But its value is not limited to English Language Learners: Benjamin Franklin famously developed his writing style by regularly cutting apart essays he liked and going back to them weeks or months later to challenge himself to put them back together again.
"It was like, 'I could be writing this essay, or cutting this little video I'm starting to make,' " said Mr. Gordon-Levitt, who dropped out of Columbia and returned to his native Southern California to start acting again.
Michael Hulls's lighting is an essay in atmosphere, cutting from dingy parchment-brown interiors to the wet blue-greys of the monsoon and the street.
Paprika makes everything easier by downloading recipes, cutting out the 2,000 word essays and dozens of photos many food sites publish, and sorting ingredients and directions into organized sections.
What makes Wainaina's essay a clever and cutting protest and Sacco's tweet racist and ignorant?
Roughly half of the people in the photo essay are now gone, some embittered by realities they did not anticipate or cast aside by a president cutting losses.
The only reason for cutting through it all and writing a short book might be to offer a fresh and challenging interpretation, a speculative essay to get us all thinking differently about the conflict.
