Word: essay
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Sidey is not surprised that following a story into the U.S. heartland was so rewarding. Although he has spent 35 years reporting and writing for TIME in Washington -- experience he put to good use in this week's Essay on the pressures and perils of working there -- he has never lost his fascination for what he calls "the machines and methods of America: mining, cattle ranching, plows, the things that make this country work." As a journalist new to the Capitol, he was once approached in a Senate hallway by Lyndon B. Johnson, then the majority leader: "He stared...
...ESSAY...
...check the operation of a Vague Generality, take the typical example of "Hume brought empiricism to its logical extreme." The question is asked, "Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent with the sprit of the age in which he lived?" Our hero replies with by opening his essay with "David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, brought empiricism to its logical extreme. If this be the spirit of the age in which he lived, then he was representative of it." This Generality expert has already taken his position for the essay. Actually he has not the vaguest idea of what Hume...
Just exactly what our equivocator's answer has to do with the original question is hard to say. The equivocator writes an essay about the point, but never on it. Consequently, the grader often mentally assumes that the right answer is known by the equivocator and marks the essay as an extension of the point rather than a complete irrelevance. The Artful Equivocation must imply the writer knows the right answer, but it must never get definite enough to eliminate any possibilities...
...reasons he suggests--that the assumption is so cosmic that it might be accepted. It is rarely "accepted;" we aren't here to accept or reject--we're here to be amused. The more dazzling, personal, unorthodox, paradoxic your assumptions (paradoxes are not equivocation), the more interesting an essay is likely to be. (If you have a chance to confer with the assistant in advance, of course--and we all like to be called "assistants," not "graders"--you may be able to ferret out one or two cosmic assumptions of his own; seeing them in your bluebook, he can only...