"Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind."
— General William Westmoreland
United States Army
"In war, truth is the first casualty."
— Aeschylus
525-456 B.C.
"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the [U.S.] media."
— Noam Chomsky
M.I.T. professor of linguistics
prolific author & U.S. foreign policy critic
co-author Manufacturing Consent
"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity — much less dissent.
"Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions..."
— Gore Vidal
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
"Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.
"When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular."
— David Hume
Of the First Principles of Government
1758
quoted in Gore Vidal's
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
"The owners and managers of the press determine which person, which facts, which version of the facts, and which ideas shall reach the public."
Report by the Commission on Freedom of the Press
quoted in Democracy for the Few, by Michael Parenti
and Don't Blame the People, by Robert Cirino
"Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness."
— George Orwell
author of the book 1984
"When I was Times bureau chief in Washington, I was a member of the League of Gentlemen [i.e., the established elite]; otherwise I never would have been bureau chief. Time after time, good reporters ... complained about not being able to get stories in the paper. And time after time I said to them, 'You're just not going to get that in the New York Times... it's too reliant on your judgement rather than on official judgement, it's too complex, it contradicts the official record more flagrantly than the conventions of daily journalism allow.'"
— Tom Wicker
New York Times columnist
Guardian (London)
February 13, 1985
quoted in Democracy for the Few, by Michael Parenti
and "'League of Gentlemen' Rates Media," by Kevin Kelly
"Following the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths.
"The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state."
— David McGowan
from the introduction to Derailing Democracy
"Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play."
— Joseph Goebbels
Nazi Propaganda Minister
"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.
"There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.
"If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.
"The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread.
"You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press.
"We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men.
"We are intellectual prostitutes."
— John Swinton
New York Times editor
in a speech before the New York Press Club
1953
"The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them."
— Albert Einstein
letter to Sigmund Freud
July 30, 1932
"...the corporate ownership of the country has absolute control of the populist pulpit — 'the media' — as well as of the schoolroom."
— Gore Vidal
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
"A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government."
— Kenneth Boulding
University of Michigan
quoted in The Hidden Persuaders
"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology."
— Michael Parenti
Political scientist and author of
Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media
"The U.S. Government spends more than $400,000,000 per year to employ more than 8000 workers to create propaganda favourable to the United States. The result: 90 films per year, twelve magazines in 22 languages, and 800 hours of Voice of America programming in 37 languages with an estimated audience of 75 million listeners — all describing the 'virtues' of the American way."
— Pratkanis and Aronson
Age of Propaganda: the everyday use and abuse of persuasion
1992
"The [Central Intelligence] Agency has owned outright more than 240 Media operations around the world, including newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, radio and television stations, and wire services, and has partially controlled many more."
— Michael Parenti
Political scientist and author of
Democracy for the Few and
Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media
"We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is."
— station manager
of a Murdoch/News Corp.-owned station in Florida
The station manager is alleged to have said this to two of the station's on-air reporters, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, when they refused to water down their investigative report on Monsanto's bovine growth hormone. When the reporters continued to resist management-ordered story changes which they felt were false and misleading, they were fired.
Source: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/aug2001/cbs-a21.shtml
"In the media, the world is turned upside down. The Contras and the KLA are "democratizers"; the lethal sanctions against (the people of) Iraq exist to deliver its people from their dictator; the destruction of Yugoslavia through aerial bombardment of civilians and their infrastructure is a "humanitarian intervention."
— Michelle Stoddard
CovertAction Quarterly magazine
"The great masses of the people... more easily fall victims to a big lie than a small one"
— Adolf Hitler
Mein Kampf
"You furnish the pictures and I will furnish the war."
— William Randolph Hearst
Hearst was the owner of a chain of grossly dishonest, jingoistic newspapers. He had sent the famous artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to provide sketches for American newspaper readers of the Cuban insurrection against Spanish rule. When Remington arrived he found no insurrection happening. He wired Hearst, saying: "Everything quiet. No trouble here. There will be no war." Hearst wired back the notorious reply above.
"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."
— Mark Twain
The Mysterious Stranger
1916
"The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary."
— George Orwell
in the book 1984
"One of the intentions of corporate-controlled media is to instill in people a sense of disempowerment, of immobilization and paralysis. Its outcome is to turn you into good consumers. It is to keep people isolated, to feel that there is no possibility for social change."
— David Barsamian
journalist and publisher
"History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people."
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
emancipator
"The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth."
— Aldous Huxley
"We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest — which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves."
— Thomas Jefferson
political visionary
3rd U.S. President
unrepentant slave-owner
"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America."
— Alexis de Tocqueville
French political thinker, traveller
author of Democracy in America
1805-1859
"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it...."
— General Douglas MacArthur
1957
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
— H. L. Mencken
"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
— Herman Goering
Nazi Air Force (Luftwaffe) commander
at the Nuremberg Trials
"...the rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious.
"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly...it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."
— Joseph Goebbels
Nazi Propaganda Minister
"How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think."
— Adolf Hitler
"Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity... and I'm not sure about the former."
— Albert Einstein
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Essay
An essay is a piece of writing, usually from an author's personal point of view. Essays are non-fiction but often subjective; while expository, they can also include narrative. Essays can be literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author.The definition of an essay is vague, overlapping with those of an article and a short story. Almost all modern essays are written in prose, but works in verse have been dubbed essays (e.g. Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man). While brevity usually defines an essay, voluminous works like John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population provide counterexamples.The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, 'to try' or 'to attempt'. The first author to describe his works as essays was the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). Inspired in particular by the works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Oeuvres morales (Moral works) into French had just been published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his essays in 1572; the first edition, entitled Essais, was published in two volumes in 1580. For the rest of his life he continued revising previously published essays and composing new ones.
Francis Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597, 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Notable essayists are legion. They include G.K. Chesterton, Virginia Woolf, Voltaire, Adrienne Rich, Alamgir Hashmi, Joan Didion, Jean Baudrillard, Benjamin Disraeli, Susan Sontag, Natalia Ginzburg, Sara Suleri, Annie Dillard, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Charles Lamb, Leo Tolstoy, William Hazlitt, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Walter Bagehot, Maurice Maeterlinck, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, John D'Agata, Reynolds Price, Gore Vidal, Marguerite Yourcenar, J.M. Coetzee, Gaston Waringhien and E.B. White.
It is very difficult to define the genre into which essays fall.
The following remarks by Aldous Huxley, a leading essayist, may help:
"Like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay. But a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel. Montaigne's Third Book is the equivalent, very nearly, of a good slice of the Comédie Humaine. Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and at their best in the neighborhood of only one of the essay's three poles, or at the most only in the neighborhood of two of them. There are the predominantly personal essayists, who write fragments of reflective autobiography and who look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description. There are the predominantly objective essayists who do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme. … And how splendid, how truly oracular are the utterances of the great generalizers! … The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist" (Collected Essays, "Preface").
The essay as a pedagogical tool
In recent times, essays have become a major part of a formal education. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and essays are often used by universities in selecting applicants (see admissions essay). In both secondary and tertiary education, essays are used to judge the mastery and comprehension of material. Students are asked to explain, comment on, or assess a topic of study in the form of an essay.
Academic essays are usually more formal than literary ones. They may still allow the presentation of the writer's own views, but this is done in a logical and factual manner, with the use of the first person often discouraged.
The five-paragraph essay
Main article: Five paragraph essay
Many students' first exposure to the genre is the five paragraph essay, a highly structured form requiring an introduction presenting the thesis statement; three body paragraphs, each of which presents an idea to support the thesis together with supporting evidence and quotations; and a conclusion, which restates the thesis and summarizes the supporting points. The use of this format is controversial. Proponents argue that it teaches students how to organize their thoughts clearly in writing; opponents characterize its structure as rigid and repetitive.
Academic essays
Longer academic essays (often with a word limit of between 2,000 to 5,000 words) are often more discursive. They sometimes begin with a short summary analysis of what has previously been written on a topic, which is often called a literature review. Longer essays may also contain an introductory page in which words and phrases from the title are tightly defined. Most academic institutions will require that all substantial facts, quotations, and other supporting material used in an essay be referenced in a bibliography or works cited page at the end of the text. This scholarly convention allows others (whether teachers or fellow scholars) to understand the basis of the facts and quotations used to support the essay's argument, and thereby help to evaluate to what extent the argument is supported by evidence, and to evaluate the quality of that evidence. The academic essay tests the student's ability to present their thoughts in an organized way and tests their intellectual capabilities.
Some types of essays are:
Descriptive essays
The aim of descriptive essays is to provide a vivid picture of a person, location, object, event, or debate. It will offer details that will enable the reader to imagine the item described.
Definitive essays
The aim of a definition essay is to describe what a particular term means using facts, terms and anecdotes that a reader will understand.
Narrative essays
The aim of a narrative essay is to describe a course of events from a subjective vantage point, and may be written in first-person present or first person past tense. Though not always chronological, narrative essays do follow the development of a person through a series of experiences and reflections. The focus of the essay is often to more clearly identify the point of view of the narrator, and to express common features of subjectivity.
Compare and contrast essays
The aim of a compare and contrast essay is to develop the relationship between two or more things. Generally, the goal is to show that superficial differences or similarities are inadequate, and that closer examination reveals their unobvious, yet significant, relations or differences.
Persuasive essays
In a persuasive essay, the writer tries to persuade the reader to accept an idea or agree with an opinion. The writer's purpose is to convince the reader that her or his point of view is a reasonable one. The persuasive essay should be written in a style that grabs and holds the reader's attention, and the writer's opinion should be backed up by strong supporting details.
Argumentative essays
Argumentative essays are most often used to address controversial issues - i.e. serious issue over which there is some evident disagreement. An argument is a position combined with its supporting reasons. Argumentative papers thus set out a main claim and then provide reasons for thinking that the claim is true. Acknowledging opposing views and either refuting them or conceding to them is a common practice in this form of essay.
Reflective essays
This deals with topics of abstract nature, as habits, and ambitions. Social, political, philosophical and religious subjects also come under this head.
Dialectic essays
In this form of essay used commonly in Philosophy, one makes a thesis and argument, then objects to their own argument (with a counterargument), but then counters the counterargument with a final and novel argument. This form benefits from being more open-minded while countering a possible flaw that some may present.
Imitation
Essays in which the writer pulls out the main thesis and outline of a particular paper, and then writes an essay in his or her own style.
Non-literary essays
Visual Arts
In the visual arts, an essay is a preliminary drawing or sketch upon which a final painting or sculpture is based, made as a test of the work's composition (this meaning of the term, like several of those following, comes from the word essay's meaning of "attempt" or "trial").
Music
In the realm of music, composer Samuel Barber wrote a set of "Essays for Orchestra," relying on the form and content of the music to guide the listener's ear, rather than any extra-musical plot or story.
Film
Film essays are cinematic forms of the essay, with the film consisting of the evolution of a theme or an idea rather than a plot per se; or the film literally being a cinematic accompaniment to a narrator reading an essay. The genre is not well-defined but might include works of early Soviet documentarians like Dziga Vertov, or present-day filmmakers like Michael Moore or Errol Morris.
Jean-Luc Godard describes his recent work as "film-essays" (discussion of film essays)
Photography
A photographic essay is an attempt to cover a topic with a linked series of photographs.
Words are collections of sounds; sentences are collections of words; paragraphs are collections of sentences; and essays are collections of paragraphs. But so are many other forms of writing such as that found in novels, magazines, and newspapers. So what are the essential differences between the essay and other types of writing?
The essay is, first and foremost, essentially true, a piece of non-fiction. As soon as authors begin making up characters, adding details that really didn't occur, or fabricating a plot structure in order to make what they are writing larger than real life, they are writing in a fictional mode. In other words, essays may be descriptive, use narration, propose solutions to problems, elucidate the inner workings of complicated creations of nature and/or humanity, but one thing they aren't is fake or false or made up or fabricated. Essays may be creative in the sense that the authors have creatively explained their points of view, but essays aren't creative.
Secondly, all essays have definable beginnings, middles, and endings, unlike some forms of writing such as newspaper stories. In addition, essays are built around central ideas, normally referred to as theses. Elsewhere in this Online Writing Lab, the thesis statement is discussed, so there will be no great elaboration of that essential ingredient here. Basically, the thesis is the glue which binds the essay together. It is the point of the essay. It's what the essay is about, what it intends to show, prove, or do: the controlling purpose.
Finally, essays consist of one, three, or more paragraphs. While a two paragraph essay may be possible to write, the requirement that essays have introductions, bodies, and conclusions makes the use of a two-paragraph format rather awkward. And the one paragraph essay, consisting of a topic sentence, supporting details, and a closing sentence, is too brief to be considered a serious effort in terms of narrating, describing, explaining, or arguing a point of view. Realistically, that leaves us with three paragraphs or more. But length should never be a primary consideration when creating an essay. More germane is the idea that the essay should be long enough to completely discuss, argue, prove, or relate the main idea of the essay, the thesis. The well-written essay has a completeness, a wholeness about it that announces, "There's nothing more to be said."
The primary job of the essay, then, is to thoroughly discuss its main idea(s). In addition, three or more paragraphs are normally required to adequately perform this important function, even though under certain circumstances the one-paragraph essay is acceptable. In other areas of this OWL, typical one-paragraph, three-paragraph, five-paragraph, and longer essays will be displayed.
"Start writing, no matter about what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. You can sit and look at a page for a long time and nothing will happen. Start writing and it will." -- Louis L'Amour
essay
noun
1. A relatively brief discourse written especially as an exercise: composition, paper, theme. See words.
2. A procedure that ascertains effectiveness, value, proper function, or other quality: assay, proof, test, trial, tryout. See investigate.
3. A trying to do or make something: attempt, crack, effort, endeavor, go, offer, stab, trial, try. Informal shot. Slang take. Archaic assay. See try.
verb
1. To make an attempt to do or make: assay, attempt, endeavor, seek, strive, try. Idioms: have a go at, havemaketakea shot at, havetakea whack at, make a stab at, take a crack at. See try.
2. To subject to a procedure that ascertains effectiveness, value, proper function, or other quality: assay, check, examine, prove, test, try, try out. Idioms: bring to the test, make trial of, put to theprooftest. See investigate.
Antonyms: essay
n
Definition: try, attempt
Antonyms: idleness, pass
v
Definition: try, attempt
Antonyms: be idle, forget, neglect, pass
essay, a short written composition in prose that discusses a subject or proposes an argument without claiming to be a complete or thorough exposition. A minor literary form, the essay is more relaxed than the formal academic dissertation. The term (‘trying out’) was coined by the French writer Michel de Montaigne in the title of his Essais (1580), the first modern example of the form. Francis Bacon's Essays (1597) began the tradition of essays in English, of which important examples are those of Addison, Steele, Hazlitt, Emerson, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. The verse essays of Pope are rare exceptions to the prose norm.
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: essay
Analytic, interpretative, or critical literary composition, usually dealing with its subject from a limited and often personal point of view. Flexible and versatile, the essay was perfected by Michel de Montaigne, who chose the name essai to emphasize that his compositions were "attempts" to express his thoughts and experiences. The essay has been the vehicle of literary and social criticism for some, while for others it could serve semipolitical, nationalistic, or polemical purposes and could have a detached, playful, earnest, or bitter tone.
German Literature Companion: Essay
Essay, a term of French and English origin (Montaigne, 1580, Bacon, 1597), was first applied to German essays by Hermann Grimm (Essays, 4 vols., 1859-90), supplementing German terms such as ‘Versuch’, ‘Entwurf’, ‘Fragment’, ‘Abhandlung’, and ‘Aufsatz’, all of which had been employed since the mid-18th c. (e.g. by Winckelmann, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, F. Schlegel, Novalis, A. von Humboldt). ‘Essayistik’, the art of critical essay writing with its often frankly subjective bias, has been cultivated since Grimm by a great number of outstanding men of letters (e.g. P. Ernst, R. Kaßner, H. and Th. Mann, G. Lukács
Columbia Encyclopedia: essay,
relatively short literary composition in prose, in which a writer discusses a topic, usually restricted in scope, or tries to persuade the reader to accept a particular point of view. Although such classical authors as Theophrastus, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, and Plutarch wrote essays, the term essai was first applied to the form in 1580 by Montaigne, one of the greatest essayists of all time, to his pieces on friendship, love, death, and morality. In England the term was inaugurated in 1597 by Francis Bacon, who wrote shrewd meditations on civil and moral wisdom. Montaigne and Bacon, in fact, illustrate the two distinct kinds of essay—the informal and the formal. The informal essay is personal, intimate, relaxed, conversational, and frequently humorous. Some of the greatest exponents of the informal essay are Jonathan Swift, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, Mark Twain, James Thurber, and E. B. White. The formal essay is dogmatic, impersonal, systematic, and expository. Significant writers of this type include Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, J. H. Newman, Walter Pater, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. In the latter half of the 20th cent. the formal essay has become more diversified in subject and less stately in tone and language, and the sharp division between the two forms has tended to disappear.
Bibliography
Word Tutor: essay
IN BRIEF: A short piece of writing on some subject, giving the writer's personal ideas.
Grammar Dictionary: essay
A short piece of writing on one subject, usually presenting the author's own views. Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and Ralph Waldo Emerson are celebrated for their essays.
Francis Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597, 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Notable essayists are legion. They include G.K. Chesterton, Virginia Woolf, Voltaire, Adrienne Rich, Alamgir Hashmi, Joan Didion, Jean Baudrillard, Benjamin Disraeli, Susan Sontag, Natalia Ginzburg, Sara Suleri, Annie Dillard, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Charles Lamb, Leo Tolstoy, William Hazlitt, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Walter Bagehot, Maurice Maeterlinck, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, John D'Agata, Reynolds Price, Gore Vidal, Marguerite Yourcenar, J.M. Coetzee, Gaston Waringhien and E.B. White.
It is very difficult to define the genre into which essays fall.
The following remarks by Aldous Huxley, a leading essayist, may help:
"Like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay. But a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel. Montaigne's Third Book is the equivalent, very nearly, of a good slice of the Comédie Humaine. Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and at their best in the neighborhood of only one of the essay's three poles, or at the most only in the neighborhood of two of them. There are the predominantly personal essayists, who write fragments of reflective autobiography and who look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description. There are the predominantly objective essayists who do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme. … And how splendid, how truly oracular are the utterances of the great generalizers! … The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist" (Collected Essays, "Preface").
The essay as a pedagogical tool
In recent times, essays have become a major part of a formal education. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and essays are often used by universities in selecting applicants (see admissions essay). In both secondary and tertiary education, essays are used to judge the mastery and comprehension of material. Students are asked to explain, comment on, or assess a topic of study in the form of an essay.
Academic essays are usually more formal than literary ones. They may still allow the presentation of the writer's own views, but this is done in a logical and factual manner, with the use of the first person often discouraged.
The five-paragraph essay
Main article: Five paragraph essay
Many students' first exposure to the genre is the five paragraph essay, a highly structured form requiring an introduction presenting the thesis statement; three body paragraphs, each of which presents an idea to support the thesis together with supporting evidence and quotations; and a conclusion, which restates the thesis and summarizes the supporting points. The use of this format is controversial. Proponents argue that it teaches students how to organize their thoughts clearly in writing; opponents characterize its structure as rigid and repetitive.
Academic essays
Longer academic essays (often with a word limit of between 2,000 to 5,000 words) are often more discursive. They sometimes begin with a short summary analysis of what has previously been written on a topic, which is often called a literature review. Longer essays may also contain an introductory page in which words and phrases from the title are tightly defined. Most academic institutions will require that all substantial facts, quotations, and other supporting material used in an essay be referenced in a bibliography or works cited page at the end of the text. This scholarly convention allows others (whether teachers or fellow scholars) to understand the basis of the facts and quotations used to support the essay's argument, and thereby help to evaluate to what extent the argument is supported by evidence, and to evaluate the quality of that evidence. The academic essay tests the student's ability to present their thoughts in an organized way and tests their intellectual capabilities.
Some types of essays are:
Descriptive essays
The aim of descriptive essays is to provide a vivid picture of a person, location, object, event, or debate. It will offer details that will enable the reader to imagine the item described.
Definitive essays
The aim of a definition essay is to describe what a particular term means using facts, terms and anecdotes that a reader will understand.
Narrative essays
The aim of a narrative essay is to describe a course of events from a subjective vantage point, and may be written in first-person present or first person past tense. Though not always chronological, narrative essays do follow the development of a person through a series of experiences and reflections. The focus of the essay is often to more clearly identify the point of view of the narrator, and to express common features of subjectivity.
Compare and contrast essays
The aim of a compare and contrast essay is to develop the relationship between two or more things. Generally, the goal is to show that superficial differences or similarities are inadequate, and that closer examination reveals their unobvious, yet significant, relations or differences.
Persuasive essays
In a persuasive essay, the writer tries to persuade the reader to accept an idea or agree with an opinion. The writer's purpose is to convince the reader that her or his point of view is a reasonable one. The persuasive essay should be written in a style that grabs and holds the reader's attention, and the writer's opinion should be backed up by strong supporting details.
Argumentative essays
Argumentative essays are most often used to address controversial issues - i.e. serious issue over which there is some evident disagreement. An argument is a position combined with its supporting reasons. Argumentative papers thus set out a main claim and then provide reasons for thinking that the claim is true. Acknowledging opposing views and either refuting them or conceding to them is a common practice in this form of essay.
Reflective essays
This deals with topics of abstract nature, as habits, and ambitions. Social, political, philosophical and religious subjects also come under this head.
Dialectic essays
In this form of essay used commonly in Philosophy, one makes a thesis and argument, then objects to their own argument (with a counterargument), but then counters the counterargument with a final and novel argument. This form benefits from being more open-minded while countering a possible flaw that some may present.
Imitation
Essays in which the writer pulls out the main thesis and outline of a particular paper, and then writes an essay in his or her own style.
Non-literary essays
Visual Arts
In the visual arts, an essay is a preliminary drawing or sketch upon which a final painting or sculpture is based, made as a test of the work's composition (this meaning of the term, like several of those following, comes from the word essay's meaning of "attempt" or "trial").
Music
In the realm of music, composer Samuel Barber wrote a set of "Essays for Orchestra," relying on the form and content of the music to guide the listener's ear, rather than any extra-musical plot or story.
Film
Film essays are cinematic forms of the essay, with the film consisting of the evolution of a theme or an idea rather than a plot per se; or the film literally being a cinematic accompaniment to a narrator reading an essay. The genre is not well-defined but might include works of early Soviet documentarians like Dziga Vertov, or present-day filmmakers like Michael Moore or Errol Morris.
Jean-Luc Godard describes his recent work as "film-essays" (discussion of film essays)
Photography
A photographic essay is an attempt to cover a topic with a linked series of photographs.
Words are collections of sounds; sentences are collections of words; paragraphs are collections of sentences; and essays are collections of paragraphs. But so are many other forms of writing such as that found in novels, magazines, and newspapers. So what are the essential differences between the essay and other types of writing?
The essay is, first and foremost, essentially true, a piece of non-fiction. As soon as authors begin making up characters, adding details that really didn't occur, or fabricating a plot structure in order to make what they are writing larger than real life, they are writing in a fictional mode. In other words, essays may be descriptive, use narration, propose solutions to problems, elucidate the inner workings of complicated creations of nature and/or humanity, but one thing they aren't is fake or false or made up or fabricated. Essays may be creative in the sense that the authors have creatively explained their points of view, but essays aren't creative.
Secondly, all essays have definable beginnings, middles, and endings, unlike some forms of writing such as newspaper stories. In addition, essays are built around central ideas, normally referred to as theses. Elsewhere in this Online Writing Lab, the thesis statement is discussed, so there will be no great elaboration of that essential ingredient here. Basically, the thesis is the glue which binds the essay together. It is the point of the essay. It's what the essay is about, what it intends to show, prove, or do: the controlling purpose.
Finally, essays consist of one, three, or more paragraphs. While a two paragraph essay may be possible to write, the requirement that essays have introductions, bodies, and conclusions makes the use of a two-paragraph format rather awkward. And the one paragraph essay, consisting of a topic sentence, supporting details, and a closing sentence, is too brief to be considered a serious effort in terms of narrating, describing, explaining, or arguing a point of view. Realistically, that leaves us with three paragraphs or more. But length should never be a primary consideration when creating an essay. More germane is the idea that the essay should be long enough to completely discuss, argue, prove, or relate the main idea of the essay, the thesis. The well-written essay has a completeness, a wholeness about it that announces, "There's nothing more to be said."
The primary job of the essay, then, is to thoroughly discuss its main idea(s). In addition, three or more paragraphs are normally required to adequately perform this important function, even though under certain circumstances the one-paragraph essay is acceptable. In other areas of this OWL, typical one-paragraph, three-paragraph, five-paragraph, and longer essays will be displayed.
"Start writing, no matter about what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. You can sit and look at a page for a long time and nothing will happen. Start writing and it will." -- Louis L'Amour
essay
noun
1. A relatively brief discourse written especially as an exercise: composition, paper, theme. See words.
2. A procedure that ascertains effectiveness, value, proper function, or other quality: assay, proof, test, trial, tryout. See investigate.
3. A trying to do or make something: attempt, crack, effort, endeavor, go, offer, stab, trial, try. Informal shot. Slang take. Archaic assay. See try.
verb
1. To make an attempt to do or make: assay, attempt, endeavor, seek, strive, try. Idioms: have a go at, havemaketakea shot at, havetakea whack at, make a stab at, take a crack at. See try.
2. To subject to a procedure that ascertains effectiveness, value, proper function, or other quality: assay, check, examine, prove, test, try, try out. Idioms: bring to the test, make trial of, put to theprooftest. See investigate.
Antonyms: essay
n
Definition: try, attempt
Antonyms: idleness, pass
v
Definition: try, attempt
Antonyms: be idle, forget, neglect, pass
essay, a short written composition in prose that discusses a subject or proposes an argument without claiming to be a complete or thorough exposition. A minor literary form, the essay is more relaxed than the formal academic dissertation. The term (‘trying out’) was coined by the French writer Michel de Montaigne in the title of his Essais (1580), the first modern example of the form. Francis Bacon's Essays (1597) began the tradition of essays in English, of which important examples are those of Addison, Steele, Hazlitt, Emerson, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. The verse essays of Pope are rare exceptions to the prose norm.
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: essay
Analytic, interpretative, or critical literary composition, usually dealing with its subject from a limited and often personal point of view. Flexible and versatile, the essay was perfected by Michel de Montaigne, who chose the name essai to emphasize that his compositions were "attempts" to express his thoughts and experiences. The essay has been the vehicle of literary and social criticism for some, while for others it could serve semipolitical, nationalistic, or polemical purposes and could have a detached, playful, earnest, or bitter tone.
German Literature Companion: Essay
Essay, a term of French and English origin (Montaigne, 1580, Bacon, 1597), was first applied to German essays by Hermann Grimm (Essays, 4 vols., 1859-90), supplementing German terms such as ‘Versuch’, ‘Entwurf’, ‘Fragment’, ‘Abhandlung’, and ‘Aufsatz’, all of which had been employed since the mid-18th c. (e.g. by Winckelmann, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, F. Schlegel, Novalis, A. von Humboldt). ‘Essayistik’, the art of critical essay writing with its often frankly subjective bias, has been cultivated since Grimm by a great number of outstanding men of letters (e.g. P. Ernst, R. Kaßner, H. and Th. Mann, G. Lukács
Columbia Encyclopedia: essay,
relatively short literary composition in prose, in which a writer discusses a topic, usually restricted in scope, or tries to persuade the reader to accept a particular point of view. Although such classical authors as Theophrastus, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, and Plutarch wrote essays, the term essai was first applied to the form in 1580 by Montaigne, one of the greatest essayists of all time, to his pieces on friendship, love, death, and morality. In England the term was inaugurated in 1597 by Francis Bacon, who wrote shrewd meditations on civil and moral wisdom. Montaigne and Bacon, in fact, illustrate the two distinct kinds of essay—the informal and the formal. The informal essay is personal, intimate, relaxed, conversational, and frequently humorous. Some of the greatest exponents of the informal essay are Jonathan Swift, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, Mark Twain, James Thurber, and E. B. White. The formal essay is dogmatic, impersonal, systematic, and expository. Significant writers of this type include Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, J. H. Newman, Walter Pater, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. In the latter half of the 20th cent. the formal essay has become more diversified in subject and less stately in tone and language, and the sharp division between the two forms has tended to disappear.
Bibliography
Word Tutor: essay
IN BRIEF: A short piece of writing on some subject, giving the writer's personal ideas.
Grammar Dictionary: essay
A short piece of writing on one subject, usually presenting the author's own views. Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and Ralph Waldo Emerson are celebrated for their essays.
Grammar; Its Importance in English Communication
Grammar is important in communication. Grammar is the study of the structure and meaning of human language; the term is also applied to books that set out rules governing a language’s usage. Grammar maybe understood either in a traditional sense, designating an unbroken chain of theories about language extending back to ancient Greece., or in a more modern way. In current linguistics, grammar is defined as, the body of tacit knowledge that constitute a speaker’s voice group of his language.
Grammar is the study of the forms of words and their arrangement in sentence; a system of rules for speaking and writing judge d with regard to correctness of spelling, syntax, etc.
Scholars have analyzed all known languages, and have reduced the users and forms of words and their combinations to a set of rules derived from usage. The manner in which words may be put together to form sentences is called grammar.
Grammar is, first is rules for language: the system for rules by which word are formed and put together to form sentences; second is particular set of language rules: the rule for speaking or writing is particular language, or an analysis of the rules of a particular aspects of language (Spanish grammar and case grammar);third is quality of language: the spoken or written form of language that somebody uses with regard to accept standard of correctness (bad grammar) fourth is grammar book: a book dealing with the grammar of a language and fifth is Analytical system: a systematic treatment of elementary principles of a subject and their interrelationships.
Grammar includes such specific subtopics as morphology (the principles of word formation: see phonology and morphology), syntax, (the principles of sentence structures) and the part of speech. Descriptive grammar is observational and attempts to characterize the principles of words and sentences formation that speakers actually follow in using their language. On the other hand, prescriptive grammar, also called normative grammar, formulate rules about how people ought to speak or write.
Traditional grammar isolates and identifies language units of various sizes and develops rules for combining them into longer structures. A properly constituted structure–one formed according to the rules- is called grammatical; ungrammatical structures are those violate the rules. For example, a morphological rule for English is that nouns but not verbs can end in the suffix-ness. Forms such as quickness, fastness and present ness may or may not be nouns in English, but they cannot be verbs. A syntactic rule is that singular subjects take singular verbs.
In grammar, there are many kinds of grammatical elements such as using the present tense correctly: we use the simple present tense to express a habitual action, a general truth which is not repeated but which is true, we use present tense whenever refer to action done at present: using imperative correctly: the imperative form of the verb is used to give instruction of directions, make requests or give commands, It uses the base form of the verb; using question words correctly: Wh-question words , who, what, which are question words when the information needed is the subject of the modifiers of the subject; Going to and Will: we usually be going to+ base form of the verb (v) when we talk about our plane or intentions for the future. We can use Will for the same meaning although going to is more common; single-word, compound, phrasal modifiers. Single word modifiers are placed before the item described, whereas phrasal modifiers are placed after item described; coordinating correlative conjunctions: conjunctions such as and, or, but, yet, and so stand between join part of a sentence pattern of life construction ( between two nouns, two verbs, two phrases or clauses). They are called coordinators, coordinating conjunctions or conjunctive they join the grammatical elements of equal interest and importance; In clauses join by conjunctions, a comma, semi-colon, or period is placed is placed before the conjunction; sentence connectors are also called conjunctions, they resemble coordinating conjunction in that both join or stand between sentence patterns or independent clauses. Sentence connectors differ from coordinating conjunctions in that they occur at the end of or inside the second pattern or Independent clause, the conjunction can only occur between sentence patterns; Expressing relationship of ideas through subordination using subordinating connectives,in constructing sentences you can make one idea more pathetic than another by the process of subordination, that is by putting the main or important idea in the main clause , and the lesser or minor idea in the subordinate clause; subordinate clauses are dependent structures, they are meaningful only when they apart of larger sentence structure.
The advantages of knowing correct grammar, you can easily get other’s attention when you are vocalizing those words or sentences correctly, it can help you to be more confident in facing different people in their different fields, you can easily get jobs like being a call center representative, you can get along with the high society people, it can enhance your vocabulary wordings, it will enhance your ability to create some exception all essay of your own.
Grammar is the study of the forms of words and their arrangement in sentence; a system of rules for speaking and writing judge d with regard to correctness of spelling, syntax, etc.
Scholars have analyzed all known languages, and have reduced the users and forms of words and their combinations to a set of rules derived from usage. The manner in which words may be put together to form sentences is called grammar.
Grammar is, first is rules for language: the system for rules by which word are formed and put together to form sentences; second is particular set of language rules: the rule for speaking or writing is particular language, or an analysis of the rules of a particular aspects of language (Spanish grammar and case grammar);third is quality of language: the spoken or written form of language that somebody uses with regard to accept standard of correctness (bad grammar) fourth is grammar book: a book dealing with the grammar of a language and fifth is Analytical system: a systematic treatment of elementary principles of a subject and their interrelationships.
Grammar includes such specific subtopics as morphology (the principles of word formation: see phonology and morphology), syntax, (the principles of sentence structures) and the part of speech. Descriptive grammar is observational and attempts to characterize the principles of words and sentences formation that speakers actually follow in using their language. On the other hand, prescriptive grammar, also called normative grammar, formulate rules about how people ought to speak or write.
Traditional grammar isolates and identifies language units of various sizes and develops rules for combining them into longer structures. A properly constituted structure–one formed according to the rules- is called grammatical; ungrammatical structures are those violate the rules. For example, a morphological rule for English is that nouns but not verbs can end in the suffix-ness. Forms such as quickness, fastness and present ness may or may not be nouns in English, but they cannot be verbs. A syntactic rule is that singular subjects take singular verbs.
In grammar, there are many kinds of grammatical elements such as using the present tense correctly: we use the simple present tense to express a habitual action, a general truth which is not repeated but which is true, we use present tense whenever refer to action done at present: using imperative correctly: the imperative form of the verb is used to give instruction of directions, make requests or give commands, It uses the base form of the verb; using question words correctly: Wh-question words , who, what, which are question words when the information needed is the subject of the modifiers of the subject; Going to and Will: we usually be going to+ base form of the verb (v) when we talk about our plane or intentions for the future. We can use Will for the same meaning although going to is more common; single-word, compound, phrasal modifiers. Single word modifiers are placed before the item described, whereas phrasal modifiers are placed after item described; coordinating correlative conjunctions: conjunctions such as and, or, but, yet, and so stand between join part of a sentence pattern of life construction ( between two nouns, two verbs, two phrases or clauses). They are called coordinators, coordinating conjunctions or conjunctive they join the grammatical elements of equal interest and importance; In clauses join by conjunctions, a comma, semi-colon, or period is placed is placed before the conjunction; sentence connectors are also called conjunctions, they resemble coordinating conjunction in that both join or stand between sentence patterns or independent clauses. Sentence connectors differ from coordinating conjunctions in that they occur at the end of or inside the second pattern or Independent clause, the conjunction can only occur between sentence patterns; Expressing relationship of ideas through subordination using subordinating connectives,in constructing sentences you can make one idea more pathetic than another by the process of subordination, that is by putting the main or important idea in the main clause , and the lesser or minor idea in the subordinate clause; subordinate clauses are dependent structures, they are meaningful only when they apart of larger sentence structure.
The advantages of knowing correct grammar, you can easily get other’s attention when you are vocalizing those words or sentences correctly, it can help you to be more confident in facing different people in their different fields, you can easily get jobs like being a call center representative, you can get along with the high society people, it can enhance your vocabulary wordings, it will enhance your ability to create some exception all essay of your own.
American Slang
Dicey - Definition: Risky, dangerous Example: 1) Getting into a fight with Tim is very dicey -- he is a black belt in karate.
Wrong side of the track - Definition: The poor part of town. Example: 1) Chris came from the wrong side of the tracks, but eventually he became a millionaire. Etymology: In many American cities, the neighborhoods where poor people live are typically on one side of a city's railroad tracks, close to factories and sources of pollution. Synonyms: slum
Mystery Meat - Definition: Animal flesh that has been cooked so long and so badly that it cannot be identified; an unappealing food item of unknown origin, typically served to defenseless students in dining halls.
Example: Oh, no… it looks like mystery meat is on the menu again.
Five o'clock shadow - Definition: Facial stubble; a man's beard at the end of the day. Example: 1) Peter has a very heavy beard -- even though he shaves every morning, he gets a five o'clock shadow by lunchtime Etymology: The typical American workday ends at 'five o'clock' in the afternoon. A 'shadow' is a patch of darkness, or a hint of the presence of something. After spending a full day at work for eight or more hours, many men have a noticeable growth of facial hair, which is dark like a 'shadow' and hints at the beard that would grow if left unshaven.
Jane Doe - Definition: An unidentified woman or the average American woman.
Example:
1) The police found Jane Doe number 1 buried under the blanket in the back yard.
2) Jane Doe spends most of her time shopping for the latest fashions.
knucle sandwich - Definition: A punch in the face. Example: 1) If you don't stop bothering me, you're going 2) Sabah gave Peter a knuckle sandwich when she caught him looking at other girls. to get a knuckle sandwich.
Etymology: A 'sandwich' is an assortment of food between two pieces of bread, and 'knuckles' are the bones in your hand. So a 'knuckle sandwich' is a fist that goes straight toward your mouth.
Hole in the Wall - Definition: A small, simple place, particularly a shop or restaurant.
Example: 1) Let's go to the Italian restaurant on Smith Street. It's just a hole in the wall, but the food is excellent. Etymology: This phrase has been used since the early 1800s. A 'hole' is an empty space, and a 'wall' is part of a building. So a 'hole in the wall' is a simple, undecorated space in a building.
Wrong side of the track - Definition: The poor part of town. Example: 1) Chris came from the wrong side of the tracks, but eventually he became a millionaire. Etymology: In many American cities, the neighborhoods where poor people live are typically on one side of a city's railroad tracks, close to factories and sources of pollution. Synonyms: slum
Mystery Meat - Definition: Animal flesh that has been cooked so long and so badly that it cannot be identified; an unappealing food item of unknown origin, typically served to defenseless students in dining halls.
Example: Oh, no… it looks like mystery meat is on the menu again.
Five o'clock shadow - Definition: Facial stubble; a man's beard at the end of the day. Example: 1) Peter has a very heavy beard -- even though he shaves every morning, he gets a five o'clock shadow by lunchtime Etymology: The typical American workday ends at 'five o'clock' in the afternoon. A 'shadow' is a patch of darkness, or a hint of the presence of something. After spending a full day at work for eight or more hours, many men have a noticeable growth of facial hair, which is dark like a 'shadow' and hints at the beard that would grow if left unshaven.
Jane Doe - Definition: An unidentified woman or the average American woman.
Example:
1) The police found Jane Doe number 1 buried under the blanket in the back yard.
2) Jane Doe spends most of her time shopping for the latest fashions.
knucle sandwich - Definition: A punch in the face. Example: 1) If you don't stop bothering me, you're going 2) Sabah gave Peter a knuckle sandwich when she caught him looking at other girls. to get a knuckle sandwich.
Etymology: A 'sandwich' is an assortment of food between two pieces of bread, and 'knuckles' are the bones in your hand. So a 'knuckle sandwich' is a fist that goes straight toward your mouth.
Hole in the Wall - Definition: A small, simple place, particularly a shop or restaurant.
Example: 1) Let's go to the Italian restaurant on Smith Street. It's just a hole in the wall, but the food is excellent. Etymology: This phrase has been used since the early 1800s. A 'hole' is an empty space, and a 'wall' is part of a building. So a 'hole in the wall' is a simple, undecorated space in a building.
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