Keep your essay on topic.
(I wrote briefly about this in regard to Sofia Coppola's "The Bling Ring"; Rachel Syme, in her superb essay on selfies, for Matter, develops the idea in much greater depth).
We're always inventing new ones, but in the past we've asked for found poetry, famous quotations matched with Times articles and "summer reading" mini-essays on what mattered to students in The Times that week, and why.
Each of the inmates was required to submit two essays on weighty matters like Frantz Fanon's view that language helped "support the weight of a civilization" or Sigmund Freud's thoughts on happiness.
She now lives in Iowa City, where she teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and where, for years, she has been accustomed to interrupting her career as a novelist to produce essays on such matters as the truth of John Calvin's writings.
Surely they deserve better representation in an essay on such an important matter, that affects all of us so deeply.
In response to my last column before disappearing into a book leave, my Jan . 22essay on James Frey and other matters of truthiness in American public life, the "Oprah" producers asked me to appear on a Jan . 26show in which Frey and other interested parties would take on the same subject.
In 1896, Henri Bergson made in Matter and Memory "Essay on the relation of body and spirit" a forceful case for the ontological difference of body and mind by reducing the problem to the more definite one of memory, thus allowing for a solution built on the empirical test case of aphasia.
Taboos are misread into Jacques Rivette's essay "On Abjection"; his warning against aestheticizing matters of life and death is distorted into worry about pictorializing almost anything.
Jonathon Porritt, in his magisterial essay on Capitalism as if the World Matters, ascribes the "continuing, utterly perverse denial on the part of politicians" to a failure to grasp that much of the very complexity which makes people stick to policies they think they understand is itself the result of "the dominant paradigm of progress through exponential economic growth" (p.215).
