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…
What must the first flower feel in March when it gives a final push and breaks to the surface of the earth? All around her bowed head, the grass is withered and the trees are bare. The sky is white. The winds howl with frost. Amid the sere brown and gray, trudge pale wintered faces…