Word: essays
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...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 equivocations), 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...
...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 very well might 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 writer banks...
...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 his essay with, “David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, brought empiricism to its logical extreme. If these 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...
Just exactly what the equivocator’s answer has to do with the actual 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 be definite enough to eliminate any possibilities...
Charles Krauthammer's essay "Did Chess Make Him Crazy?" [May 2] unfortunately looked at only the negative aspects of the Bobby Fischer saga. Krauthammer should know that there's a fine line between genius and madness. He wrote that Fischer "fell off a psychic cliff," but that's not generally how the game of chess affects people. I have been playing chess since I was in elementary school. It helped me tremendously with concentration, analytical skills, organizing and prioritizing. It made me what I am today: an engineer and International Chess Master. The experiences of the majority of chess players...