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As a literary genre, the essay has too blurred boundaries to distinguish confidently between "essay" and "non-essay" among small literary forms. Both types of literary work can perform the functions of description, narrative and reasoning. It is shown that a specific feature of an essay, as opposed to an ascertaining discourse, can be considered the development of the author's thesis in a chain of logically constructed judgments. As a methodological technique, the essay is a complexly constructed teaching subject. To teach how to write a good essay, it is not enough to provide students with the necessary vocabulary, solid grammatical skills, and knowledge of punctuation rules. It is necessary to develop intellectual functions, a high level of critical thinking and logic, in addition to the habit of writing in a given format. This paper focuses on teaching essays as logically organised reasoning, since the violation of logic in the essay text is one of the main causes of communicative failures of writers.
The features of "big" and "small" logic of essays are considered and examples from pedagogical practice are given. The published study also considers the essay as an instrument of pedagogical measurement of students' communicative competence. The "validity" and "reliability" of the essay as a didactic test are critically evaluated. The validity of the essay, i.e., a clear idea of what exactly is being tested in this task, seems to be insufficient, since all components of communicative competence as well as general outlook and personal maturity are tested simultaneously. In addition, the task, which is carried out in the exam in a limited time, diagnoses not only the level of proficiency in the language studied, but also the properties of the candidate's central nervous system. The dilemma in trying to solve the problem of essay reliability as a language test is shown. On the one hand, "closed" testing with assessment of the formal characteristics of the text increases the reliability of the assessment, but shifts the emphasis from content to form.
On the other hand, the essay, as an "open" test, directs the evaluators' attention to the content, reducing the likelihood of a match in the experts' assessment.