 ). ANOVA test was also used to determine whether or not there was a statistically significant difference in the number of words (i.e. boosters, attitude markers, hedges, engagement markers and self-mentions) used by the four groups of writers in support of their point of view. P values that are less than 0.05 were considered statistically significant.

With large enough sample sizes per group (>30 or 40), the violation of the normality assumption should not cause major problems (Pallant, 2020 ); this implies that we can use parametric procedures even when the data are not normally distributed (Elliott and Woodward, 2007 ). In other words, if we have samples consisting of hundreds of observations, we can ignore the distribution of the data (Altman and Bland, 1995 ). In addition, according to the central limit theorem, the sampling distribution tends to be normal in large samples (>30 or 40) regardless of the shape of the data (Field, 2009 ). In contrast, a distribution is considered normal if it has skewness indices of less than 2 and kurtosis values of less than 7 (West et al., 1995 ). We used kurtosis and skewness to examine if the data were normally distributed for all the variables in the study to compare between males ( n = 59) and females ( n = 85). The results showed that all skewness values were less than 2, and all kurtosis values were less than 7 for all the variables, so the parametric T test was used (see Table 2 below).

To make sure that the two groups of male and female writers were equivalent, Independent Samples t Test was performed and the results illustrate that male writers have a mean score of (16.85 ± 6.232) compared to that of (18.29 ± 3.386) by female writers with a small difference of 1.44 out of 25 degrees. This indicates that there was no significant difference between male and female writers in terms of their writing ability before starting the procedure of data collection. Table 3 below is illustrative.

As for comparing the four groups in terms of their writing ability, assumptions of parametric statistics were considered for the four groups: (a) males writing in favour of males: n = 39, (b) males writing for females: n = 20, (c) females arguing for males: n = 19 and (d) females in support of female drivers: n = 66. The results showed that all skewness values were less than 2, and all kurtosis values were less than 7 for all the variables, so the data were approximately normally distributed among the four groups (see Table 4 below). Hence, the researchers used the parametric test of ANOVA to compare the four groups in terms of their writing ability.

Table 5 below shows that the test result of ANOVA is (F-ANOVA = 1.685, p = 0.047 < 0.05). It indicates that there was a significant difference between the four groups of writers with regard to their writing ability. After finding a significant difference between some groups using ANOVA, the LSD test was used to figure out the difference between which two groups’ averages would be considered statistically significant (Ruxton, 2010 ). Further, pairwise tests showed that the group of male writers arguing for female writers had the lowest mean score (15.70 ± 5.849) with a significant difference between it and that of females favouring women’s driving (18.38 ± 3.048). However, this would not have any effect on students’ use of metadiscourse markers, as previous researchers (El-Dakhs, 2020 ; Yoon, 2021 ) note that there is no significant relationship between language proficiency and students’ use of metadiscourse markers.

Gender differences in writers’ use of interactional metadiscourse markers

Independent Samples t Tests were performed again to determine whether or not there was a statistically significant difference in the number of words (i.e. boosters, attitude markers, hedges, engagement markers and self-mentions) utilised by male and female writers to support their point of view. Table 6 below shows that there was a statistically significant difference ( p < 0.05) in using boosters, attitude markers, hedges and self-mentions by male and female writers in favour of female writers. Male writers scored 12.59 ± 6.349 in using boosters compared to female writers whose score is 22.34 ± 7.893 and achieved a score of 15.24 ± 5.937 in employing attitude markers in comparison to female writers whose mean score is 24.01 ± 8.430. The same applies to the use of hedges and self-mentions. Female writers employed hedges (females: 10.33 ± 4.917; males: 8.51 ± 4.337) and self-mentions (females: 5.39 ± 3.704; males: 3.59 ± 3.696) more than male writers. However, there was no significant difference between the two groups in their use of engagement markers. It is important to note that measures of association (Eta Square, η 2 ) were performed to find the effect size. Cohen ( 1988 ) defined effects as small at ( η 2 = 0.01), medium at ( η 2 = 0.06) and large at ( η 2 = 0.14). Quantitative results are supplemented with qualitative and contextual analysis given in this section.

As advanced above, attitude markers were more commonly used by writers of each gender. Using normalised frequencies, there are 54,33 occurrences per 1000 words in males’ essays and 64,66 instances in females’ writings. Boosters came second (i.e. males: 44,26; females: 60,16), whereas the category of hedges (i.e. males: 29,95; females: 27,81) was ranked third. Self-mentions (i.e. males: 11,95; females: 14,50) came fourth and engagement markers (i.e. males: 11,08; females: 8,07) occupied the last place (see Table 8 in the Appendix ). As shown above, normalised frequencies confirmed T test results that there were differences between male and female writers in favour of the latter group in terms of their use of self-mentions, boosters and attitude markers.

To show a certain attitude towards the suggested topic, ‘good,’ ‘better,’ and ‘even’ are very common in essays by writers of both genders. Nevertheless, ‘easily,’ ‘important,’ ‘long,’ and ‘hard’ were preferred by male writers, whereas ‘bad,’ ‘important,’ and ‘careful’ were more utilised by female writers. As male writers wanted to prove that driving is hard and cannot be done easily by women (Examples 1 and 2), female writers’ attitude is best reflected by attitudinal lexis that manifests importance and which gender has proven to be careful in driving (Examples 3 and 4).

Firstly men are better at focusing and do not get distracted easily in my opinion. Plus, cars are made for men mostly, so women will be having a hard time driving on the streets because I think most of them are short, they cannot see the mirrors of the car.

(Male for males)

In my point of view the men drive better than women and men can control his car in any hard scenario and he can take care of his car.

In conclusion, I see that women have better skills in what is related to driving a car. Women responsibility while driving a car will perform less accidents. Moreover, that awareness that women have about never thought of drifting is strongly important .

(Female for females)

Another important thing is women have more discipline which means they can control themselves more than men who are known to have problems when it comes to controlling their feeling.

Concerning boosters, if writers wanted to boost their claims, females employed ‘think,’ ‘believe,’ ‘many,’ ‘a lot,’ and ‘all.’ On the other hand, males selected ‘more,’ ‘a lot,’ ‘know,’ ‘say,’ ‘think,’ and ‘all.’

I think men can drive better than women for two reasons.

A lot of people think that women cannot control a car without giving them a chance to try.

We did not see many women had car accidents.

In addition, both genders tended to use ‘all’ as a boosting device, but it has been used differently by both groups. For example, female writers generalised using ‘all’ to describe that females took all driving lessons, know all driving aspects and that all females cause fewer accidents, and all reports have proven that (Example 8). On the other hand, males used ‘all’ to emphasise that all men, with no exception, know how to drive better than women (Example 10) and learn it faster (Example 9).

All reports proved their ability to drive a car better than men.

All of men 1 week is the time for learning them.

We all know that we drive much more better than women do, but women refuse admitting it.

As for hedging by both writer groups, males and females preferred to use ‘can,’ ‘some,’ and ‘most.’ It is important to note that ‘most’ has been used by female writers to argue that most males use cell phones while driving, do not know driving rules and thus cause car accidents. On the other hand, for men, most women are slow at driving. Females’ frequent use of ‘can’ as a modal expressing ability illustrates how cautious they are, as manifested in ‘Women can do a lot ’ and ‘Women can do many things at one time.’ Regarding self-foregrounding, the results revealed that male and female writers preferred to use ‘I’ and ‘my’ more than other self-mentions. However, ‘me’ and ‘we’ (Example 11) were ranked third in males’ and females’ essays, respectively.

We need to drive to go to our work and to do our tasks.

To engage their readers, both groups of readers used ‘you’ more commonly than other markers and ‘we’ came second in writings by males, whereas ‘should’ came after ‘you’ in females’ essays. Further, ‘questions’ were mainly used by male writers. On the other hand, ‘your’ was more frequently used by female writers as an engaging word. Though there was no difference between both groups in terms of the use of engaging resources, female writers preferred to use ‘should’ as a deontic modal (Example 12), and males tended to use questions (Example 13) more often as they wanted to include their readers as participants in the argument (Hyland, 2005 ). However, they did not expect their readers to confirm their observations or to answer their questions because they assumed that such rhetorical questions tapped into common knowledge. On the other hand, ‘should’ was employed by females to pull readers into discourse at some important points and to refer to common knowledge.

Of course, that every capable adult should be allowed to practice one of their basic rights, which is driving.

Why people think that men drive better than women ?

The effect of gender, stance, and topic on writers’ use of interactional metadiscourse markers

As for differences in using metadiscourse markers by the four groups of writers with regard to a certain stance, ANOVA test was used again. Table 7 below illustrates the average number of words used and the standard deviation for each of the four groups of writers. ANOVA test results revealed that there were statistically significant differences between the four groups of writers ( P < 0.05) in the number of boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions, and hedging words used in support of their point of view on the topic of driving cars. Nevertheless, no significant difference was found between the four groups in using engagement resources ( p > 0.05). This is due to the convergence of the mean values by small differences. Quantitative results are supplemented with qualitative and contextual analysis given in this section.

As illustrated above, Post-Hoc comparison tests showed significant differences between all pairwise groups in their use of attitude markers. In other words, the group of females arguing for male drivers scored the highest mean (i.e. 29.79 ± 10.649), whereas the group of male writers supporting men’s driving scored the lowest (i.e. 13.77 ± 3.943). Results of normalised frequencies also showed that the former group used attitude markers more than others. More specifically, they used attitudinal resources 75,86 times for every 1000 words. As for groups’ utilisation of boosting devices, Post-Hoc comparison tests and ANOVA showed significant differences between all pairwise groups except for the group of females who favoured women’s driving and the other group of female writers arguing for male drivers, as reflected by their mean scores. Results revealed that female writers arguing for female drivers scored higher (i.e. 22.82 ± 7.870) in comparison to the other two groups of male writers. Likewise, significant differences were found between the female group who wrote in support of male drivers (i.e. 20.68 ± 7.959) and the other groups of male writers. On the other hand, the group of males arguing for male drivers scored the lowest mean (i.e. 11.26 ± 4.284) in comparison to the other three groups. Further, there were significant differences between that group and the other group of males arguing for female drivers (15.20 ± 8.691). Results of normalisation confirmed that the group of females writing in favour of females used boosting devices more than others. That is, they used 62,47 boosters in every 1000 words (see Table 8 in the Appendix ).

Additionally, Post-Hoc comparison results on the use of hedges by the four groups showed significant differences between all the pairwise groups except for the two groups writing in support of women’s driving because their means are closer to one another. As shown in Table 8 in the Appendix , normalisation results showed that the two groups arguing for men’s driving had nearly similar normalised frequencies estimated to be 34 hedges in every 1000 words. However, in terms of statistically significant differences, the female group arguing for male drivers scored the highest average score (i.e. 13.47 ± 5.348) compared to that of males writing in favour of male drivers who scored the lowest mean (i.e. 7.56 ± 3.676). In other words, there was a significant statistical difference between the two groups (see Table 7 ).

As for utilising self-mentions by the four groups, normalisation results showed that the two groups who argued for their gender had almost similar normalised frequencies (i.e. 15 self-mentions in every 1000 words). However, Post-Hoc comparison tests showed significant differences between the group of female writers arguing for females and that of male writers writing for males in favour of the former group who obtained a higher average score (i.e. 5.65 ± 3.466). Finally, no Post- Hoc comparison tests were needed for engagement markers because there were no significant differences between the four groups of writers. However, after normalising frequencies, data revealed that the group of males arguing for men’s driving used engagement markers more than others. More specifically, they employed 13,40 markers in every 1000 words.

In general, attitude markers were more common than other metadicourse markers followed by boosters, hedges, self-mentions and finally engaging words in three writing groups (i.e. males writing in support of male drivers, males arguing for female drivers and females writing in favour of males). In other words, in terms of attitudinal lexis, there were 62,61 occurrences per 1000 words in males’ essays arguing for male drivers, 43,09 instances in males’ essays supporting women’s driving, 75,86 examples in females’ essays in favour of male drivers and 61,19 instances per 1,000 words in females’ writing in support of females (see Table 8 in the Appendix ). Frequent attitude markers employed by females supporting male drivers are ‘good,’ ‘better,’ ‘even,’ and ‘fast.’ In general, females’ assertive attitude and positive comments are emphasised through their use of positive adjectives such as ‘careful,’ ‘important,’ and ‘fast’ (Example 14).

I believe that women are excellent because they are very strict to the rules.

(Female for males)

As for boosting words, there were 51,18 boosters in males’ essays arguing for male drivers, 34,85 examples in males’ writing for females, 52,67 boosting instances in essays by females arguing for males, and 62,47 boosters per 1000 words in essays by females supporting females. However, females arguing for female drivers used boosters more than attitudinal words. The female group of writers writing in favour of Saudi female drivers preferred to use ‘many,’ ‘a lot,’ and ’think’ to show commitment to their viewpoint. On the other hand, the other group of female writers used ‘many,’ ‘all,’ ‘know,’ ‘more,’ and ‘think’ more commonly than other boosters. In general, boosting resources such as ‘many,’ ‘a lot,’ ‘all,’ ‘more,’ etc. are associated with positive comments (Examples 15 and 16). In addition, boosters such as ‘think,’ ‘believe,’ ‘noticed,’ and ‘know’ were used with self-mentions (Example 14).

Men drive better than women for many reasons such as confidence, experience and the ability to control the car at difficult situations.

They follow rules more than men.

Regarding hedging words, there were 34,39 words in essays by males supporting men’s driving, 23,92 instances in essays by males in support of females, 34,31 hedging devices per 1000 words in females’ essays favouring males, and 25,80 instances in essays by females preferring women’s driving. Hedging words such as ‘can,’ ‘some,’ and ‘most’ were more frequently used by the groups writing in support of male drivers (Examples 17 & 18).

Men can handle different things better when it comes to driving.

Men can be more used to traffic jams and tough situations over women.

As for self-mentions, there were 15,97 examples in essays by males for male drivers and 15,47 instances in essays by females for women’s driving. Though normalised frequencies showed no big difference between the two groups, statistical tests revealed that the latter group outperformed the former. Female writers arguing for females employed ‘I,’ ‘my,’ and ‘we’ (Example 19) more frequently, whereas male writers writing for males utilised ‘I,’ ‘my,’ and ‘me’ (Example 20) more than other self-mentions.

In the end and because all what is above I think men are better driver.

The research questions aim at exploring gender differences between EFL male and female writers in using interactional metadiscourse markers. Further, the focus of the present study is on investigating such differences with respect to different viewpoints on a gender-sensitive topic. Generally speaking, since EFL writers argue for a stance and support it with examples and evidence, attitude markers, boosters and hedges are more commonly utilised than other interactional resources. The type of essay, i.e. being an argumentative essay, dictates the type of markers found in students’ essays (El-Dakhs, 2020 ; Hong and Cao, 2014 ). Thus, attitude markers are the most commonly used, whereas engagement markers are the least to be employed in argumentative essays. This finding is consistent with that of Puspita and Suhandano’s ( 2023 ), Azlia’s ( 2022 ), Merghmi and Hoadjli’s ( 2024 ) and Alotaibi’s ( 2018 ) who note that engaging resources are the least to be used in personal essays, TED Talks, discussion sections in theses and acknowledgements. Apparently, EFL students focus more on expressing their stance with ensured objectivity (Merghmi and Hoadjli, 2024 ) than engaging their readers (El-Dakhs, 2020 ).

For the first research question, the results reveal that female writers used rhetorical resources of self-mentions, hedges, boosters and attitude markers more significantly than male writers. Such results are inconsistent with previous research by Latif and Rasheed ( 2020 ) and Azher et al. ( 2023 ), who state that females hedge more than males and males use boosters more than females; Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ), who claim that males use hedges and boosters more than females; Alsubhi ( 2016 ), who found that Saudi male columnists hedge more than female column writers; and Farahanynia and Nourzadeh ( 2023 ), who argue that professional male writers employ self-mentions and boosters more than female writers in applied linguistics. However, such results reflect Pasaribu’s ( 2017 ), who notes that females outperform males in their use of hedges and boosters; Puspita and Suhandano’s ( 2023 ), who reported that females employ attitudinal resources and boosters more than male writers; Merghmi and Hoadjli’s ( 2024 ), who state that female postgraduates employed self-mentions, hedges and attitudinal lexis more than their male counterparts in discussion sections; and Azlia’s ( 2022 ), who argues that females used hedges, boosters and attitude markers more than males in TED Talks. Such unexpected results can be attributed to the changes that affected the role of Saudi women as they have been given more voice and power recently. Apparently, Saudi female writers want to confirm their presence and visibility in the argument through common use of self-foregrounding devices and attitudinal resources (Fendri, 2020 ; Merghmi and Hoadjli, 2024 ).

Heavy use of attitude markers, hedges, boosters and personal markers indicates a more personalised style of writing that is mainly associated with female writers (cf. Holmes, 1988 ). Further, after the Saudi Vision with its emphasis on women empowerment, women became bolder in arguing for their rights. Therefore, they used boosters more significantly than male writers to reinforce their point of view and employed positive attitude markers (e.g. good, better, careful, etc.) to emphasise praise of their own ability in driving (Herbert, 1990 ; Johnson and Roen, 1992 ).

It is important to note that females’ personalised style has been reinforced by their significant use of self-mentions (D’angelo, 2008 ) such as ‘I,’ ‘my,’ and ‘we.’ As opposed to males who employed ‘I,’ ‘my,’ and ‘me’ more commonly than other personal markers, Saudi female writers included themselves and other females to voice their opinion through the use of ‘we’ for the purpose of promoting solidarity (Alotaibi, 2018 ; Aziz et al., 2016 ). This also manifests that female writers want to convey a sense of togetherness, selflessness and cooperation (Aziz et al., 2016 ; Mason, 1994 ) to the reader, while males prefer to express an aura of authority and dominance by distancing themselves from their reader (Mulac et al., 2001 ).

Focusing on boosters, both groups of males and females preferred to employ boosters that strengthen a common belief through using ‘all’ and ‘think’ more than those showing solidarity (i.e. shared knowledge with the reader) such as ‘really,’ ‘actually,’ and ‘certainly,’ which are chiefly used by females. Using belief boosters indicates that both groups are convinced of their arguments. Such results contradict Mokhtar et al.’s ( 2021 ) and Holmes’ ( 1990 ) who note that males show some tendency towards boosters of solidarity. In this study, female writers are more forceful in emphasising their claims and more conscious of their readers. Additionally, as stated above, ‘think’ has been used more frequently by writers of both genders to reinforce one’s point of view. However, ‘think’ has occurred mainly with self-mentions in males’ academic essays as Saudi males establish themselves as credible sources of the driving experience and hence highlight their confidence in a judgement (Hyland and Tse, 2008 ; Mulac et al., 2001 ). On the other hand, ‘think’ is also associated with ‘people,’ ‘many,’ ‘they,’ etc. in females’ writing because female writers are more aware of others’ points of view and critiques and they are ready to refute them. In addition, they present their argument with a higher degree of assurance using belief boosters such as ‘prove’ and ‘show.’ Boosters used by females are generally associated with positive comments as highlighted by Hyland and Tse ( 2008 ). However, females’ heavy use of hedges indicates that the information discussed is presented as opinions and hence they are legible for negotiation and discussion. They respect their readers and they do not want to impose their point of view on them (Ahmed and Maros, 2017 ; Farahanynia and Nourzadeh, 2023 ; Hyland, 2005 ; Merghmi and Hoadjli, 2024 ). In general, females are more cautious (Fendri, 2020 ; Lakoff, 1973 ; Zare-ee and Kuar, 2012 ) and indirect in voicing their opinions.

As for the second question that is concerned with the effect of gender and the chosen stance on the distribution of interactional metadiscourse markers in students’ essays, the results show that a gender-sensitive topic can play a role in determining which rhetorical resources should be used the most for which stance. As reported above, the two groups of females arguing for women’s driving and men’s driving used boosters and attitude markers more significantly than the two male groups. On the other hand, the group of males writing in favour of their driving scored the least in terms of boosters and attitudes. However, the female group writing in favour of males outperformed others in terms of hedges. Further, there is no significant difference between the four groups with regard to engagement markers. More importantly, females preferring women’s driving employed self-mentions more significantly than males arguing for their driving.

Females’ significant use of boosters can be justified in terms of their desire to emphasise praise (Herbert, 1990 ; Johnson and Roen, 1992 ). Thus, boosting resources are associated with positive comments on both genders’ ability in car driving. Further, female writers used boosters more commonly with self-mentions. Apparently, female writers establish themselves as experienced individuals whose views are valued and well-considered. They are being firm in voicing their opinions regardless of which point of view might be pervasive among others. Though they are not the seniors in the field of car driving, Saudi females are more empowered nowadays and they are ready to follow an uncompromising approach no matter how the proponents of the opposite team think of them. Hence, females’ attitude is reflected in their use of positive adjectives such as ‘careful’ and ‘important.’

More importantly, the male group arguing for female drivers used boosters and attitudinal resources more than the other group of male writers to emphasise their stance. They believe that Saudi women are in need of support from males in particular. This indicates that such male drivers are aware of the opposition and the refutation they might encounter from other males. On the other hand, the group of male writers arguing for male drivers used the least of boosters and attitude markers because they believe that in a Middle Eastern society, they do not have to be that assertive in presenting their arguments. In fact, the majority of males and a great proportion of females support men’s driving. Compared to doing housework and taking care of children, driving cars is one of the tasks that traditionally belongs to the masculine domain and where men can demonstrate acts of manliness. Moreover, in Saudi Arabia, driving schools are basically operated by men and they shape its requirements. Thus, writers arguing for females are encouraged to present their arguments in a forceful manner (cf. Hyland and Tse, 2008 ).

Previous research (cf. Hyland and Tse, 2008 ) indicates that there is no direct relationship between gender and language and that topic or discipline dictates the projection of a specific identity. Similarly, in this research, hedges are not commonly used by females, whereas boosters are not frequently employed by males. Hence, females’ significant use of hedges in arguing for the opposite-gender members may suggest some correlation between language and stance. Some Saudi females arguing for men and overusing hedges as a result might be accustomed to being driven by their male family members. Their cautious nature and reluctance have been manifested through the use of hedges (Zare-ee and Kuar, 2012 ). Females’ exploitation of ‘can,’ as a modal of ability, is mainly used to refer to males’ capability in multitasking, controlling cars, concentrating, etc.; things that some female writers doubt women can do. Females arguing for males are tempted to project this gender identity as it is culturally typical and expected of them. They feel insecure and have to voice their opinion indirectly (Albaqami, 2017 ; Merghmi and Hoadjli, 2024 ). Additionally, males arguing in favour of their ability employed hedges more than the other group of male writers. This finding goes somewhat in line with Tse and Hyland’s (2008) who state that male reviewers tend to write more critical reviews and hedge if the author is a male. Further, the sensitivity of the topic and how personal it can be prompt males to use more hedges (Azizah, 2021 ). One may conclude that writers of both genders may tend to be cautious when they argue for or against males, as males are stereotyped to play dominant roles in society including academia and handling some tasks.

More importantly, the significant difference between females arguing for themselves and males writing in favour of their driving in their use of self-mentions is a bit surprising. It seems that females adopt a more personalised style especially when they argue for themselves and their rights. They want to sound firm in voicing their opinions (Hyland and Tse, 2008 ). On the other hand, males want to be objective (Alsubhi, 2016 ), and thus they do not need to use self-mentions in arguing for themselves. This shows their confidence and trust in their audience whose common knowledge will help them validate their arguments. Hence, they used engagement resources more than the other groups.

In general, in Saudi Arabia, driving cars as a task has been mainly associated with Saudi males for years. It is a sensitive topic for both genders. As Saudi females are pressurised to prove their ability in driving cars through the use of boosting devices and attitude markers, males do not feel the same pressure, and thus they do not employ a lot of boosters and attitudinal lexis to prove their point. More importantly, based on this research and previous studies, there is no specific stance marker that typically describes males’ or females’ language. Language users lean towards projecting a specific type of identity with respect to a certain discipline, topic, or stance. In argumentative writing, the use of metadiscourse resources is determined by whom you argue for and against.

The present study aims at bridging the gap and examines the effect of a gender-sensitive topic on Saudi EFL undergraduates’ use of metadiscourse markers in their argumentative writing. The results of the current study show that female writers used attitude markers, followed by boosters and hedges and finally self-mentions more than male writers. As for stance choice as a variable, it has been proven that it can influence one’s use of metadiscourse resources. The female group advocating men’s driving outperformed others in terms of hedges. However, one cannot attribute the use of hedges to females and that of boosters to males. Previous studies on the use of metadiscourse resources by both genders reveal unpredictable results. In fact, the use of one type of interactional markers by one gender is dependent on the type of topic and stance writers adopt.

Limitations and recommendations

Since this study explores the distribution of metadiscourse markers in Saudi students’ essays about a gender-sensitive topic, there are a number of limitations that should be considered in future research. First, the corpora utilised for discourse analysis are relatively small, especially the one written by male students arguing in support of females. This is mainly attributed to the fact that a few males support women’s driving. Further, the number of male students registering for the course is smaller than that of female students. Additionally, some students in some groups did not write 400 words in an essay but less. Second, only one institutional setting was selected for corpus compilation, namely King Saud University. A third limitation is that data collection was limited to one genre (i.e. argumentative writing), one gender-sensitive topic (i.e. the superiority of which gender in driving cars), and one age group. Therefore, future research should assess metadiscourse use in larger corpora containing larger pieces of writing and with different variables. Further, other institutional settings can be considered to account for cultural or regional differences. It is also possible to investigate other genres, including spoken genres, in particular debates on similar topics. In addition, metadiscourse analysis of argumentative writing by senior citizens of both genders would reveal different results. Considering that essays were collected from students under exam conditions, more relaxed settings would perhaps produce different essays than those written under time constraints and for grading purposes.

Suggestions for future research

Previous studies state that there are no certain rhetorical resources expected of one gender. Based on this study and previous research, a certain type of discourse and a specific group of topics with their respective stances dictate the kinds of rhetorical resources that should be used in writing to project a specific identity. Thus, future research is ought to explore the effect of other gender-sensitive topics on students’ writing, especially if such students live in a community where one does not expect 100% agreement on one stance. Similar topics addressing one gender’s capability in handling a specific task (e.g. occupying a leadership position) are still debatable, especially among Saudis (Alanazi et al., 2023 ). Moreover, as some have investigated the distribution and frequency of metadiscourse markers by writers of reviews of both genders across two disciplines, it would be insightful if further research examines reviews written on books of different topics if the gender of the professional book writer is revealed or hidden from the reviewer. In addition, some emphasise the significance of topic choice on the use of metadiscourse markers; thus, it would be enlightening if researchers examine the effect of choosing a gender-sensitive topic and one that is not addressing gender on writers’ use of metadiscourse resources. Further, it is recommended to explore how metadiscourse markers are employed by opinion columnists of both genders writing about women driving before and after ban lifting in 2017, as previous research shows that the type of genre determines which metadiscourse resources should be used the most by writers in support of their viewpoint. Moreover, the use of interactional metadiscourse markers in essays on a gender-sensitive topic can be explored across languages in translated or untranslated essays, as some (Alotaibi, 2018 ; Gholami et al., 2014 ) point out the Arabs do not use many interactional resources in Arabic as they do when they write in English. Thus, the role of L1 interference and cultural restrictions should be explored because Arab females are expected to hedge when they voice their opinions. However, culturally speaking, Arabs are advised to be direct when they argue for or refuse something (Alghazo et al., 2021 ; El-Dakhs et al., 2021 ). In general, since the present study proves that statistical tests can reveal significant differences in students’ use of metadiscourse rhetorical resources, it would be intriguing if future research utilises statistical measures besides normalised frequencies to draw defensible conclusions.

Pedagogical implications of the study

The findings of this study have significant implications for EFL instructors, syllabus designers and curriculum developers. They brought to our attention the significance of metadiscourse resources and the pressing need to support EFL students in gaining rhetorical knowledge in order to improve the quality of their argumentative academic writing. Saudi female writers are given more voice and power than before. However, their overuse of hedges when they argue for men’s driving denotes a less assertive nature. In light of this, the pragmatic functions of metadiscourse markers should be explicitly taught in EFL courses. Saudi EFL students should be taught how to argue effectively using boosters and attitude markers. Additionally, syllabus designers and learning material creators should think about adding metadiscourse markers to learning materials or presenting authentic English texts to students to assist them in projecting their views efficiently.

Data availability

All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].

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Acknowledgements

The authors give equal credit to the male instructors, Dr. Hamad Al-Shalawi, Mr. Abdulaziz Almuaibid and Mr. Shady Ibrahim, who participated in collecting exams of argumentative essays written by male writers. They also thank King Saud University for funding this research.

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The authors contributed equally to this paper. GM is the first and the corresponding author of the article. She designed the research, collected, analysed and interpreted the data, as well as drafted and revised the Introduction, the Review of Literature, the Data analysis Section, the Results and the Abstract. AH is the second author of the article. She participated in collecting, analysing and interpreting the data besides drafting and revising the Methodology, the Results, the Discussion, the Conclusion and the references.

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The methodology for this study was approved by the Committee of Research Ethics in Humanities and Social Sciences of King Saud University (Ethics approval number: KSU-HE-22-590).

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Before starting the procedure of data collection, the purpose of the study was explained to the participants. They were ensured that their argumentative essays can be withdrawn from the corpus upon their request and that their writing is only used for research purposes. Full written consent was obtained from students. To guarantee anonymity and confidentiality, argumentative essays have been coded with numbers to be analysed by researchers.

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Table 8 normalised frequencies of interactional metadiscourse markers in students' essays., rights and permissions.

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Al-Otaibi, G.M., Hussain, A.A. The use of interactional metadiscourse markers by Saudi EFL male and female college students: the case of a gender-sensitive topic. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 988 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03506-3

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The Best Books of Ocean Journalism , recommended by Laura Trethewey

The best books on Islands , recommended by Gavin Francis

The Best Books For Environmental Learning , recommended by Mitchell Thomashow

The best books on Summer , recommended by Melissa Harrison

The Problem of Nature Writing

New Yorker Favorites

Essay On Nature | Nature Essay for Students and Children in 500 Words

Essay On Nature – Important Points to Note

Essay On Nature – Sample 1 (250 Words)

500 Words Nature Essay

Conclusion on Nature Essay

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A Summary and Analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Nature’

Discover more from Interesting Literature

What is nature writing?

13 Essays About Nature: Use These For Your Next Assignment

1. How Happiness Is Related to Nature Connectedness

Essay About Nature

Importance of Nature

Role and Importance of Nature

Save Our Nature

Nature Conservation

FAQs on Nature Essay

Nature Essay

Importance and Role of Nature

Nature Conservation

Frequently Asked Questions on Nature Essay

What steps can we take to conserve nature?

How can we control the depletion of nature?

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Nature - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Conservation of Nature is the Solution to the Problem of Climate Change

Relationship between Humans and Animals

The Competitive Exclusion Principle: Nature’s Balancing Act

The Aqueous Rhapsody: a Whimsical Journey through the Water Cycle in Nature

Before the Flood

Nature Frosty Ballet: Unveiling the Enigma of Martian Weather and the Average Temperature on Mars

Exploring the Wonders of Abiotic Things in the World of Nature