The Age of the Essay 286
bluFox writes "Paul Graham, has just published a new article on the English literature and role of Essays. It is not connected to lisp or languages or hackers for a change, but still feels like a continuation of his earlier articles."
Impact of Blogs (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm... the term (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting article (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem I have with essays.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this arises because "the point" is usually nothing profound in itself so the only thing you can do to stand out is blabber on in a particularly well way.
Being a scientist I'm necessarily biased about anything that can be called an "essay". The closest thing in science is probably a review paper but that also should be as concise as possible.
I blame schools.
Re:Impact of Blogs (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we just notice that more people can't spell worth a damn now that they are forced to attempt to spell in order to function in their job, social life, whatever they use the internet for.
"With the result..." (Score:2, Insightful)
Writing complete sentences will improve your essay.
Fact (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, having said that, I believe that once a student has achieved proficiency at writing about what they read, they should be encouraged to write about other things as well.
To quote Thoreau, "How vain it is to sit down to write when one has never stood up to live."
As to the question "Why is this on Slashdot?" I have a degree in English Literature. When I took my first job in IT, my boss told me that most IT people were an inch wide and a mile deep. Perhaps the person who posted this is trying to help some of us nerds broaden our horizons!
To quote one of the nerds from the movie "War Games" "Remember when you told me to tell you when you were acting rudely and insensitively? Well you're doing it now!"
Re:Impact of Blogs (Score:3, Insightful)
As for spelling, I think you'll find that it has always been an issue. The only reason why it has become more apparent, is that internet users fail to take the time for a proper proofread. Not that I'm about to start proofreading every message I write. It simply takes too long for the very time-sensitive communications inherent in the internet.
Now I know... (Score:4, Insightful)
The English Class Ruined the Essay (Score:4, Insightful)
In school we focus on the rules, in terms of how an essay should be structured, and what it should contain.
Rules like spelling and grammar ARE important, but not as important as the content. I'd rather read an easy by a brilliant person with English as a second langauge, who doesn't write very well, opposed to an essay written perfectly by a random bloke.
This is where the English class ruined the essay. It was graded on those rules, and seldom on content.
They should focus on free thinking, creative writing, as much, if not more than the structure.
His question about Humor. (Score:4, Insightful)
I like Heinlein's answer to that question: "We laugh because it hurts to much to cry.".
Basically Heinlein was of the opinion (and I agree) that it is ONLY misfortune that we find funny. That the laugh, the joke etc. are coping mechanisms we have developed to let us deal with bad things.
essays place in history (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Impact of Blogs (Score:5, Insightful)
And they get pissed off at anyone who tries to correct their spelling. "it dosent mater eveywun can stil understnad me bitch fuck off cocksucking whore", I believe is the standard response. Funny how they always seem to get the swear words perfect though.
You're right, we do notice it more. But the primary problem is that hardly anyone takes pride or care in what they do anymore.
"yeah whatevah it's just the internet who cares"
Re:Why is this on Slashdot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Impact of Blogs (Score:3, Insightful)
As pedants, it's our role to resist this change at all costs!
BTM
Re:Impact of Blogs (Score:2, Insightful)
Then again, I majored in essays...and I can't give them up. Shit, that's why I've got over 3000 longwinded Slashdot comments, as well.
In fact, that's something the Internet has that talk radio and TV panels do not: you can take as much time and as much space as you need to to be an effective disputant. Can you sum up your idea into a thirty second soundbite? Great. But if it takes you 10,000 words...the Internet doesn't give a shit...post 'em if you got 'em.
Re:Impact of Blogs (Score:3, Insightful)
The Internet may not be hurting anyone's learning ability, but it is certainly not *helping* anyone to learn how to spell. Not when so many just don't care what their words look like or how they use them.
Re:Why is this on Slashdot? (Score:5, Insightful)
1.) To foster an appreciation for literature as a whole by looking at its history. Many modern works of literature contain references to earlier works, and are often directly inspired by them.
2.) The idea is to teach students how to analyze literature in general. The hope is that you will take the skills you learned analyzing Shakespeare and apply them to other works.
3.) When teaching analysis, it's a lot easier if you're teaching a text that has been analyzed thousands of times by thousands of other people already. It makes it less likely people will think you're just making stuff up if many others throughout history support your analysis.
In essence, the point of learning Shakespeare is not solely to learn Shakespeare, but to learn skills of analysis that will serve you in many aspects of your life. A large part of learning is simply learning how to learn.
Re:Impact of Blogs (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not to say that careless language is a good thing, of course; but we should be careful when it comes to railing too much against different usage of language on the basis that it's "incorrect".
Re:The English Class Ruined the Essay (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Impact of Blogs (Score:5, Insightful)
What the internet allows that the real world does not is a chance for people who aren't naturally good at organizing ideas to make themselves heard regardless. Many people who visit open forums like Slashdot et. al. are much better at explaining opinions than they are at making them...which is why so many highly moderated posts begin with "What I think you mean is," and so on. This means that poorly written posts that have valid points are not necessarily ignored...they are quite often embellished so that the validity of points raised by good thinker is strengthened by those who are good writers.
Incidentally, this bolstering of good ideas with good language is in my opinion the first step towards making an important viewpoint into a political lynchpin: finding a way to explain the viewpoint and the urgency of it in an understandable (if not completely accurate) way. Bush Jr has (some would say unfortunately) had great success in his political career due to the bolstering he receives from his speech writers -- lord knows he couldn't survive in an oratorical vacuum. Bush's camp almost seems to have take cues from the internet -- they've realized that not speaking perfect English is an easy way to get the common man to associate himself with you, even if you're a multi-millionaire oil baron and career politician who's a former coke fiend.
The point is: people who can't spell and can't write aren't a problem on the internet, because it's the internet and it offers a system of checks and balances that will quite often bury their points. You want to promote better English? Use it yourself and don't make it a point of elitism -- all that does is create a feeling of separatism that's not getting us a less abbreviated internet.
Re:The English Class Ruined the Essay (Score:2, Insightful)
While it's true that form might be taught more vigorously than content in schools, there's good reason for it; many students still need to grasp the formal rules of good writing. That, and it's so much harder to teach someone to think creatively than it is to teach them to write clearly. I guess it might be like composing music: you can learn what all the notes on the staff "are," but making them work to create music is something else entirely. Let alone, getting those notes to create truly original, creative, exciting, enticing, whatever music.
Re:The problem I have with essays.... (Score:5, Insightful)
A good essay is a point illustrated through insights, pruned to fill a word limit.
If you ever take a journalism or discourse class (and, if you ever plan to do any writing in any respect, you should), you will learn that a piece of writing is not done until you can take nothing else away without losing meaning.
Unfortunately, this is the opposite of what we learn in school up to this point -- assignments like "write an X page paper on beekeeping" train young writers that what matters is not the content but the length that's important. This perception tends to stick with people -- my wife, who writes reports as part of her work, starts writing by setting up her page limit, and then tries to fill that. Doesn't matter what form her language takes or how many leading sentences she uses, she has to fill her limit or she doesn't feel like she's done. And when she goes over the limit, she stresses out as well.
In a good discourse class, you learn to overwrite first. Plan for two or more pages to fill one page. Take out flimsy arguments, avoid needless soft language and remove obvious conclusions that don't prove your hypothesis. Of course, none of these would help you in a high school where the state board is looking for students to write a minimum of 40 pages per class per year -- only the most prolific fledgling authors could manage 80 pages and intense editing along with a normal courseload. I sure couldn't.
Academia aside, good language isn't about length. It's about coherence. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was only 3 paragraphs long. It also doesn't address any single problem by name nor does it offer any solutions. If he had added those in there...he might have wound up with something like Castro's infamous marathon speeches...and still never left the point at hand.
Re:The problem I have with essays.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I hear you. I blame schools for a great deal.
Up here in Canada, there is a great amount of fussing about how to make the school system better. The problem with schools is that at least 95% of what the students learn is crap. Rule-based, length-controlled essay writing is only a minor example.
Kids come out of school knowing next to nothing about how the things in the world actually work. Instead the learn classification systems and definitions.
As another example, take chemistry. Kids learn various definitions. They learn how to balance ionic equations. They learn how to lie about their lab results. But they learn next to nothing about the interesting stuff... hydrocarbons - methane, ethane, propane, butane..., get those carbon chains long enough (mostly around 7 or 8 in a chain) and you have gasoline. Look at the benzene ring (six atoms in an extremely rigid flat hexagonal ring. Replace a hydrogen with an OH and you get phenol - what makes the soar throat spray stuff work. Instead of the OH, replace a hydrogen with a methyl group (CH3) and you get toluene, the main ingredient (I think) in nail-polish remover - great solvent. Replace a few more hydrogens with nitrate groups (NO3) and you get trinitrotoluene - TNT. Now kids, those NO3s are kind of unstable; give 'em a hit and they will loose one of those oxygens, which given half a chance will try to combine with the carbons and hydrogens in there. Carbon and hydrogen love to combine with oxygen - we call it "burning". When TNT does it with oxygen that it supplies itself, we call it "blowing up".
My point is that there is a lot of interesting things to learn about in this world. Instead, kids go to school.
Re:Speak for yourself (Score:1, Insightful)
No. People have (or should have) a right to private life, and that means they should have a right to retreat to places where their thinking won't be challenged. You can't make someone think against their will; going into partisan groups and arguing for the opposite opinion is both rude and counterproductive. You will not enlighten creationists by posting excerpts from Dawkins to their newsgroups, and it is not an abridgement of your right to free speech - neither legally nor morally - for them to refuse to permit you to do so.
Re:One word (Score:3, Insightful)
Common inversions aside, I tend to quit reading mangled text much faster than I quit reading well written text. In IMs brb is fine as I more "hear" than see the text. In forums like this, however, I tend to appriciate (and reward with more "eye-time") well written text.
-nB
Re:Impact of Blogs (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the usual response people give to defend bad grammar and spelling. It's funny that a bunch of geeks who keep railing about standards in coding suddenly become anarchists when it comes to language. We have standardized our language for a reason, and that reason is effective communication. It's harder to communicate if people start redefining the rules whenever they feel like it.
Of course the language is evolving, but that is not an excuse for a free-for-all.
Wrong Era (Score:3, Insightful)
The modern equivalent is the columnist. He requires neither leisure or nor much in the way of literacy. Content and style have suffered accordingly.
zerg (Score:2, Insightful)
This is literary gold, I'll die happy when I can write something this awesome. (regardless of the caveat)
As much as I enjoy his essays... (Score:4, Insightful)
wish
that
they
were
formatted
better.
:)
Re:Where's Arc, Paul? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me that a multipartite (written) discussion forum is the natural extension of an essay by an individual writer when it comes to "searching for truth".
But with Arc you seem to be talking to yourself, which you decry in your essay on essays as likely to lead to the petering out of a project. That or talking to a select handful of colleagues whose opinions you probably trust because they're so similar to your own, which is not so different from talking to yourself.
If you want interesting surprises, why not open the discussion to people who care about things that you and your friends might not have put much thought into?
What are the security implications of your design ideas? Some people don't care about dynamic vs. static typing per se but care a lot about the security issues, some of which might be impacted by this decision. Is there some relatively minor issue that might hamstring automatic decomposition into massive parallelism that you could change now but not later? Are there text models that would dramatically improve your chances of ending up with powerful text processing libraries? And what text model would be most likely to survive the radical changes in computer architectures that we will see over the next century?
You say the world has waited for 45 years for a good Lisp, and you're correct in the sense you intended, but in another sense, of course, the world hasn't waited for Lisp at all. It has left it behind and built up massive ecosystems around its competitors. Those ecosystems are relentlessly growing and create a moving target for what a language is expected to have if it is to be a contender.
Any really successful Lisp will need a lot of time after release to build up such an ecosystem, and the longer it takes to release it, the longer it will take *after* release to become a contender. I think it *will* make a difference whether it is released in 2 years or 10, though even if I'm right, you aren't obligated to do anything about it, of course.
It just seems to me that you'd have a better chance of creating a better overall language if you had an open discussion of the design while change is still easy. You might even get things done sooner by delegating more of the implementation of everything from design comparison prototypes to docs.
Re:Impact of Blogs (Score:2, Insightful)
At least I didn't use 'nemore' (and it's the phonetic abbreviation stuff that I'm mainly railing against).