Percy, a scion of the Southern planter aristocracy, a nonpracticing pathologist, spent years churning out turgid existentialist essays before finding his voice (or his version of Camus's voice) with his novel "The Moviegoer".
And at long last, after two decades of plying him with food and drink, I got my first story out of Clay, an essay about finding a compromise between youthful dreams and grown-up responsibilities.
The essays — incorporating findings from archaeology, philology, anthropology and the study of ancient cultures — raise contentious questions about things like the existence of Abraham and Moses, the accuracy of the Exodus story, whether there were walls that tumbled at Jericho and whether David, far from being a mighty king, was more likely a provincial leader whose stature was later enhanced.
While the increases in vocabulary and grammar scores significantly correlated with the increases in writing score, spelling or orthographic knowledge did not significantly correlate with essay score a finding that needs to be re-examined in future research as the present study has no available data to explain this conflicting finding.
Re "His Kind of River" (New York Observed, March 22), the essay by David Hajdu about finding inspiration in Riverside Park: I am another Upper West Sider who finds a particular spiritual quality, mysticism and nourishment from the Hudson River (which I usually travel to by bike).
In this part of our series, Ms. Hansen and Mr. Campbell respond to questions about finding an essay topic and choosing a major.
Maybe the essay is my way of finding them.
In "Some Notes on Attunement," an essay about her transition from finding Joni Mitchell's music incomprehensible to falling in love with it, she observes, "I truly cannot understand the language of my former heart.
This early essay emphasizes the importance of finding a (conceptual) "content" that one shares with one's interlocutor(s), and restricting one's conversation to this.
For Sri Andiani, who received the award in the junior high school category, it was her life experience that inspired her to write an essay on the difficulty of finding the right school for children with special needs.
