Starting 2021, I’ll log my doings and thoughts about writing.
Content Like Seneca, Orwell begins by identifying a problem and promising a solution. He hops almost immediately into an English language workshop, which centers around five paragraph-long examples. The insights I found most helpful were: Dying metaphors: The purpose of metaphors is to bring a thought alive by calling a vivid image to mind. Dead…
Form This essay is not concise—but perhaps one of the reasons I say so is because it is laden with examples and anecdotes from the first century A.D. This makes it historically interesting but difficult to relate to and tricky to evaluate from my 21st century perspective. When I come to a text that is…
“‘That woman Estelle,’” the note reads, “‘is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated today.’” Didion begins her essay with this note because it awakes a gossipy desire for confession in the reader and he’s hooked. But that desire is disappointed, or at least diverted. The note is a quotation of a…
The other day, an Instagram ad caught my eye. I clicked for “More Information” and was taken to the following testimonial. “My name is Heinrich Faust. I spent fifty years in academia searching for truth only to realize I had wasted my life. I was decidedly single, and for all my work, I could hardly…