This link has been bookmarked by 212 people . It was first bookmarked on 19 Jul 2006, by Bren.
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11 Jan 19
Christine L["something you write to try to figure something out" Nice piece on the actual tradition of the essay and what academics has forced it to become]
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29 Nov 18
Yee Sian NgRemember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure. Oy.
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04 Apr 18
Alyssa BlackRequired reading for all English teachers (current or future).
The Age of the Essay by Paul Grahamhttps://t.co/EBsU2UWCKe pic.twitter.com/IS48WTuKa6
— John Jacobs, M.Ed. (@jjacobs1987) April 4, 2018 -
05 Jan 18
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by 1350 someone who wanted to learn about science could find better teachers than Aristotle in his own era. [1]
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[1] I'm thinking of Oresme (c. 1323-82). But it's hard to pick a date, because there was a sudden drop-off in scholarship just as Europeans finished assimilating classical science. The cause may have been the plague of 1347; the trend in scientific progress matches the population curve.
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The study of rhetoric was inherited directly from Rome, where it was considered the most important subject. It would not be far from the truth to say that education in the classical world meant training landowners' sons to speak well enough to defend their interests in political and legal disputes.
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14 Dec 17
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Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion.
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Mods
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High schools imitate universities.
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we're now three steps removed from real work: the students are imitating English professors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are merely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of what was, 700 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work.
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No Defense
The other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it. -
The study of rhetoric, the art of arguing persuasively, was a third of the undergraduate curriculum. [5] And after the lecture the most common form of discussion was the disputation.
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It's not just that you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is that you can't change the question.
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Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing.
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I don't try to fix the unconvincing bits by arguing more cleverly. I need to talk the matter over.
At the very least I must have explained something badly. In that case, in the course of the conversation I'll be forced to come up a with a clearer explanation, which I can just incorporate in the essay. More often than not I have to change what I was saying as well. -
Trying
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An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside. -
Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.
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In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud.
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Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience. The things I've written just for myself are no good.
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the staff writers feel obliged to write something "balanced." Since they're writing for a popular magazine, they start with the most radioactively controversial questions, from which-- because they're writing for a popular magazine-- they then proceed to recoil in terror. Abortion, for or against? This group says one thing. That group says another. One thing is certain: the question is a complex one. (But don't get mad at us. We didn't draw any conclusions.)
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The River
Questions aren't enough. An essay has to come up with answers. They don't always, of course. Sometimes you start with a promising question and get nowhere. But those you don't publish. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive results. An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know. -
what you tell him doesn't matter, so long as it's interesting.
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An essay is supposed to be a search for truth.
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Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting.
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I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course.
This doesn't always work. Sometimes, like a river, one runs up against a wall. Then I do the same thing the river does: backtrack. At one point in this essay I found that after following a certain thread I ran out of ideas. I had to go back seven paragraphs and start over in another direction. -
Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation. Real thought, like real conversation, is full of false starts.
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You need to cut and fill to emphasize the central thread, like an illustrator inking over a pencil drawing. But don't change so much that you lose the spontaneity of the original.
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An essay is not a reference work. It's not something you read looking for a specific answer, and feel cheated if you don't find it.
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Surprise
So what's interesting? For me, interesting means surprise. -
Essays should aim for maximum surprise.
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I found the best way to get information out of them was to ask what surprised them. How was the place different from what they expected? This is an extremely useful question. You can ask it of the most unobservant people, and it will extract information they didn't even know they were recording.
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Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get.
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How do you find surprises? Well, therein lies half the work of essay writing. (The other half is expressing yourself well.) The trick is to use yourself as a proxy for the reader. You should only write about things you've thought about a lot. And anything you come across that surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot, will probably surprise most readers.
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So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients: a few topics you've thought about a lot, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected.
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What should you think about? My guess is that it doesn't matter-- that anything can be interesting if you get deeply enough into it.
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Observation
So the ability to ferret out the unexpected must not merely be an inborn one. It must be something you can learn. How do you learn it?
To some extent it's like learning history. -
the more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto-- which means you accumulate knowledge at what's colloquially called an exponential rate.
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Collecting surprises is a similar process. The more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones. Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older, life should become more and more surprising.
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there may be habits of mind that will help the process along. It's good to have a habit of asking questions, especially questions beginning with Why. But not in the random way that three year olds ask why. There are an infinite number of questions. How do you find the fruitful ones?
I find it especially useful to ask why about things that seem wrong. -
If you want to notice things that seem wrong, you'll find a degree of skepticism helpful.
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I take it as an axiom that we're only achieving 1% of what we could. This helps counteract the rule that gets beaten into our heads as children: that things are the way they are because that is how things have to be.
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I write down things that surprise me in notebooks. I never actually get around to reading them and using what I've written, but I do tend to reproduce the same thoughts later. So the main value of notebooks may be what writing things down leaves in your head.
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To be surprised is to be mistaken.
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One of the keys to coolness is to avoid situations where inexperience may make you look foolish. If you want to find surprises you should do the opposite. Study lots of different things, because some of the most interesting surprises are unexpected connections between different fields.
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Whatever you study, include history-- but social and economic history, not political history. History seems to me so important that it's misleading to treat it as a mere field of study. Another way to describe it is all the data we have so far.
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Among other things, studying history gives one confidence that there are good ideas waiting to be discovered right under our noses.
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Disobedience
Above all, make a habit of paying attention to things you're not supposed to, either because they're "inappropriate," or not important, or not what you're supposed to be working on. If you're curious about something, trust your instincts. Follow the threads that attract your attention. -
Gradualness is very powerful. And that power can be used for constructive purposes too: just as you can trick yourself into looking like a freak, you can trick yourself into creating something so grand that you would never have dared to plan such a thing. Indeed, this is just how most good software gets created.
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(how hard can it be?) and gradually it grows
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If there's one piece of advice I would give about writing essays, it would be: don't do as you're told. Don't believe what you're supposed to. Don't write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. And don't write the way they taught you to in school.
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if they published an essay on x it had to be by someone who was at least forty and whose job title had x in it. Which is a problem, because there are a lot of things insiders can't say precisely because they're insiders.
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Who are you to write about x? You are whatever you wrote.
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Popular magazines made the period between the spread of literacy and the arrival of TV the golden age of the short story. The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay.
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Notes
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[5] The undergraduate curriculum or trivium (whence "trivial") consisted of Latin grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Candidates for masters' degrees went on to study the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Together these were the seven liberal arts.
The study of rhetoric was inherited directly from Rome, where it was considered the most important subject. It would not be far from the truth to say that education in the classical world meant training landowners' sons to speak well enough to defend their interests in political and legal disputes.
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18 Feb 17
randallj560The Internet is changing that. Anyone can publish an essay on the Web, and it gets judged, as any writing should, by what it says, not who wrote it. Who are you to write about x? You are whatever you wrote.
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14 Feb 17
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10 Dec 16
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An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know.
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30 Aug 16
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The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature.
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assimilate
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but what about the professors who taught rhetoric or composition? What should they do research on? The closest thing seemed to be English literature.
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the students are imitating English professors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are merely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of what was, 700 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work.
-
An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
-
You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
-
In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud.
-
Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience.
-
meandering.
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frivolity
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Essays should aim for maximum surprise.
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You should only write about things you've thought about a lot. And anything you come across that surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot, will probably surprise most readers.
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axiom
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People trying to be cool will find themselves at a disadvantage when collecting surprises. To be surprised is to be mistaken.
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Above all, make a habit of paying attention to things you're not supposed to, either because they're "inappropriate," or not important, or not what you're supposed to be working on. If you're curious about something, trust your instincts.
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real essays are not exclusively about English literature
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if the study of ancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not modern texts?
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But Harvard didn't have a professor of English literature until 1876
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Oxford had a chair of Chinese before it had one of English.
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What tipped the scales, at least in the US, seems to have been the idea that professors should do research as well as teach.
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Writing was one of the casualties. Colleges had long taught English composition. But how do you do research on composition?
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The closest thing seemed to be English literature. [3]
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The seeds of our miserable high school experiences were sown in 1892, when the National Education Association "formally recommended that literature and composition be unified in the high school course
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Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth
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he topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the conclusion-- uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell. Why bother? But when you understand the origins of this sort of "essay," you can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the jury.
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Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing.
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there are two things I want to know: which parts bore them, and which seem unconvincing.
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Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.
-
In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud.
-
Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well.
-
Questions aren't enough. An essay has to come up with answers. They don't always, of course. Sometimes you start with a promising question and get nowhere. But those you don't publish. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive results. An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know.
-
At one point in this essay I found that after following a certain thread I ran out of ideas. I had to go back seven paragraphs and start over in another direction.
-
Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation. Real thought, like real conversation, is full of false starts.
-
An essay is not a reference work. It's not something you read looking for a specific answer, and feel cheated if you don't find it. I'd much rather read an essay that went off in an unexpected but interesting direction than one that plodded dutifully along a prescribed course.
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Essays should aim for maximum surprise.
-
How was the place different from what they expected? This is an extremely useful question. You can ask it of the most unobservant people, and it will extract information they didn't even know they were recording.
-
Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew.
-
So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients: a few topics you've thought about a lot, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected.
-
It's good to have a habit of asking questions, especially questions beginning with Why.
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I find it especially useful to ask why about things that seem wrong. For example, why should there be a connection between humor and misfortune?
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People trying to be cool will find themselves at a disadvantage when collecting surprises. To be surprised is to be mistaken.
-
One of the keys to coolness is to avoid situations where inexperience may make you look foolish.
-
f you want to find surprises you should do the opposite. Study lots of different things, because
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some of the most interesting surprises are unexpected connections between different fields. For example, jam, bacon, pickles, and cheese, which are among the most pleasing of foods, were all originally intended as methods of preservation.
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Above all, make a habit of paying attention to things you're not supposed to
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not important, or not what you're supposed to be working on. If you're curious about something, trust your instincts. Follow the threads that attract your attention.
-
just as you can trick yourself into looking like a freak, you can trick yourself into creating something so grand that you would never have dared to plan such a thing.
-
If there's one piece of advice I would give about writing essays, it would be: don't do as you're told. Don't believe what you're supposed to. Don't write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. And don't write the way they taught you to in school.
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29 Aug 16
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But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature.
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These earlier civilizations were so much more sophisticated that for the next several centuries the main work of European scholars, in almost every field, was to assimilate what they knew.
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d'etre
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he archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that those studying the classics were, if not wasting their time, at least working on problems of minor importance.
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he first courses in English literature seem to have been offered by the newer colleges, particularly American ones. Dartmouth, the University of Vermont, Amherst, and University College, London taught English literature in the 1820s.
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the professors who taught rhetoric or composition?
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What should they do research on? The closest thing seemed to be English literature
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his had two drawbacks: (a) an expert on literature need not himself be a good writer, any more than an art historian has to be a good painter, and (b) the subject of writing now tends to be literature, since that's what the professor is interested in.
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in 1892, when the National Education Association "formally recommended that literature and composition be unified in the high school course."
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he other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it.
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The study of rhetoric, the art of arguing persuasively, was a third of the undergraduate curriculum.
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disputation
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a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was the argument by which one defended it.
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you can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the
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jury.
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As the reader gets smarter, convincing and true become identical, so if I can convince smart readers I must be near the truth.
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An
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essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
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In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it.
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peter
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meandering
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This doesn't always work. Sometimes, like a river, one runs up against a wall. Then I do the same thing the river does: backtrack. At one point in this essay I found that after following a certain thread I ran out of ideas. I had to go back seven paragraphs and start over in another direction.
-
Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation. -
I found the best way to get information out of them was to ask what surprised them.
-
So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients: a few topics you've thought about a lot, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected.
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18 Apr 16
Christian Amaral"you"
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27 Nov 15
Wessel van Rensburg"If you're curious about something, trust your instincts. Follow the threads that attract your attention.” – https://t.co/sLlhV0Txpu
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07 Jul 15
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29 Apr 15
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most people treat the words thesis and dissertation as interchangeable, but originally, at least, a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was the argument by which one defended it.
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Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth, as I think lawyers would be the first to admit. It's not just that you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is that you can't change the question.
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To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
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If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.
-
If you want to notice things that seem wrong, you'll find a degree of skepticism helpful. I take it as an axiom that we're only achieving 1% of what we could. This helps counteract the rule that gets beaten into our heads as children: that things are the way they are because that is how things have to be. For example, everyone I've talked to while writing this essay felt the same about English classes-- that the whole process seemed pointless. But none of us had the balls at the time to hypothesize that it was, in fact, all a mistake. We all thought there was just something we weren't getting.
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I write down things that surprise me in notebooks. I never actually get around to reading them and using what I've written, but I do tend to reproduce the same thoughts later. So the main value of notebooks may be what writing things down leaves in your head.
-
Whatever you study, include history-- but social and economic history, not political history. History seems to me so important that it's misleading to treat it as a mere field of study. Another way to describe it is all the data we have so far.
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incrementally
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Popular magazines made the period between the spread of literacy and the arrival of TV the golden age of the short story. The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay. And that's certainly not something I realized when I started writing this.
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12 Mar 15
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01 Jul 14
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16 Mar 14
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15 Jan 14
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The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure.
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what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one.
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The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature.
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With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless.
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How did things get this way?
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These earlier civilizations were so much more sophisticated that for the next several centuries the main work of European scholars, in almost every field, was to assimilate what they knew.
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In the 19th century the study of ancient texts was still the backbone of the curriculum.
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The answer, of course, is that the original raison d'etre of classical scholarship was a kind of intellectual archaeology that does not need to be done in the case of contemporary authors.
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Dartmouth, the University of Vermont, Amherst, and University College, London taught English literature in the 1820s. <!--The newly founded University of London had the first professor of English language and literature in 1828, and Lafayette College the second in 1857.--> But Harvard didn't have a professor of English literature until 1876, and Oxford not till 1885.
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High schools imitate universities.
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to write, without even realizing it, imitations of whatever English professors had been publishing in their journals a few decades before.
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The other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it.
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It's often mistakenly believed that medieval universities were mostly seminaries.
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Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing.
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so if I can convince smart readers I must be near the truth.
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To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far.
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Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one.
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In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud.
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An essay has to come up with answers.
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An essay is supposed to be a search for truth.
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At one point in this essay I found that after following a certain thread I ran out of ideas.
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So what's interesting?
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interesting means surprise.
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Essays should do the opposite. Essays should aim for maximum surprise.
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Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew.
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a few topics you've thought about a lot, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected.
-
How do you learn it?
-
To some extent it's like learning history.
-
The more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones.
-
If you want to notice things that seem wrong, you'll find a degree of skepticism helpful.
-
But none of us had the balls at the time to hypothesize that it was, in fact, all a mistake. We all thought there was just something we weren't getting.
-
I write down things that surprise me in notebooks.
-
People trying to be cool will find themselves at a disadvantage when collecting surprises.
-
If you want to find surprises you should do the opposite.
-
Gradualness is very powerful. And that power can be used for constructive purposes too:
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See what you can extract from a frivolous question?
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don't do as you're told.
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Don't believe what you're supposed to.
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one learns nothing from what one expects. And don't write the way they taught you to in school.
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The most important sort of disobedience is to write essays at all.
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The Internet is changing that.
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Popular magazines made the period between the spread of literacy and the arrival of TV the golden age of the short story.
-
-
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all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens.
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Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay about color or baseball.
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In the 19th century the study of ancient texts was still the backbone of the curriculum.
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raison d'etre of classical scholarship was a kind of intellectual archaeology that does not need to be done in the case of contemporary author
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it implied that those studying the classics were, if not wasting their time
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been the idea that professors should do research as well as teach.
-
he teaching of writing was inherited by English professors.
-
an expert on literature need not himself be a good writer, any more than an art historian has to be a good painter
-
the subject of writing now tends to be literature, since that's what the professor is interested in.
-
1892, when the National Education Association "formally recommended that literature and composition be unified in the high school course."
-
the students are imitating English professors
-
who are imitating classical scholars,
-
who are merely the inheritors of a tradition
-
is that a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it.
-
The real problem is that you can't change the question.
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this principle is built into the very structure of the things they teach you to write in high school
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But when you understand the origins of this sort of "essay," you can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the jury.
-
but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing.
-
The sort of writing that attempts to persuade may be a valid (or at least inevitable) form, but it's historically inaccurate to call it an essay. An essay is something else.
-
An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
-
An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a questio
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merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're writing for yourself.
-
An essay has to come up with answers
-
An essay is supposed to be a search for truth.
-
The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting.
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Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation.
-
Err on the side of the river. An essay is not a reference work
-
Essays should aim for maximum surprise
-
So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients: a few topics you've thought about a lot, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected.
-
Collecting surprises is a similar process. The more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones
-
Whatever you study, include history-- but social and economic history, not political history.
-
History seems to me so important that it's misleading to treat it as a mere field of study. Another way to describe it is all the data we have so far.
-
If there's one piece of advice I would give about writing essays, it would be: don't do as you're told.
-
Don't write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. And don't write the way they taught you to in school.
-
The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay.
-
And that's certainly not something I realized when I started writing this.
-
-
-
The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature.
-
a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature.
-
How did things get this way?
-
Europe at last began to catch its breath after centuries of chaos, and once they had the luxury of curiosity they rediscovered what we call "the classics."
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As European scholarship gained momentum it became less and less important;
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In the 19th century the study of ancient texts was still the backbone of the curriculum.
-
if the study of ancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not modern texts?
-
The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that those studying the classics were, if not wasting their time, at least working on problems of minor importance.
-
the study of modern literature.
-
But how do you do research on composition?
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What should they do research on? The closest thing seemed to be English literature.
-
The other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it.
-
In fact they were more law schools.
-
The real problem is that you can't change the question.
-
But when you understand the origins of this sort of "essay," you can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the jury.
-
ut it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing.
-
Good writing should be convincing
-
The sort of writing that attempts to persuade may be a valid (or at least inevitable) form, but it's historically inaccurate to call it an essay. An essay is something else
-
essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
-
you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one
-
Expressing ideas helps to form them.
-
In a real essay
-
You're thinking out loud.
-
But not quite
-
writing something that other people will read forces you to think well
-
For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting
-
Sometimes, like a river, one runs up against a wall.
-
backtrack
-
Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation.
-
Essays should aim for maximum surprise.
-
So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients: a few topics you've thought about a lot, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected.
-
What should you think about?
-
get deeply enough into it
-
anything
-
e workin
-
The more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones. Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older, life should become more and more surprising.
-
the rich get richer
-
It's good to have a habit of asking questions, especially questions beginning with Why.
-
surprises are what one wants to deliver.
-
Study lots of different things, because some of the most interesting surprises are unexpected connections between different fields.
-
Whatever you study, include history-- but social and economic history, not political history.
-
Above all, make a habit of paying attention to things you're not supposed to
-
If you're curious about something, trust your instincts.
-
Gradualness is very powerful.
-
don't do as you're told.
-
The Internet is changing that.
-
Who are you to write about x? You are whatever you wrote.
-
-
14 Jan 14
-
It's the concluding remarks to the jury.
-
real essays are not exclusively about English literature.
-
Who cares
-
What tipped the scales, at least in the US, seems to have been the idea that professors should do research as well as teach. This idea (along with the PhD, the department, and indeed the whole concept of the modern university) was imported from Germany in the late 19th century. Beginning at Johns Hopkins in 1876,
-
Writing was one of the casualties.
-
but what about the professors who taught rhetoric or composition? What should they do research on? The closest thing seemed to be English literature.
-
This had two drawbacks: (a) an expert on literature need not himself be a good writer, any more than an art historian has to be a good painter, and (b) the subject of writing now tends to be literature
-
to write, without even realizing it, imitations of whatever English professors had been publishing in their journals a few decades before.
-
a pointless exercise,
-
the students are imitating English professors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are merely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of what was, 700 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work.
-
The study of rhetoric, the art of arguing persuasively, was a third of the undergraduate curriculum
-
Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth,
-
Why bother?
-
It's the concluding remarks to the jury.
-
When I give a draft of an essay to friends, there are two things I want to know: which parts bore them, and which seem unconvincing.
-
The sort of writing that attempts to persuade may be a valid (or at least inevitable) form, but it's historically inaccurate to call it an essay. An essay is something else.
-
An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
-
question
-
Expressing ideas helps to form them.
-
Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.
-
You're thinking out loud.
But not quite. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience. -
Questions aren't enough. An essay has to come up with answers
-
. An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know.
-
An essay is supposed to be a search for truth. It would be suspicious if it didn't meander.
-
low interesting.
-
Sometimes, like a river, one runs up against a wall. Then I do the same thing the river does: backtrack.
-
a cleaned-up train of thought,
-
Essays should aim for maximum surprise.
-
Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get.
-
How do you find surprises? Well, therein lies half the work of essay writing. (The other half is expressing yourself well.) The trick is to use yourself as a proxy for the reader. You should only write about things you've thought about a lot. And anything you come across that surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot, will probably surprise most readers.
-
So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients: a few topics you've thought about a lot, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected.
-
So the ability to ferret out the unexpected must not merely be an inborn one. It must be something you can learn. How do you learn it?
-
he more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones.
-
habits of mind
-
habit of asking questions,
-
fruitful ones
-
I find it especially useful to ask why about things that seem wrong. For example, why should there be a connection between humor and misfortune? Why do we find it funny when a character, even one we like, slips on a banana peel?
-
People trying to be cool will find themselves at a disadvantage when collecting surprises. To be surprised is to be mistaken
-
the most interesting surprises are unexpected connections
-
Whatever you study, include history-- but social and economic history, not political history.
-
f you're curious about something, trust your instincts. Follow the threads that attract your attention.
-
bove all, make a habit of paying attention to things you're not supposed to, either because they're "inappropriate," or not important, or not what you're supposed to be working on.
-
The key question,
-
If there's one piece of advice I would give about writing essays, it would be: don't do as you're told. Don't believe what you're supposed to. Don't write the essay readers expect;
-
The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay. And that's certainly not something I realized when I started writing this.
-
-
-
How did things get this way?
-
But schools change slower than scholarship. In the 19th century the study of ancient texts was still the backbone of the curriculum.
-
if the study of ancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not modern texts?
-
problems of minor importance.
-
This idea (along with the PhD, the department, and indeed the whole concept of the modern university) was imported from Germany in the late 19th century. Beginning at Johns Hopkins in 1876, the new model spread rapidly.
-
This had two drawbacks: (a) an expert on literature need not himself be a good writer, any more than an art historian has to be a good painter, and (b) the subject of writing now tends to be literature, since that's what the professor is interested in.
-
High schools imitate universities
-
medieval universities were mostly seminaries.
-
Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth, as I think lawyers would be the first to admit. It's not just that you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is that you can't change the question.
-
I was never sure about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell. Why bother? But when you understand the origins of this sort of "essay," you can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the jury.
-
The sort of writing that attempts to persuade may be a valid (or at least inevitable) form, but it's historically inaccurate to call it an essay. An essay is something else.
-
To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais."
-
In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud.
-
Many published essays peter out in the same way. Particularly the sort written by the staff writers of newsmagazines. Outside writers tend to supply editorials of the defend-a-position variety, which make a beeline toward a rousing (and foreordained) conclusion. But the staff writers feel obliged to write something "balanced." Since they're writing for a popular magazine, they start with the most radioactively controversial questions, from which-- because they're writing for a popular magazine-- they then proceed to recoil in terror. Abortion, for or against? This group says one thing. That group says another. One thing is certain: the question is a complex one
-
There you're not concerned with truth. You already know where you're going, and you want to go straight there, blustering through obstacles, and hand-waving your way across swampy ground.
-
The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn't do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea. [6]
-
an essay is a train of thought--
-
Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get. They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things you've already eaten
-
When you first read history, it's just a whirl of names and dates. Nothing seems to stick. But the more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto-- which means you accumulate knowledge at what's colloquially called an exponential rate
-
When it comes to surprises, the rich get richer.
-
I write down things that surprise me in notebooks. I never actually get around to reading them and using what I've written, but I do tend to reproduce the same thoughts later. So the main value of notebooks may be what writing things down leaves in your head.
-
comb-overs,
-
Fortunately, this sort of disobedience shows signs of becoming rampant
-
Anyone can publish an essay on the Web, and it gets judged, as any writing should, by what it says, not who wrote it
-
-
-
Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion
-
what an essay really is, and how you write one
-
real essays are not exclusively about English literature.
-
The first courses in English literature seem to have been offered by the newer colleges, particularly American ones. Dartmouth, the University of Vermont, Amherst, and University College, London taught English literature in the 1820s.
-
the students are imitating English professors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are merely the inheritors of a tradition
-
a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it
-
a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was the argument by which one defended it.
-
it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing
-
An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
-
In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
-
explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud.
-
Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well.
-
An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know.
-
An essay is supposed to be a search for truth.
-
Sometimes, like a river, one runs up against a wall.
-
You need to cut and fill to emphasize the central thread, like an illustrator inking over a pencil drawing.
-
They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things you've already eaten.
-
For example, in a recent essay I pointed out that because you can only judge computer programmers by working with them, no one knows who the best programmers are overall.
-
So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients: a few topics you've thought about a lot, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected.
-
To some extent it's like learning history.
-
anomalies
-
When I was a kid, I used to think adults had it all figured out. I had it backwards. Kids are the ones who have it all figured out. They're just mistaken.
-
For example, everyone I've talked to while writing this essay felt the same about English classes-- that the whole process seemed pointless
-
don't do as you're told. Don't believe what you're supposed to. Don't write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. And don't write the way they taught you to in school.
-
It used to be that only a tiny number of officially approved writers were allowed to write essays
-
-
-
what an essay really is, and how you write one
-
The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature
-
With the result
-
With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless.
-
These earlier civilizations were so much more sophisticated that for the next several centuries the main work of European scholars, in almost every field, was to assimilate what they knew.
-
During this period the study of ancient texts acquired great prestige.
-
In the 19th century the study of ancient texts was still the backbone of the curriculum
-
why not modern texts?
-
The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that those studying the classics were, if not wasting their time, at least working on problems of minor importance.
-
idea that professors should do research as well as teach
-
But how do you do research on composition?
-
The closest thing seemed to be English literature
-
(a) an expert on literature need not himself be a good writer, any more than an art historian has to be a good painter, and (b) the subject of writing now tends to be literature, since that's what the professor is interested in.
-
1892, when the National Education Association "formally recommended that literature and composition be unified in the high school course
-
real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it
-
And after the lecture the most common form of discussion was the disputation
-
most people treat the words thesis and dissertation as interchangeable, but originally, at least, a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was the argument by which one defended it.
-
The real problem is that you can't change the question.
-
you can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the jury
-
But I don't try to fix the unconvincing bits by arguing more cleverly. I need to talk the matter over.
-
As the reader gets smarter, convincing and true become identical, so if I can convince smart readers I must be near the truth.
-
The sort of writing that attempts to persuade may be a valid (or at least inevitable) form, but it's historically inaccurate to call it an essay. An essay is something else.
-
Michel de Montaigne
-
An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
-
An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question.
-
Expressing ideas helps to form them
-
In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're writing for yourself
-
writing something that other people will read forces you to think well
-
they start with the most radioactively controversial questions, from which-- because they're writing for a popular magazine-- they then proceed to recoil in terror
-
Questions aren't enough. An essay has to come up with answers.
-
An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know.
-
But what you tell him doesn't matter, so long as it's interesting.
-
An essay is supposed to be a search for truth. It would be suspicious if it didn't meander.
-
The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea
-
flow interesting
-
Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting.
-
Sometimes, like a river, one runs up against a wall. Then I do the same thing the river does: backtrack
-
Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-up train of thought,
-
But don't change so much that you lose the spontaneity of the original.
-
So what's interesting? For me, interesting means surprise.
-
Essays should aim for maximum surprise.
-
Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew.
-
You should only write about things you've thought about a lot.
-
And anything you come across that surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot, will probably surprise most readers.
-
So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients: a few
-
topics you've thought about a lot, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected.
-
What should you think about? My guess is that it doesn't matter-- that anything can be interesting if you get deeply enough into it.
-
So the ability to ferret out the unexpected must not merely be an inborn one. It must be something you can learn.
-
To some extent it's like learning history
-
But the more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to
-
stick onto--
-
The more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones.
-
as you grow older, life should become more and more surprising.
-
It's good to have a habit of asking questions, especially questions beginning with Why
-
I find it especially useful to ask why about things that seem wrong
-
If you want to notice things that seem wrong, you'll find a degree of skepticism helpful.
-
I have a hunch you want to pay attention not just to things that seem wrong, but things that seem wrong in a humorous way.
-
So the main value of notebooks may be what writing things down leaves in your head.
-
To be surprised is to be mistaken.
-
hatever you study, include history-- but social and economic history,
-
all the data we have so far.
-
Above all, make a habit of paying attention to things you're not supposed to, either because they're "inappropriate," or not important, or not what you're supposed to be working on.
-
If there's one piece of advice I would give about writing essays, it would be: don't do as you're told. Don't believe what you're supposed to. Don't write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. And don't write the way they taught you to in school.
-
there are a lot of things insiders can't say precisely because they're insiders.
-
Anyone can publish an essay on the Web, and it gets judged, as any writing should, by what it says, not who wrote it.
-
The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay. And that's certainly not something I realized when I started writing this.
-
-
-
what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one.
-
real essays are not exclusively about English literature.
-
How did things get this way
-
Around 1100, Europe at last began to catch its breath after centuries of chaos, and once they had the luxury of curiosity they rediscovered what we call "the classics."
-
As European scholarship gained momentum it became less and less important;
-
by 1350 someone who wanted to learn about science could find better teachers than Aristotle in his own era.
-
ancient texts was still the backbone of the curriculum.
-
19th centur
-
irst courses in English literature seem to have been offered by the newer colleges, particularly American ones.
-
ut how do you do research on composition?
-
The closest thing seemed to be English literature
-
High schools imitate universities. The seeds of our miserable high school experiences were sown in 1892, when the National Education Association "formally recommended that literature and composition be unified in the high school course." [4
-
a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it.
-
The study of rhetoric, the art of arguing persuasively, was a third of the undergraduate curriculum.
-
thesis and dissertation as interchangeable
-
a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was the argument by which one defended it.
-
originally
-
real problem is that you can't change the question.
-
The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the conclusion
-
Good writing should be convincing
-
draft of an essay
-
I want to know: which parts bore them, and which seem unconvincing.
-
boring bits
-
fixed by cutting
-
I don't try to fix the unconvincing bits by arguing more cleverly. I need to talk the matter over.
-
real essay is, we have to reach back into history again
-
Michel de Montaigne,
-
book of what he called "essais."
-
in 1580
-
Essayer is the French verb
-
essai is an attemp
-
essay is something you write to try to figure something out
-
"to try"
-
you can't begin with a thesis
-
essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question
-
essay, you don't take a position and defend it
-
Expressing ideas helps to form them.
-
An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know
-
flow dow
-
river's algorithm is simple
-
flow interestin
-
next, choose the most interestin
-
Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation
-
Essays should aim for maximum surprise.
-
I began that essay, and even now I find it kind of weird. That's what you're looking for.
-
a few topics you've thought about a lot, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected.
-
It must be something you can learn. How do you learn it?
-
more anomalies you've
-
Collecting surprises is a similar process.
-
seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones
-
When you're mistaken, don't dwell on it; just act like nothing's wrong and maybe no one will notice.
-
If you want to find surprises you should do the opposite. Study lots of different things, because some of the most interesting surprises are unexpected connections between different fields
-
If there's something you're really interested in, you'll find they have an uncanny way of leading back to it anyway, just as the conversation of people who are especially proud of something always tends to lead back to it.
-
The most important sort of disobedience is to write essays at all. Fortunately, this sort of disobedience shows signs of becoming rampant.
-
-
-
what an essay really is
-
, and how you write one.
-
real essays are not exclusively about English literature.
-
the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature.
-
How did things get this way?
-
"the classics."
-
In the 19th century the study of ancient texts was still the backbone of the curriculum.
-
if the study of ancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not modern texts?
-
And so began the study of modern literature.
-
The first courses in English literature seem to have been offered by the newer colleges, particularly American ones.
-
professors should do research as well as teach.
-
imported from Germany
-
Beginning at Johns Hopkins in 1876, the new model spread rapidly.
-
how do you do research on composition?
-
English literature.
-
in the late 19th century the teaching of writing was inherited by English professors.
-
an expert on literature need not himself be a good writer
-
two drawbacks
-
the subject of writing now tends to be literature, since that's what the professor is interested in.
-
1892, when the National Education Association "formally recommended that literature and composition be unified in the high school course."
-
to write, without even realizing it, imitations of whatever English professors had been publishing in their journals a few decades before.
-
a pointless exercise
-
a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it.
-
another intellectual hangover of long forgotten origins.
-
medieval universities were mostly seminaries.
-
lawyers are advocates, trained to take either side of an argument
-
rhetoric, the art of arguing persuasively
-
a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was the argument by which one defended it.
-
Defending a position
-
not the best way to get at the truth
-
you can't change the question.
-
thesis
-
supporting paragraphs
-
conclusion
-
what is the conclusion?
-
the concluding remarks to the jury.
-
Good writing should be convincing
-
it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing
-
The sort of writing that attempts to persuade may be a valid (or at least inevitable) form, but it's historically inaccurate to call it an essay. An essay is something else.
-
Michel de Montaigne
-
1580 published a book of what he called "essais."
-
Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt.
-
An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
-
An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question.
-
Montaigne's great discovery
-
In a real essay you're writing for yourself.
-
So it does matter to have an audience.
-
But the staff writers feel obliged to write something "balanced."
-
An essay has to come up with answers.
-
An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know.
-
An essay is supposed to be a search for truth.
-
-- but a cleaned-up train of thought
-
an essay is a train of thought
-
Interfaces, as Geoffrey James has said, should follow the principle of least astonishment
-
ask what surprised them.
-
Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew.
-
two ingredients
-
: a few topics you've thought about a lot, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected.
-
How do you learn it?
-
it's like learning history
-
Collecting surprises is a similar process. The more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones.
-
It's good to have a habit of asking questions, especially questions beginning with Why
-
So the main value of notebooks may be what writing things down leaves in your head.
-
To be surprised is to be mistaken.
-
all the data we have so far.
-
make a habit of paying attention to things you're not supposed to
-
You start by writing a stripped-down kernel (how hard can it be?) and gradually it grows into a complete operating system.
-
don't do as you're told. Don't believe what you're supposed to. Don't write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. And don't write the way they taught you to in school.
-
It used to be that only a tiny number of officially approved writers were allowed to write essays.
-
-
13 Jan 14
-
real essays are not exclusively about English literature.
-
due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature.
-
With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless.
-
interested
-
But schools change slower than scholarship. In the 19th century the study of ancient texts was still the backbone of the curriculum.
-
The answer, of course, is that the original raison d'etre of classical scholarship was a kind of intellectual archaeology that does not need to be done in the case of contemporary authors. But for obvious reasons no one wanted to give that answer.
-
The first courses in English literature seem to have been offered by the newer colleges, particularly American ones.
-
Dartmouth, the University of Vermont, Amherst, and University College, London taught English literature in the 1820s.
-
professor of English literature until 1876
-
Harvard
-
Oxford not till 1885
-
late 19th century the teaching of writing was inherited by English professors.
-
an expert on literature need not himself be a good writer, any more than an art historian has to be a good painter, and (b) the subject of writing now tends to be literature, since that's what the professor is interested in.
-
3 Rs then morphed into English
-
high school students now had to write about English literature-- to write, without even realizing it,
-
real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it.
-
The study of rhetoric, the art of arguing persuasively, was a third of the undergraduate curriculum.
-
most people treat the words thesis and dissertation as interchangeable, but originally, at least, a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was the argument by which one defended it.
-
The real problem is that you can't change the question.
-
The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict
-
It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell.
-
Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing.
-
which parts bore them, and which seem unconvincing.
-
As the reader gets smarter, convincing and true become identical, so if I can convince smart readers I must be near the truth.
-
Michel de Montaigne
-
1580 published a book of what he called "essais."
-
Essayer
-
French verb meaning "to try"
-
essai is an attempt.
-
essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
-
And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one.
-
, but with a question
-
essay
-
You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside
-
Expressing ideas helps to form them.
-
Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them.
-
school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader.
-
real essay you're writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud.
-
writing something that other people will read forces you to think well.
-
An essay has to come up with answers.
-
An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know
-
An essay is supposed to be a search for truth. It would be suspicious if it didn't meander.
-
I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course.
-
Sometimes, like a river, one runs up against a wall.
-
Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation.
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full of false starts
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You need to cut and fill to emphasize the central thread, like an illustrator inking over a pencil drawing.
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I'd much rather read an essay that went off in an unexpected but interesting direction than one that plodded dutifully along a prescribed course.
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Essays should aim for maximum surprise.
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And I found the best way to get information out of them was to ask what surprised them.
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(The other half is expressing yourself well.)
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You should only write about things you've thought about a lot. And anything you come across that surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot, will probably surprise most readers.
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: a few topics you've thought about a lot, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected.
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I can see more now in the fragments of memory I preserve of that age than I could see at the time from having it all happening live, right in front of me.
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But the more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto--
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Once you remember
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it will catch your attention
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that other Normans conquered southern Italy at about the same time
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when you hear
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Which will make you wonder
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Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older, life should become more and more surprising. When I was a kid, I used to think adults had it all figured out. I had it backwards. Kids are the ones who have it all figured out.
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It's good to have a habit of asking questions, especially questions beginning with Why.
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I find it especially useful to ask why about things that seem wrong.
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If you want to notice things that seem wrong, you'll find a degree of skepticism helpful.
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The connection may be surprise. Surprises make us laugh, and surprises are what one wants to deliver.
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I write down things that surprise me in notebooks
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main value of notebooks may be what writing things down leaves in your head.
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When you're mistaken, don't dwell on it; just act like nothing's wrong and maybe no one will notice.
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One of the keys to coolness is to avoid situations where inexperience may make you look foolish.
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Study lots of different things, because some of the most interesting surprises are unexpected connections between different fields.
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studying history gives one confidence that there are good ideas waiting to be discovered right under our noses.
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If you're curious about something, trust your instincts.
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Follow the threads that attract your attention.
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If there's something you're really interested in, you'll find they have an uncanny way of leading back to it anyway, just as the conversation of people who are especially proud of something always tends to lead back to it.
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Gradualness is very powerful. And that power can be used for constructive purposes too
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just as you can trick yourself into looking like a freak, you can trick yourself into creating something so grand that you would never have dared to plan such a thing.
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don't do as you're told. Don't believe what you're supposed to. Don't write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. And don't write the way they taught you to in school.
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The most important sort of disobedience is to write essays at all.
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Fortunately, this sort of disobedience shows signs of becoming rampant. It used to be that only a tiny number of officially approved writers were allowed to write essays.
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The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay.
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03 Nov 13
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With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens? Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay about color or baseball.
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It's no wonder if this seems to the student a pointless exercise, because we're now three steps removed from real work: the students are imitating English professors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are merely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of what was, 700 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work
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And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the things they teach you to write in high school. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the conclusion-- uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell. Why bother? But when you understand the origins of this sort of "essay," you can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the jury.
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so if I can convince smart readers I must be near the truth.
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The sort of writing that attempts to persuade may be a valid (or at least inevitable) form, but it's historically inaccurate to call it an essay. An essay is something else
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10 Oct 13
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08 Oct 13
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23 Feb 13
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11 Feb 13
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11 Sep 12
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Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.
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people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience.
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inviting
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But not quite. Just as
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So what's interesting? For me, interesting means surprise. -
A button that looks like it will make a machine stop should make it stop, not speed up. Essays should do the opposite. Essays should aim for maximum surprise.
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13 Aug 12
KonstantinosSeptember 2004 // "Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. [...] So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one."
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02 Aug 12
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September 2004
Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure.
Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one.
Mods
The most obv -
ous difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature
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due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens.
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With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens? Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay about color or baseball.
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Around 1100, Europe at last began to catch its breath after centuries of chaos, and once they had the luxury of curiosity they rediscovered what we call "the classics." The effect was rather as if we were visited by beings from another solar system. These earlier civilizations were so much more sophisticated that for the next several centuries the main work of European scholars, in almost every field, was to assimilate what they knew.
During this period the study of ancient texts acquired great prestige. It seemed the essence of what scholars did. As European scholarship gained momentum it became less and less important; by 1350 someone who wanted to learn about science could find better teachers than Aristotle in his own era. [1] But schools change slower than scholarship. In the 19th century the study of ancient texts was still the backbone of the curriculum. -
What tipped the scales, at least in the US, seems to have been the idea that professors should do research as well as teach. This idea (along with the PhD, the department, and indeed the whole concept of the modern university) was imported from Germany in the late 19th century. Beginning at Johns Hopkins in 1876, the new model spread rapidly.
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Writing was one of the casualties. Colleges had long taught English composition. But how do you do research on composition? The professors who taught math could be required to do original math, the professors who taught history could be required to write scholarly articles about history, but what about the professors who taught rhetoric or composition? What should they do research on? The closest thing seemed to be English literature. [3]
And so in the late 19th century the teaching of writing was inherited by English professors. This had two drawbacks: (a) an expert on literature need not himself be a good writer, any more than an art historian has to be a good painter, and (b) the subject of writing now tends to be literature, since that's what the professor is interested in -
High schools imitate universities. The seeds of our miserable high school experiences were sown in 1892, when the National Education Association "formally recommended that literature and composition be unified in the high school course." [4] The 'riting component of the 3 Rs then morphed into English, with the bizarre consequence that high school students now had to write about English literature-- to write, without even realizing it, imitations of whatever English professors had been publishing in their journals a few decades before.
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It's no wonder if this seems to the student a pointless exercise, because we're now three steps removed from real work: the students are imitating English professors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are merely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of what was, 700 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work.
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The other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it. That principle, like the idea that we ought to be writing about literature, turns out to be another intellectual hangover of long forgotten origins.
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It's often mistakenly believed that medieval universities were mostly seminaries. In fact they were more law schools. And at least in our tradition lawyers are advocates, trained to take either side of an argument and make as good a case for it as they can. Whether cause or effect, this spirit pervaded early universities. The study of rhetoric, the art of arguing persuasively, was a third of the undergraduate curriculum. [5] And after the lecture the most common form of discussion was the disputation. This is at least nominally preserved in our present-day thesis defense: most people treat the words thesis and dissertation as interchangeable, but originally, at least, a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was the argument by which one defended it.
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Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth, as I think lawyers would be the first to admit. It's not just that you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is that you can't change the question.
-
And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the things they teach you to write in high school. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the conclusion-- uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell. Why bother? But when you understand the origins of this sort of "essay," you can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the jury.
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Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing. When I give a draft of an essay to friends, there are two things I want to know: which parts bore them, and which seem unconvincing. The boring bits can usually be fixed by cutting. But I don't try to fix the unconvincing bits by arguing more cleverly. I need to talk the matter over.
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To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
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Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
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If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.
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In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud.
-
But not quite. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience. The things I've written just for myself are no good. They tend to peter out. When I run into difficulties, I find I conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea.
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Questions aren't enough. An essay has to come up with answers. They don't always, of course. Sometimes you start with a promising question and get nowhere. But those you don't publish. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive results. An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know.
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But what you tell him doesn't matter, so long as it's interesting. I'm sometimes accused of meandering. In defend-a-position writing that would be a flaw. There you're not concerned with truth. You already know where you're going, and you want to go straight there, blustering through obstacles, and hand-waving your way across swampy ground. But that's not what you're trying to do in an essay. An essay is supposed to be a search for truth. It would be suspicious if it didn't meander.
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The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course.
-
Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation. Real thought, like real conversation, is full of false starts. It would be exhausting to read. You need to cut and fill to emphasize the central thread, like an illustrator inking over a pencil drawing. But don't change so much that you lose the spontaneity of the original.
-
-
20 Feb 12
Justin MaresThe other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it. That principle, like the idea that we ought to be writing about literature, turns out to be another intellectual hangover of long forgotten origins
An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question.
The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. -
11 Feb 12
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26 Jan 12
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09 Dec 11
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07 Dec 11
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24 Oct 11
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04 Aug 11
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10 Jul 11
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30 May 11
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People trying to be cool will find themselves at a disadvantage when collecting surprises. To be surprised is to be mistaken. And the essence of cool, as any fourteen year old could tell you, is nil admirari. When you're mistaken, don't dwell on it; just act like nothing's wrong and maybe no one will notice.
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23 May 11
John DAn essay about what essays are. And how they are most definitely NOT a thesis followed by support followed by a conclusion (which is basically just a restatement of the thesis, so why bother).
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22 May 11
Joshua SchmidtAn essay about what essays are. And how they are most definitely NOT a thesis followed by support followed by a conclusion (which is basically just a restatement of the thesis, so why bother).
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Dave Duarte" An essay is something you write to try to figure something out."
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18 May 11
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At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting
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from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course.
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I'd much rather read an essay that went off in an unexpected but interesting direction than one that plodded dutifully along a prescribed course.
-
make a habit of paying attention to things you're not supposed to, either because they're "inappropriate," or not important, or not what you're supposed to be working on.
-
If you're curious about something, trust your instincts. Follow the threads that attract your attention. If there's something you're really interested in, you'll find they have an uncanny way of leading back to it anyway
-
don't do as you're told. Don't believe what you're supposed to. Don't write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. And don't write the way they taught you to in school.
-
-
13 May 11
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01 May 11
Robert MartinezJust as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well.
In retrospect, was there anything interesting about working at Baskin-Robbins? Well, it was interesting how import -
21 Mar 11
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10 Mar 11
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09 Mar 11
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The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens.
-
hat tipped the scales, at least in the US, seems to have been the idea that professors should do research as well as teach. This idea (along with the PhD, the department, and indeed the whole concept of the modern university) was imported from Germany in the late 19th century. Beginning at Johns Hopkins in 1876, the new model spread rapidly.
-
The seeds of our miserable high school experiences were sown in 1892, when the National Education Association "formally recommended that literature and composition be unified in the high school course."
-
The other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it. That principle, like the idea that we ought to be writing about literature, turns out to be another intellectual hangover of long forgotten origins.
-
The study of rhetoric, the art of arguing persuasively, was a third of the undergraduate curriculum.
-
And after the lecture the most common form of discussion was the disputation. This is at least nominally preserved in our present-day thesis defense: most people treat the words thesis and dissertation as interchangeable, but originally, at least, a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was the argument by which one defended
-
Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth, as I think lawyers would be the first to admit. It's not just that you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is that you can't change the question.
-
And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the things they teach you to write in high school. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the conclusion-- uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell. Why bother? But when you understand the origins of this sort of "essay," you can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the jury.
-
But the aim is never to be convincing per se. As the reader gets smarter, convincing and true become identical, so if I can convince smart readers I must be near the truth.
-
The sort of writing that attempts to persuade may be a valid (or at least inevitable) form, but it's historically inaccurate to call it an essay. An essay is something else.
-
he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
-
Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
-
all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.
-
In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud.
-
ut not quite. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience. The things I've written just for myself are no good. They tend to peter out. When I run into difficulties, I find I conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea.
-
Outside writers tend to supply editorials of the defend-a-position variety, which make a beeline toward a rousing (and foreordained) conclusion. But the staff writers feel obliged to write something "balanced." Since they're writing for a popular magazine, they start with the most radioactively controversial questions, from which-- because they're writing for a popular magazine-- they then proceed to recoil in terror. Abortion, for or against? This group says one thing. That group says another. One thing is certain: the question is a complex one. (But don't get mad at us. We didn't draw any conclusions.)
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Questions aren't enough. An essay has to come up with answers. They don't always, of course. Sometimes you start with a promising question and get nowhere. But those you don't publish. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive results. An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know.
-
But what you tell him doesn't matter, so long as it's interesting. I'm sometimes accused of meandering. In defend-a-position writing that would be a flaw. There you're not concerned with truth.
-
An essay is supposed to be a search for truth. It would be suspicious if it didn't meander.
-
Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation. Real thought, like real conversation, is full of false starts. It would be exhausting to read.
-
So what's interesting? For me, interesting means surprise.
-
button that looks like it will make a machine stop should make it stop, not speed up. Essays should do the opposite. Essays should aim for maximum surprise.
-
ou should only write about things you've thought about a lot. And anything you come across that surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot, will probably surprise most readers.
-
So the ability to ferret out the unexpected must not merely be an inborn one. It must be something you can learn. How do you learn it?
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To some extent it's like learning history. When you first read history, it's just a whirl of names and dates. Nothing seems to stick. But the more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto-- which means you accumulate knowledge at what's colloquially called an exponential rate.
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's good to have a habit of asking questions, especially questions beginning with Why. But not in the random way that three year olds ask why. There are an infinite number of questions. How do you find the fruitful ones?
I find it especially useful to ask why about things that seem wrong. For example, why should there be a connection between humor and misfortune? Why do we find it funny when a character, even one we like, slips on a banana peel? There's a whole essay's worth of surprises there for sure. -
People trying to be cool will find themselves at a disadvantage when collecting surprises. To be surprised is to be mistaken. And the essence of cool, as any fourteen year old could tell you, is nil admirari. When you're mistaken, don't dwell on it; just act like nothing's wrong and maybe no one will notice.
-
Above all, make a habit of paying attention to things you're not supposed to, either because they're "inappropriate," or not important, or not what you're supposed to be working on. If you're curious about something, trust your instincts.
-
ollow the threads that attract your attention. If there's something you're really interested in, you'll find they have an uncanny way of leading back to it anyway, just as the conversation of people who are especially proud of something always tends to lead back to it.
-
You start by writing a stripped-down kernel (how hard can it be?) and gradually it grows into a complete operating system. Hence the next leap: could you do the same thing in painting, or in a novel?
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28 Feb 11
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09 Feb 11
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18 Jan 11
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17 Jan 11
Tom McHaleAn interesting post about how real essays are nothing like the 5-paragraph essay we learned in school
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24 Jul 10
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18 Jul 10
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Vicki PierceInteresting essay about essays--where they came from and where they should go.
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26 Oct 09
Philip GirvanHow Paul Graham writes an essay
paulgraham learning language rhetoric writing essay research education communication
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16 Sep 09
Brett BolkowyFriggin awesome.
essay writing paulgraham excellent education literature essays creativity history english
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04 Apr 08
David Feld"[W]hat an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one."
writing essays education language creativity literature blogging communication
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