Isn’t it pretty strange to write about what makes a great essay without mentioning a single actual essay except Charles Darwin’s natural selection paper from 1844?
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The Best Essay
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Re: The Best Essay
#32Good essay! Shame he doesn’t talk about taboo. Taboo subjects could make for great essays but it takes a lot of guts to write about them. Anything from collapse of your life, work, prison or death threats may ensue. Breaking taboos move society forward though. Keep an eye on “exceptions to free speech”.
Re: The Best Essay
#33> The best possible essay at any given time would usually be one describing the most important scientific or technological discovery To a hammer, everything is a nail. I love technology and science, but that doesn't mean that is what makes the best essay. Relationships are key to our survival, so I suggest personal relations could be just as good an essay as anything scientific - yes, I'm suggesting that social scien…
> Relationships are key to our survival, so I suggest personal relations could be just as good an essay as anything scientific
Some of my favorite books are old literature that describe relationship dynamics I still see playing out between people today. Swann’s Way, The Brothers Karamazov, even Canterbury Tales…
I think it was Vonnegut that wrote that the best books are the ones that tell you what you already know [but maybe you didn’t know you knew till you read it]. That’s something like surprise, and yet something like the opposite.
Re: The Best Essay
#34"It probably wouldn't be about this year's lipstick colors."
Why not? "Death of a Pig" didn't convey any new scientific ideas, and might not even have been surprising in any kind of intellectual way.
You could title this piece "Great Essays" and it would be entirely defensible. But Graham gave himself a higher goal here, and I don't think he's really presented a recipe for writing the Best essay. Look what he's up against: Baldwin, Didion, Oliver Sacks; it's easier to come up with examples of great essays that don't set out to develop surprising new ideas, and that probably didn't start out with a mischievous look in the author's eyes.
I'm not saying this isn't good advice for developing great essays, just that it's advice that narrows the solution space a bit much.
Re: The Best Essay
#35[deleted]
Re: The Best Essay
#36> The best essay would be on the most important topic you could tell people something surprising about. The premise is wrong (or at least not obviously right) IMO, so I have a hard time taking any of the rest of it seriously. Could the best essay not be the most emotionally moving? The best when heard aloud? The most convincing call to action? The most accurate? The highest grossing? Driving the most engagement? What…
Anyone can nitpick anyone by listing whatabouts they didn't intend. Whatabout this OTHER sense of the word "best". It's in the dictionary. You didn't address it, therfore you're a lazy man of straw. The only defense to that type of attack is to write everything in a way that never chooses any one path, spends all it's time mounting a defense to every whatabout, vaguely floating over eggshells, immune to attack. Who w…
I’ll concede my point, I think you’re right. Everyone’s a critic.
Re: The Best Essay
#37> Writing about the best essay implies there is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive, though it follows necessarily from the possibility of one essay being better than another. What is the best car? Some cars are real stinkers. It's not hard to find cars that are better than Zastava Yugo in every way. For most cars you can find other cars that are in the same class, but just better. Clea…
Or formalized, a partial ordering over some set doesn't imply a total ordering or a maximum value.
Re: The Best Essay
#38"It probably wouldn't be about this year's lipstick colors." Why not? "Death of a Pig" didn't convey any new scientific ideas, and might not even have been surprising in any kind of intellectual way. You could title this piece "Great Essays" and it would be entirely defensible. But Graham gave himself a higher goal here, and I don't think he's really presented a recipe for writing the Best essay. Look what he's up ag…
When he mentioned lipstick and evolution right after I figured he was going to remark on the obvious connection later in the essay, but no.
Re: The Best Essay
#39Good essay! Shame he doesn’t talk about taboo. Taboo subjects could make for great essays but it takes a lot of guts to write about them. Anything from collapse of your life, work, prison or death threats may ensue. Breaking taboos move society forward though. Keep an eye on “exceptions to free speech”.
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Re: The Best Essay
#40"It probably wouldn't be about this year's lipstick colors." Why not? "Death of a Pig" didn't convey any new scientific ideas, and might not even have been surprising in any kind of intellectual way. You could title this piece "Great Essays" and it would be entirely defensible. But Graham gave himself a higher goal here, and I don't think he's really presented a recipe for writing the Best essay. Look what he's up ag…
When he mentioned lipstick and evolution right after I figured he was going to remark on the obvious connection later in the essay, but no.
When the GP mentioned lipstick and pigs, I thought they were going somewhere too.