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."
I care! (Score:4, Interesting)
Mind you I've haven't read Dickens since middle/high-school but I care.
It's not just the symbolism, it's the experience. I was watching some show on PBS and the host said something that I wish English teachers would have said to me. To paraphase; 'Reading a narrative is an exercise in building life experience. No one has written about that particular character at that place and time. Reading allows us to see the world through different eyes'
It makes perfect sense too. Whether it's Dickens or Dick (Philip K.) you are getting a point of view out of the book. Looking at it that way is much more rewarding. The host went on to say that reading lets you know that other people have had similar experiences and no experience is completely new.
Man, that would have helped in life. Not being a fan of fiction, I shunned most books that I was forced to read and never absorbed those experiences. Later in life I often wondered "why is this happening to me" or simply "I can't take this". I wish I would have read more as I was growing up and coming to maturity (Daniel Goleman [eiconsortium.org] says maturity ~ 15)
I think the reason that we were supposed to write those essays on Dickens and company were to share our view of the books, and to have us look deeper than the plot. Maybe I'm wrong, I usually am, and maybe I'm crazy... that has been proven.
I am also wondering how this got on Slashdot. (Score:5, Interesting)
However, I'd like to point something out to the author and it's something I see a lot of which is a misperception regarding what students are writing about in school.
Especially when people think about testing they assume that essay topics are completely inane. Well perhaps this has been true in the past, but these days I see many essay topics that do focus on very broad personal issues and encourage the students to explore things using any creativity they can come up with. So the problem that he's discussing in his essay is somewhat contrived. In fact, students are encouraged to write about unusal, quirky and personal issues even in test settings. Not only that, but some of them come up with some really beautiful work even in the constrained environment of a test session. There are limits, but it's really not that bad.
I'm trying to think of an example. Here, today I had some that were on the topic of living through a difficult experience. That's a very general topic that refers you specifically into your own personal life. I read some real beauties. Actually that wasn't GRE though. That was another class. I had a bunch of GMAT today, but that's another story as well. Those are fun in a different way.
Anyhow, it's really not so bad and I always teach the students that if you get a lousy topic you can usually write your way around it.
My MA was in Comp, but as an undergrad I did Creative Writing. Any MFAs in the house? Losers!
There's no way you can tell me that these kinds of writing courses make writing boring. If anything they can get too edgey. We used to have all kinds of hardcore sexual stuff written about other people in the class and it was like who's going to say when? I guess it depends where you go to school.
Well, I'm rambling at 4:50Am so let me just close up with this bit of writing advice. If you want to have good time as a writing major try San Diego State. They've got a sweet writing department. You won't get rich, but you probably won't regret it either.
Where's Arc, Paul? (Score:5, Interesting)
After generating considerable excitement about Arc, a lot of discussion, and frequent updates to his Arc website, Paul simply went silent regarding Arc.
Yes, it's true that he'll attend conferences to give keynotes. He'll be billed as the guy behind Arc, but then his talk won't so much as give a status report.
Some have lamented that he has appparently chosen to take the cathedral approach instead of the bazaar with Arc, but I don't see any signs of a cathedral, either. For a language to stand some chance of success these days, it needs a lively developer community. I see no signs that Paul is even interested in hearing from anyone else, much less soliciting help. For the guy who built Yahoo Stores, putting up a discussion board for Arc discussion wouldn't be much of a challenge, but he's never done so.
His site claims to solicit ideas, but that site has been a "cobweb site" for years now. The page on which he was collecting ideas stopped being updated a few weeks after it opened and hasn't been updated for years.
I'd love to have something like Arc. So would a lot of people. It looks as though Paul has lost interest but doesn't want to say so.
Instead, we get interesting essays, which is admittedly more that I deserve, but still less that a lot of us were hoping for.
Paul Graham channels Andy Rooney (Score:1, Interesting)
Good for you! ;-) (Score:4, Interesting)
In this case you surely have read this essay, but if not -- you'll enjoy it!
To quite its epigraph: If there's nothing different about UNIX people, how come so many were liberal-arts majors?
It's the love of words that makes UNIX stand out.
Paul B.
Having a Degree in English (Score:5, Interesting)
This essay reads like one of a hundred handouts I received in Intro to Lit classes. It makes the argument that you must make an argument, that there is structure to any argument, and that there is a historical tradition behind how an essay is constructed.
There is an analagous relationship between the art of writing an essay and the discipline of an engineering discipline (in my case, constructing software). In both cases, there is a desire for internal consistency, overall clarity and optimal design. Structure tends to consist of a series of discreet statements put together so that the order has an affect on the overall outcome of the project.
Many of the engineers and programmers I work with would be baffled to know this. For them, writing is a series of consise, actionable statements scribbled on sticky pads or in the margin of documents. They tend to think in terms of how something that is said contributes towards a goal rather than what it means or how it was stated. The idea that there is structure to how arguments are presented, that there are logical and rhetorical devices used in the same way as control structures in programming languages is lost on them. Which is a shame, because soem of the best engineers I know would be excellent essayists were they to write down their thoughts.
M
Re:His question about Humor. (Score:3, Interesting)
Q: What's brown and sticky?
A: A stick.
Not everything is a "coping mechanism for dealing with bad things". Cheer up.
The Essay format (Score:4, Interesting)
Basic essay format is 5 paragraphs: Introduction, 3 paragraphs with supporting points, conclusion. Each paragraph has rules, so essentially you don't need to think about structure when writing an essay.
As a result, its stilted and hard to read.
Essays are a very very basic overly structured way to introduce writing skills. They are probably appropriate for people new to stringing more a few sentences together... such as non-native speakers and 10 year olds.
However, I've come across university professors who want assignments submitted in "strict essay format". I think this is more a sign of laziness on their behalf (read the introduction and the conclusion and briefly check that the intervening points see vaguely reasonable) than something that promotes good writing. At University level, taking one point of view and defending it blindly should be the exception, rather than the rule. At this stage one should be able to see that there are very few "black and whites", and appreciate the shades of grey and spectrums of colour.
Np, I'm not writing a fucking conclusion.
What, exactly, did Paul Graham study? (Score:3, Interesting)
Essays that I wrote in school weren't just about things like symbolism in Dickins, they were intended to give the student the choice about where he wanted to go with his paper. They were on a wide range of topics, anything from the career of your choice to what economic methods you favored. I only recall one teacher that gave out essays on virtually pre-decided topics, and I recall hearing about one or two others.
I even wrote a paper once on why monkeys should rule the world - and gave enough convincing arguments that I ended up getting a few bonus points, putting me at something like 104 of 100.
Even in English class, we were sometimes given room to really explore what we wanted. One year in high school, while our textbook served for the grammer and rhetoric assignments, the great bulk of our actual literature reading was up to us: We could read just about whatever we wanted, but we had to read at least something like 1,000 or 2,000 pages per quarter, and we had to talk to the class about what we read, and what we saw in it. Some of the romance novels that the girls were reading were enough to make the teacher pretty uncomfortable in discussing in front of a high-school class, but he still allowed it.
Even in grade school, you were assigned days on which you had to bring in a couple of newspaper stories on current events, and had to talk about them. Because nobody wanted to have a "repeat" of the news story before them, everybody tried to stay away from just the easy, front-page stories.
The part that astounds me is that I didn't go to any great school - it was just a small school in a small hick-town. While I haven't exactly tried to turn this into a well-written essay, even what I thought was a very poor essay on my part on with my college admissions got me into the class where you pass it, and your English and writing requirements are completely satisfied.
Re:Impact of Blogs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Impact of Blogs (Score:3, Interesting)
Thank you, AC.
Stream of consciousness writing is hardly evidence of poor debating skills -- Michael Herr's "Dispatches" is a good example of disjointed writing that illustrates important points. But mechanisms like the moderation system and the number of good writers willing to explain points in a different way serve to make disjointed viewpoints more accessible. Accessibility adds coherence to a good idea, because many people just aren't willing to read posts like yours. They take too much effort to parse, mentally, and so many readers rely on moderation and replies to show them what, subjectively, is worth reading. It would, indeed, be a good world where everybody would read everything regardless of style or content...but that's not going to happen.
Intellectualism (Score:1, Interesting)
There's a word for "socially adjusted" intellectuals. We call them "posers". After all, any populist renderings of a subject sufficently complex to be worthy of study must needs become a vast oversimplification of the matter at hand.
Furthermore, there are entire classes of people attempting to appear "intellectual" to be popular: parroting surface learning, but eschewing any real depth. They're socially adjusted in the extreme: they just don't really know anything of import. They can be found fluttering about universities of all sorts; the true intellectuals are hidden away in the research libraries, and look convincingly like "nerds". Perhaps there's a reason for that.
--
AC
English (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Where's Arc, Paul? (Score:1, Interesting)
I laughed out loud at your opening line though
AC because I'm ashamed to feel like a disciple.
Don't like it (Score:3, Interesting)
The death of the essayist is caused by the purpose of the esay being supplanted by several alternative media channels. In particular "non news" current affairs broadcasting (radio and TV) that provide the forum for the public discourse that was at the root of many of the essayists for the style of which the author appears to pine.
$0.02
Re:Where's Arc, Paul? (Score:4, Interesting)
--His stated goals for Arc closely match what many of us want, including those that overcome both the shortcomings in non-Lisp languages and in all current Lisps
--He has the technical knowledge of Lisp, including what has and hasn't worked out in practice
--He has the practical experience of creating a large, successful software project using Lisp
--He has the financial resources to do it without need to find corporate sponsors
--He would appear to have the time
--He has the reputation around which to form both a solid team of technical contributors and a passionate community of users
--And he appeared, at least, to have the passion and committment to doing it
With that to contend with, who is going to risk making a big committment of time and resources to starting another Arc with the knowledge that the real Arc could be released at any time?
The only parties I can think of would be large corporations who could put a lot more resources into it than Graham and could own and control the results, but I don't see any that would be interested.
If Graham would give us an update on his plans, it might break the stalemate. If he's not interested, he could say so, making it less risky for others to attempt. He could even post his design notes to help.
If he's still interested, I can't help thinking that Arc would end up better if its design decisions were discussed publicly for a while before it's "too late to change it now". No matter how much of an expert he is, there are those with even more expertise in each of the thousands of little specialty areas that a good, modern, general-purpose language ought to handle well.
No experienced developer is going to blame another one for eventually deciding to drop an exciting project that ended up being too time-consuming. But since we don't know what the story is with Arc, and he has posted "don't even ask for a status report", he has blocked both attempts to help him and attempts to compete with him. Ironically, this approach has ended up "FUDding" the New Lisp market with a vaporware campaign that Microsoft would be proud of.
Re:Impact of Blogs (Score:2, Interesting)
sure, sometimes i make a post late into the release of an article, sometimes get modded up...but more often than not, it never happens.
do i have nothing good to say? not up to me.
but most* moderators just browse through and mod quickly.
Whenever I have mod points, I use them on older articles...I may one to have bestowed mod points upon you late after an article has been forgotten about. heck, i know that sometimes I make a late post to an article...I bet most* of the time it doesn't even get read.
as far as spelling goes - it takes a lot away from a blog/essay when things are misspelled and bad grammer is used. mostly, credibility.
and i know slashdot suggest you browse at -1 when moderating...do you think most* people change their settings? probably not.
*most used lightly - obviously there are always exceptions to the rule.
yes, i didn't capitalize properly - oh well.
Re:Paul Graham is always right! (Score:4, Interesting)
I spent about four days just researching the first English courses, and as I sit here writing this there is a nose-high stack of histories of various colleges on the desk next to me. So if I sound confident when writing about the topic, perhaps that's why.
If you disagree with something I said, you'd be more convincing if you could provide a counterexample.
Re:Where's Arc, Paul? (Score:5, Interesting)
The main reason I don't talk much about Arc's status is because I don't want to feel like I have some kind of deadline I have to meet. The world has waited 45 years for a really good Lisp implementation. It's not going to make any difference if we have to wait 2 or even 10 more.
Re:Where's Arc, Paul? (Score:3, Interesting)
Grammar nazi post (Score:3, Interesting)
Hey, since we're discussing grammar, I'd thought I'd point out this minor flaw:
Your list has what I've heard called "improper parallelism". There may be another name for it (anyone? what's it called?), but here's the idea: divide your list up into the words that are common between all the elements and the ones that are different. You should be able to follow the common part followed by any single element. In your sentence:
When combined with the prefix, each becomes:
So you've got an extra "who" at the beginning of the third element. You can just take it out. ("The people who are poor spellers, have poor grammar, and use poor organizational skills") Or you can add a who to the middle one; then it would divide up differently:
("The people who are poor spellers, who have poor grammar, and who use poor organizational skills")
For brevity, taking out the word is preferable to adding another. But either would be correct.
Sorry for the long explanation of a single-word error, but I wanted to illustrate the more general principle. I see this error a lot, and it grates on me.
(And now, someone will inevitably point out a grammar or spelling error in this post. Go ahead.)
My feelings... (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree. I've always felt this way, but one experience cemented this for me. In my first semester of college, I took Principles of Chemistry I and Accelerated Rhetoric simultaneously. In the rhetoric class, we wrote the mostly usual pointless essays about things no one cares about. I was struck with how little effect any of these essays had, as though they were called persuasive essays, they never advocated any real action, much less succeeded in persuading someone to undertake it. And even when we did write about a decent topic (one area was politics; I ripped apart some stupid Republican's campaign speech), we did it badly. Looking back on the revisions my rhetoric teacher forced me to do, my essay continued to get worse. Her obsession with the standardized format destroyed the terseness of my work.
In contrast, I wrote a persuasive essay to the professors of the chemistry class. My thesis was that he software we used for homework assignments was no good and should be scrapped. It was one of the proudest moments of my college career, because I succeeded completely. They not only made these homework assignments optional mid-semester, but also forwarded my complaints to the designers of the software. (Who were surprisingly receptive.)
I realized I had learned much more about persuasive writing from convincing the chemistry professors than I had from the rhetoric class.
In general terms, I agree. He's right that the conclusion doesn't add much, except in a persuasive argument: stating the argument to a "jury" who may have half-forgotten what you were saying at that point. Another thing that specifically bothers me is that rhetoric teachers are violently opposed to non-prose elements. I like to intersperse lists of items into my work. Most people skim, not read. If you don't help them skim well, they just won't understand what you're saying.
I do not agree. A search for truth is an extremely valuable and underrepresented format, yes. But persuasive essays are valuable, too. Often in life, we write for someone who generally trusts us to make decisions but may have some additional input or at least know what's going on. I might write to my boss why I chose a particular software package. He's primarily interested in what I chose. The reasons are secondary. If he sees a priority of mine that's completely different than his, he'll mention it. That might lead him to contest the final choice. But generally, he'll go along with what I'd said. If he'd had time to follow all the permutations of my research, he would have done it himself. Thus, I often write in a sort of inverse pyramid structure. (As I learned in a journalism class long, long ago.)
I agree; these surprising insights lead to great writing. But I don't think you should exclusively do this. Many things which you do not find surprising still need to be said. If I'm writing for exposition (how to use a piece of software), I'll point out the normal as well as the weird. I might even give short treatment to the weird because I want people to know the basics before confusing them.