Word: essayed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Adan, 22, a budding playwright and a waiter, was stabbed last summer by a restaurant patron, the fascination focused on the killer: Jack Henry Abbott, Marxist, existentialist, prison murderer, author (In the Belly of the Beast) and, beginning a few weeks before Adan's killing, literary celebrity (see ESSAY). On his 38th birthday last week in Manhattan, Abbott was found guilty of manslaughter. Because he admitted that he had killed Adan, the verdict was considered a victory for the defense. Said Defense Lawyer Ivan Fisher: "When they said not guilty on murder two, I was enormously relieved...
Strobe Talbott's essay on the failure of Communism [Jan. 4] is prizewinning material. He captured the contradictions, false assumptions and lust for power that underlie this vast totalitarian system. However, the essay failed to pay sufficient attention to one striking aspect of the dilemma presented by Soviet power: it is the support of the Western world that has made the U.S.S.R. so indomitable. With our shipments of food and technology we have not only sustained the sinking ship, we have armed it as well...
...discussion of the various methods whereby the crafty student attempts to show the grader that he knows a lot more than he actually does, the vague generality is a key device. A generality is a vague statement that means nothing by itself, but when placed in an essay on a specific subject might very well mean something to the grader. The true master of the generality is the student who can write a ten page essay that means nothing at all to the writer, and have it mean a great deal to anyone who reads...
...check the operation of a vague generality under fire, take the typical example: "Hume brought empiricism to its logical extreme." The question is asked, "Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent the spirit of the age in which he lived?" Our hero replies by opening the 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 really...
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 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...