Word: essays
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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, paradoxes your assumptions (paradoxes are not equivocations), the more interesting an essay it is likely to be. (If you have a chance to confer with the assistant in advance, of course--and we all like to called "assistant," not "graders"--you may be able to ferret out one or two cosmic assumptions of his own; seeing them in you bluebook, he can only...
...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 the 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 a generality is the man who can write a 10-page essay, which means nothing at all to him, and have it mean a great deal to anyone who reads it. The generality banks...
...check the operation of a vague generality under fire, take the typical example, "Hume brought empiricism to its logical extreme." The question asked, "Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent the spirit of the age in which he lived?" Our hero replies 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 lived that he was a 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 said...
...ESSAY...
...defense of multiculturalism frames Gates' on-target attack on the right. The second essay, "The Master's Pieces," opens with a scathing assault on former Secretary of Education William Bennett and cultural critic Allan Bloom '56, chargins that they "symbolize for us the nostalgic return to what I think of as the 'antebellum aesthetic position,' when men were men, and men were white, when scholar-critics were white men, and when women and persons of color were voiceless, faceless servants,...filling brandy snifters in the boardrooms of old boy's clubs...