Word: essayed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...essay is the ditch-digging occupation of writing. Ishmael Reed...
...visceral impressions and off-the-cuff (oftentimes, off-the-wall) philosophy. To call upon Dr. Johnson's phrase, Dispatches was "an irregular, undigested piece." Or to borrow a word from the French in referring to the form later perfected by the English, Herr's book was, quite frankly, an essay...
That the term essay should evoke any negative connotations is probably a factor of our early classroom experience with a stuffy set of notions that link formality to style and set a premium on bloodless analysis and objectivity. While these principles might apply in an odd way to Montaigne and Francis Bacon, it must be remembered that the congenial essay has always been one of our most personal, eccentric, and adaptable forms. "One damn thing after another," Aldous Huxley called it, "but in a sequence that in some miraculous way develops a central theme and relates it to the rest...
...your Essay on "The Decline and Fall of Oratory" [Aug. 18]: great speeches require great men. Rhetoric is a set of tools that anyone can use; the problem is not with the tools, but with the people who use them...
...irony in reading your Essay the morning after Senator Edward Kennedy's persuasive address to the Democratic Convention...