Slashdot Mirror
The Age of the Essay
bluFox writes "Paul Graham, has just published a new article on the English literature and role of Essays. It is not connected to lisp or languages or hackers for a change, but still feels like a continuation of his earlier articles."
...can't beat that LISP humor!
The Army reading list
This is another area where the Internet has had a clear impact on a topic. Whereas it used to be like pulling teeth to get kids to write and submit essays, now you can't turn a corner on the web without running into one blog or another, loaded with essays on a wide range of controversial topics. While the Internet has had a clearly detrimental effect on our spelling abilities, I think it has had a correspondingly positive impact on our willingness and enthusiasm to express opinions of all kinds. Even sites like Slashdot are loaded with rants on all sorts of topics. Heck, I have a positive-karma modifier on trolls and flamebait posts, just because those threads are often the ones with the most spirited, passionate discussions. :)
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
"apropos of nothing" comes to mind
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
...'cause I just published an essay on English literature and the role of articles.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
And I agree with most of it, especially the point about taking a position and dending that. I did that a few times in both high school and university. Did well on some and failed on others. I tried to take positions that I did not agree with as it was more interesting to try and combat my own beliefs on an issue than to rehash a position so many others had done before. Now like I said, I didn't agree with the stance I took, I did it as a learning excercise, for example, I did one on heros and chose hitler. Now I did not try and defend the murder of countless jewish people, instead I looked at how Germany improved under his rule. I learned a lot about Hitler and his rise to power and some of the good things he did for Germany. Of course, the things he did wrong far outweighed the good, but it was a good way to learn something about our past. Everyone else in the class did somewhat easier things like Regan helping to bring down the Berlin wall and such.
...is that they usually seem to be about filling out a point to meet a word limit and not about getting to the point.
I think this arises because "the point" is usually nothing profound in itself so the only thing you can do to stand out is blabber on in a particularly well way.
Being a scientist I'm necessarily biased about anything that can be called an "essay". The closest thing in science is probably a review paper but that also should be as concise as possible.
I blame schools.
To start, essays are an ill fit in my life.
The proof is that I am ignorant and apathetic: I don't know how to write and essay, and I don't care.
In conclusion, essays are not a favorite of mine.
Writing complete sentences will improve your essay.
The better you become at reading, the better you become at writing. It only made sense to combine the two disciplines by requiring writing to be about things you read.
Now, having said that, I believe that once a student has achieved proficiency at writing about what they read, they should be encouraged to write about other things as well.
To quote Thoreau, "How vain it is to sit down to write when one has never stood up to live."
As to the question "Why is this on Slashdot?" I have a degree in English Literature. When I took my first job in IT, my boss told me that most IT people were an inch wide and a mile deep. Perhaps the person who posted this is trying to help some of us nerds broaden our horizons!
To quote one of the nerds from the movie "War Games" "Remember when you told me to tell you when you were acting rudely and insensitively? Well you're doing it now!"
Read any good sonnets lately?
Now I know why I like Paul Graham's essays so much. You read the essay, and you follow along with the thoughts. You never feel forced in a certain direction, or at least not for a long time. Eventually, the essay often manages to convince you of something, but it's not by force. It's because you draw your own conclusions, that may or may not agree with the author's.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
In a follow-up article, he will claim that, "Python programmers write better essays than Java programmers".
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Mind you I've haven't read Dickens since middle/high-school but I care.
It's not just the symbolism, it's the experience. I was watching some show on PBS and the host said something that I wish English teachers would have said to me. To paraphase; 'Reading a narrative is an exercise in building life experience. No one has written about that particular character at that place and time. Reading allows us to see the world through different eyes'
It makes perfect sense too. Whether it's Dickens or Dick (Philip K.) you are getting a point of view out of the book. Looking at it that way is much more rewarding. The host went on to say that reading lets you know that other people have had similar experiences and no experience is completely new.
Man, that would have helped in life. Not being a fan of fiction, I shunned most books that I was forced to read and never absorbed those experiences. Later in life I often wondered "why is this happening to me" or simply "I can't take this". I wish I would have read more as I was growing up and coming to maturity (Daniel Goleman says maturity ~ 15)
I think the reason that we were supposed to write those essays on Dickens and company were to share our view of the books, and to have us look deeper than the plot. Maybe I'm wrong, I usually am, and maybe I'm crazy... that has been proven.
Get your Unix fortune now!
But I'm pleased in a way. I have an MA in Composition and Rhetoric and one of my many jobs is grading GRE practice essays. I did about fifty this afternoon in fact. See, that's why I'm a /. junky. Essays and arguments are my life's blood.
However, I'd like to point something out to the author and it's something I see a lot of which is a misperception regarding what students are writing about in school.
Especially when people think about testing they assume that essay topics are completely inane. Well perhaps this has been true in the past, but these days I see many essay topics that do focus on very broad personal issues and encourage the students to explore things using any creativity they can come up with. So the problem that he's discussing in his essay is somewhat contrived. In fact, students are encouraged to write about unusal, quirky and personal issues even in test settings. Not only that, but some of them come up with some really beautiful work even in the constrained environment of a test session. There are limits, but it's really not that bad.
I'm trying to think of an example. Here, today I had some that were on the topic of living through a difficult experience. That's a very general topic that refers you specifically into your own personal life. I read some real beauties. Actually that wasn't GRE though. That was another class. I had a bunch of GMAT today, but that's another story as well. Those are fun in a different way.
Anyhow, it's really not so bad and I always teach the students that if you get a lousy topic you can usually write your way around it.
My MA was in Comp, but as an undergrad I did Creative Writing. Any MFAs in the house? Losers!
There's no way you can tell me that these kinds of writing courses make writing boring. If anything they can get too edgey. We used to have all kinds of hardcore sexual stuff written about other people in the class and it was like who's going to say when? I guess it depends where you go to school.
Well, I'm rambling at 4:50Am so let me just close up with this bit of writing advice. If you want to have good time as a writing major try San Diego State. They've got a sweet writing department. You won't get rich, but you probably won't regret it either.
I think that the essay rules ruined the essay.
In school we focus on the rules, in terms of how an essay should be structured, and what it should contain.
Rules like spelling and grammar ARE important, but not as important as the content. I'd rather read an easy by a brilliant person with English as a second langauge, who doesn't write very well, opposed to an essay written perfectly by a random bloke.
This is where the English class ruined the essay. It was graded on those rules, and seldom on content.
They should focus on free thinking, creative writing, as much, if not more than the structure.
I enjoy reading Paul's various works, but I'd sure rather have Arc.
After generating considerable excitement about Arc, a lot of discussion, and frequent updates to his Arc website, Paul simply went silent regarding Arc.
Yes, it's true that he'll attend conferences to give keynotes. He'll be billed as the guy behind Arc, but then his talk won't so much as give a status report.
Some have lamented that he has appparently chosen to take the cathedral approach instead of the bazaar with Arc, but I don't see any signs of a cathedral, either. For a language to stand some chance of success these days, it needs a lively developer community. I see no signs that Paul is even interested in hearing from anyone else, much less soliciting help. For the guy who built Yahoo Stores, putting up a discussion board for Arc discussion wouldn't be much of a challenge, but he's never done so.
His site claims to solicit ideas, but that site has been a "cobweb site" for years now. The page on which he was collecting ideas stopped being updated a few weeks after it opened and hasn't been updated for years.
I'd love to have something like Arc. So would a lot of people. It looks as though Paul has lost interest but doesn't want to say so.
Instead, we get interesting essays, which is admittedly more that I deserve, but still less that a lot of us were hoping for.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
I like Heinlein's answer to that question: "We laugh because it hurts to much to cry.".
Basically Heinlein was of the opinion (and I agree) that it is ONLY misfortune that we find funny. That the laugh, the joke etc. are coping mechanisms we have developed to let us deal with bad things.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Makes me wonder if people will look back hundreds of years from now and wonder... 'What the hell were they thinking writing in that horrible format?' Kinda like I do now with some of the weird medieval writing styles. I wonder if English teachers ever reflect on sort of things before they make their students write yet another essay.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Firstly, Paul Graham is both a geek and a nerd. But more importantly, in its purest form, nerd-dom is nothing more than socially maladjusted intellectualism. His essay is talking about how essays are a great way to think about ideas. Therefore, his essay is nerdy, therefore, it's appropriate to talk about it on Slashdot.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
I have a degree in English Literature. When I took my first job in IT, my boss told me that most IT people were an inch wide and a mile deep.
;-)
In this case you surely have read this essay, but if not -- you'll enjoy it!
To quite its epigraph: If there's nothing different about UNIX people, how come so many were liberal-arts majors?
It's the love of words that makes UNIX stand out.
Paul B.
Having a degree in English literature, it is always strange to see the odd relationship technology people have with the written word.
This essay reads like one of a hundred handouts I received in Intro to Lit classes. It makes the argument that you must make an argument, that there is structure to any argument, and that there is a historical tradition behind how an essay is constructed.
There is an analagous relationship between the art of writing an essay and the discipline of an engineering discipline (in my case, constructing software). In both cases, there is a desire for internal consistency, overall clarity and optimal design. Structure tends to consist of a series of discreet statements put together so that the order has an affect on the overall outcome of the project.
Many of the engineers and programmers I work with would be baffled to know this. For them, writing is a series of consise, actionable statements scribbled on sticky pads or in the margin of documents. They tend to think in terms of how something that is said contributes towards a goal rather than what it means or how it was stated. The idea that there is structure to how arguments are presented, that there are logical and rhetorical devices used in the same way as control structures in programming languages is lost on them. Which is a shame, because soem of the best engineers I know would be excellent essayists were they to write down their thoughts.
M
I think there are a couple of good reasons to study ancient literature:
1.) To foster an appreciation for literature as a whole by looking at its history. Many modern works of literature contain references to earlier works, and are often directly inspired by them.
2.) The idea is to teach students how to analyze literature in general. The hope is that you will take the skills you learned analyzing Shakespeare and apply them to other works.
3.) When teaching analysis, it's a lot easier if you're teaching a text that has been analyzed thousands of times by thousands of other people already. It makes it less likely people will think you're just making stuff up if many others throughout history support your analysis.
In essence, the point of learning Shakespeare is not solely to learn Shakespeare, but to learn skills of analysis that will serve you in many aspects of your life. A large part of learning is simply learning how to learn.
Every great essayist I know, given a choice only writes essays in Python. English is for the common peasant, yes you can write an essay in it but it will be crap. Great essayists are far more productive when they use Python and if you advertise the fact you are writing in Python the standard of essayists you get will be much higher.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
My fiancee is currently writing in the essay format, but she's a non-native english speaker who is preparing to take a TOEFL test.
Basic essay format is 5 paragraphs: Introduction, 3 paragraphs with supporting points, conclusion. Each paragraph has rules, so essentially you don't need to think about structure when writing an essay.
As a result, its stilted and hard to read.
Essays are a very very basic overly structured way to introduce writing skills. They are probably appropriate for people new to stringing more a few sentences together... such as non-native speakers and 10 year olds.
However, I've come across university professors who want assignments submitted in "strict essay format". I think this is more a sign of laziness on their behalf (read the introduction and the conclusion and briefly check that the intervening points see vaguely reasonable) than something that promotes good writing. At University level, taking one point of view and defending it blindly should be the exception, rather than the rule. At this stage one should be able to see that there are very few "black and whites", and appreciate the shades of grey and spectrums of colour.
Np, I'm not writing a fucking conclusion.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Oh so true. That seems to be my number one typo when I don't preview. :-)
Common inversions aside, I tend to quit reading mangled text much faster than I quit reading well written text. In IMs brb is fine as I more "hear" than see the text. In forums like this, however, I tend to appriciate (and reward with more "eye-time") well written text.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Either he went to a pretty odd school, or he just never managed to walk outside of the English department.
Essays that I wrote in school weren't just about things like symbolism in Dickins, they were intended to give the student the choice about where he wanted to go with his paper. They were on a wide range of topics, anything from the career of your choice to what economic methods you favored. I only recall one teacher that gave out essays on virtually pre-decided topics, and I recall hearing about one or two others.
I even wrote a paper once on why monkeys should rule the world - and gave enough convincing arguments that I ended up getting a few bonus points, putting me at something like 104 of 100.
Even in English class, we were sometimes given room to really explore what we wanted. One year in high school, while our textbook served for the grammer and rhetoric assignments, the great bulk of our actual literature reading was up to us: We could read just about whatever we wanted, but we had to read at least something like 1,000 or 2,000 pages per quarter, and we had to talk to the class about what we read, and what we saw in it. Some of the romance novels that the girls were reading were enough to make the teacher pretty uncomfortable in discussing in front of a high-school class, but he still allowed it.
Even in grade school, you were assigned days on which you had to bring in a couple of newspaper stories on current events, and had to talk about them. Because nobody wanted to have a "repeat" of the news story before them, everybody tried to stay away from just the easy, front-page stories.
The part that astounds me is that I didn't go to any great school - it was just a small school in a small hick-town. While I haven't exactly tried to turn this into a well-written essay, even what I thought was a very poor essay on my part on with my college admissions got me into the class where you pass it, and your English and writing requirements are completely satisfied.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
As an English major I find this quite strange, I don't argue things that have little relevance to me. In some cases if I procrastinate I might end up writing something quite lame, though that will usually not recieve a very good grade, because it isn't any good. Usually though I try to find something in the text that I can connect to my life experiences or something of social importance. The mind is a muscle that improves as you challenge it, writing essays requires you to analyze the text more thoroughly. If I happened to turn in a five-paragraph essay similar to the ones most high school students typed I would also fail. An essay does not mean that I put forth some crazy idea and then went on to prove it. It is more like putting forth a hypothesis, after looking over the information at hand (the book) you come up with an idea. You do not have to prove that point, you can even conclude stating that you were wrong and it will still be a good paper. Your topic/hypothesis can change will you are writing the paper. Also people often edit their paper down to remove the meandering, because that will usually cause your audience to put the paper/essay down. Critical thinking in school does not always appear as self-evidently as learning how to program a computer, yet these skills are quite valuable beyond simply analyzing a novel.
The essayist requires a literate, leisured audience. Carlyle, et. al., had this. You can read one of Carlyle's essays and have a pleasant time digesting the content and enjoying the style.
The modern equivalent is the columnist. He requires neither leisure or nor much in the way of literacy. Content and style have suffered accordingly.
I cannot agree with the author. As with any comparison with history, he is reviewing the current state of the world with the distilled excellence of the historical essayists. His criticism of the essay form as it is used in education must be an American thing becuse it ain't my experience, Aus high school education and Economics and Law degrees at university with all the above requiring essays none of which really match the form described by the author. Several even presented diverse opportunity to offer interesting points of view. The best ones I ever wrote (in terms of the pleasure to write and the grade the mostly received) were the ones where original thought was possible.
The death of the essayist is caused by the purpose of the esay being supplanted by several alternative media channels. In particular "non news" current affairs broadcasting (radio and TV) that provide the forum for the public discourse that was at the root of many of the essayists for the style of which the author appears to pine.
$0.02
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
This is literary gold, I'll die happy when I can write something this awesome. (regardless of the caveat)
[o]_O
Well, you have something here, but not what you think. If I'm not sure of something, I don't publish it online.
I spent about four days just researching the first English courses, and as I sit here writing this there is a nose-high stack of histories of various colleges on the desk next to me. So if I sound confident when writing about the topic, perhaps that's why.
If you disagree with something I said, you'd be more convincing if you could provide a counterexample.
I went back and forth about mentioning blogs by name, because not everything people publish on their own site is really "blogging" in the strict sense. "Blog" implies "log", which implies a time quantum of less than a day. Whereas it takes me weeks to write an essay.
Here's a footnote I commented out that made the connection to the Web more explicit:
wish
that
they
were
formatted
better.
:)
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
Hey, since we're discussing grammar, I'd thought I'd point out this minor flaw:
Your list has what I've heard called "improper parallelism". There may be another name for it (anyone? what's it called?), but here's the idea: divide your list up into the words that are common between all the elements and the ones that are different. You should be able to follow the common part followed by any single element. In your sentence:
When combined with the prefix, each becomes:
So you've got an extra "who" at the beginning of the third element. You can just take it out. ("The people who are poor spellers, have poor grammar, and use poor organizational skills") Or you can add a who to the middle one; then it would divide up differently:
("The people who are poor spellers, who have poor grammar, and who use poor organizational skills")
For brevity, taking out the word is preferable to adding another. But either would be correct.
Sorry for the long explanation of a single-word error, but I wanted to illustrate the more general principle. I see this error a lot, and it grates on me.
(And now, someone will inevitably point out a grammar or spelling error in this post. Go ahead.)
I agree. I've always felt this way, but one experience cemented this for me. In my first semester of college, I took Principles of Chemistry I and Accelerated Rhetoric simultaneously. In the rhetoric class, we wrote the mostly usual pointless essays about things no one cares about. I was struck with how little effect any of these essays had, as though they were called persuasive essays, they never advocated any real action, much less succeeded in persuading someone to undertake it. And even when we did write about a decent topic (one area was politics; I ripped apart some stupid Republican's campaign speech), we did it badly. Looking back on the revisions my rhetoric teacher forced me to do, my essay continued to get worse. Her obsession with the standardized format destroyed the terseness of my work.
In contrast, I wrote a persuasive essay to the professors of the chemistry class. My thesis was that he software we used for homework assignments was no good and should be scrapped. It was one of the proudest moments of my college career, because I succeeded completely. They not only made these homework assignments optional mid-semester, but also forwarded my complaints to the designers of the software. (Who were surprisingly receptive.)
I realized I had learned much more about persuasive writing from convincing the chemistry professors than I had from the rhetoric class.
In general terms, I agree. He's right that the conclusion doesn't add much, except in a persuasive argument: stating the argument to a "jury" who may have half-forgotten what you were saying at that point. Another thing that specifically bothers me is that rhetoric teachers are violently opposed to non-prose elements. I like to intersperse lists of items into my work. Most people skim, not read. If you don't help them skim well, they just won't understand what you're saying.
I do not agree. A search for truth is an extremely valuable and underrepresented format, yes. But persuasive essays are valuable, too. Often in life, we write for someone who generally trusts us to make decisions but may have some additional input or at least know what's going on. I might write to my boss why I chose a particular software package. He's primarily interested in what I chose. The reasons are secondary. If he sees a priority of mine that's completely different than his, he'll mention it. That might lead him to contest the final choice. But generally, he'll go along with what I'd said. If he'd had time to follow all the permutations of my research, he would have done it himself. Thus, I often write in a sort of inverse pyramid structure. (As I learned in a journalism class long, long ago.)
I agree; these surprising insights lead to great writing. But I don't think you should exclusively do this. Many things which you do not find surprising still need to be said. If I'm writing for exposition (how to use a piece of software), I'll point out the normal as well as the weird. I might even give short treatment to the weird because I want people to know the basics before confusing them.