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.
...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.
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?
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.
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."
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
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