Essay Subjects

Essay-subjects generally fall into one of half-a-dozen classes, and at the school or college examination most of these classes are usually represented.

These different types appeal to candidates with different interests and different talents. No body can expect to write an equally good essay on each of them---one subject is intended for those interested in history, another for the novel-reader, others for the budding scientist or naturalist, another for the imaginative person with a narrative gift, others for the debater.
If you have an alert mind and reasonably wide interests, you can hardly fail to find more than one subject which attracts you. But you may choose only one. It is clear, therefore, that nothing is to be gained by attempting to prepare yourself to write on all possible subjects.
If you love games and nature-study, books and arguing, you can be fairly confident of finding a subject to suit you. Do not, therefore, waste your time writing essays on historical subjects because you "loathe history and always do badly in that kind of subject." Spend your time on training t he talents you prosess, not on laboriously trying to create new ones out of nothing.

But a vague interest alone is insufficient. The fact that you like looking at "ants" and know that there are red, white, and black ants is not sufficient for an essay of the informative type. For that, you need a considerate amount of real knowledge---some of it at first-hand--- of the habits and life-history of ants.

You could, of course, given an alert mind, make a satisfactory essay out of the industrious habits of ants---your surprise as a child when you first saw the inside of an anthill; your dislike of the morals drawn for your benefit; the new outlook upon mechanical labour and the comparison of present-day industry to an ant-hill.

The imaginary conversation type of essay, however, is a trap for many weak students.
It strikes them as being easy, whereas it is really one of the hardest types.
For it involves sufficient mastery of tge language to write easy, natural dialogue in good English.
The imaginary speakers must not use slang or the lower forms of colloquialism; but neither must they use turns of phrases which no ordinary person would ever use in familiar speech.

Moreover, they should have, and express in their speech, a certain individuality, especially if the subject of their conversation implies that they are of different temperaments. This type of essay is for those who enjoy the theatre.

The reflective type of essay is the most difficult of all for the average student, though a small minority will find it suits them better than any other. It may be in the form of a quotation, as for example, "Courage" or "Justice", or a short phrase, as "The Pleasures of Loneliness".

For students who know themselves incapable of dealing with a quotation frequently imagine that they can write something about, say, "Courage" though, too often all they have to say is that courage is a great virtue for which the English race is noted. Such subjects as this have been worn so threadbare that little fresh to say is likely to present itself to the average student.

The most promising line of attack is again that of personal experience. You may point out that when you were a child, you were always told that brave boys did not cry, while the tears of your small sister were taken as a matter of course. You may add that this privilege of sex is not being granted to your three-year-old niece, and wonder whether courage is at last ceasing to be a purely masculine virtue.

Or you may recall that Jack, your friend, who at school was acclaimed a hero for saving a child from drowning, was playing truant that afternoon because he dared not face a promised interview with the headmaster. From this you may go on to speculate as to what courage is. This, indeed, is the one type of essay where the definition may be of use--not that you are to begin "Courage is the Virtue of Fearlessness"; but that you should ask yourself what exactly you understand by courage.

Is it an instinct or a virtue, something inherent or acquired? what connection has human courage with animal courage? The natural response to danger of some animals--the hare, for instance---is flight; the natural response of others is attack. Is it possible that the naturally "brave" boy has merely a double dose of this instinct of aggression, while the timid child has the flight-instinct of the hare? Is the man who "never knew what fear was" courageous or merely insentive and lacking in imagination? Is courage,then,perhaps the conquest rather than the absence of fear? Is the true distinction not between physical and moral courage, but between an inborn good quality for which no credit is due and an acquired virtue?

What, you may ask yourself again, is the connection between bullying and cowardice, between bragging and bravery? Is the braggart or the bully---as the modern psychologist suggests--merely trying to compensate himself for the sense of inferiority aroused by his own consciousness of helpless fear? Are we all born brave, but made cowards by stupid adults, who persuade us that darkness is terrible by telling us we are quite safe with a nightlight?
What benefits does the human race owe to courage and what to fear? Had man been entirely fearless, would he still be naked savage fighting all his enemies with fists and feet alone? Or would he have been long since exterminated by the fiercer animals? Do we not owe all our weapons to fear of the enemy, clothes and houses at least in part to fear of the cold; agriculture,manufactures, and trade to fear of famine or discomfort? Is not war itself, which we have for so many centuries glorified as the game of strong and braue men, merely the child of fear? Neither courage nor cowardice, then, is perhaps wholly good or wholly bad.
The old Greek view that virtue lay in the middle point between two extremes is perhaps the just view.

You should illustrate freely the ideas which these questions suggest to you. Indeed, if your mind moves more easily among concrete things, you may begin at the other end of the procesr and arive at your idea of courage by examining a whole series of deeds which seem courageous, trying to decide which are actually courageous, and---a different question---which are admirable and useful.

But, whatever the method which you adopt, it is this analysis of your own conceptions which will give you the best chance of getting off the beaten track.

By: Admin  http://high-english-writing.blogspot.com/