Essay Sampler: Models of Good Writing (Part 2)

As noted in the first essay sampler, one of the most effective ways to improve our own writing is to spend some time reading the best writing of others. This second collection of essays, articles, and speeches--some written within the past few years, others more than a century old--offers some very good reading indeed. Enjoy these works--and observe the various strategies employed by their authors to describe, narrate, explain, argue, and persuade.

1. "Bookshop Memories," by George Orwell (1936)
   "Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can't borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles."
   
   
2. "The Candy Man," by Margaret Talbot (The New Yorker, 2005)
   "Roald Dahl, the British author of children’s books, wrote in a tiny cottage at the end of a trellised pathway canopied with twisting linden trees. He called it the 'writing hut,' and, since Dahl was nearly six feet six, he must have inhabited it like a giant in an elf’s house."
   
   
3. "A Fable," by Mark Twain (1876)
   "You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of your imagination."
   
   
4. "The Hills of Zion," by H. L. Mencken (1925)
   "At a signal all the faithful crowded up to the bench and began to pray--not in unison, but each for himself. At another they all fell on their knees, their arms over the penitent. The leader kneeled facing us, his head alternately thrown back dramatically or buried in his hands. Words spouted from his lips like bullets from a machine-gun--appeals to God to pull the penitent back out of Hell, defiances of the demons of the air, a vast impassioned jargon of apocalyptic texts."
   Reading Quiz on "The Hills of Zion"
   
   
5. "I Have a Dream" by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1963)
   "We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by a sign stating: 'For Whites Only.' We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until 'justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.'"
   Reading Quiz on "I Have a Dream"
   
   
6. "On the Decay of the Art of Lying," by Mark Twain (1882)
   "Lying is universal--we all do it; we all must do it. Therefore, the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling."
   
   
7. "On National Prejudices," by Oliver Goldsmith (1763)
   "Is it not very possible that I may love my own country, without hating the natives of other countries? that I may exert the most heroic bravery, the most undaunted resolution, in defending its laws and liberty, without despising all the rest of the world as cowards and poltroons?"
   
   
8. "Once More to the Lake," by E. B. White (1941)
   "I began to sustain the illusion that [my son] was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father. This sensation persisted, kept cropping up all the time we were there. It was not an entirely new feeling, but in this setting it grew much stronger. I seemed to be living a dual existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act, I would be picking up a bait box or laying down a table fork, or I would be saying something, and suddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture. It gave me a creepy sensation."
   
   • Reading Quiz on "Once More to the Lake"
   • Drafting and Revising "Once More to the Lake"
   • Writers on Writing: E.B. White
   
   
9. "Paradise Sold: What Are You Buying When You Buy Organic?" by Steven Shapin (The New Yorker, 2006)
   "It all depends on what you think you’re buying when you buy organic. If the word conjures up the image of a small, family-owned, local operation, you may be disappointed."
   
   
10. "This Is the Life," by Annie Dillard (2003)
    "Everyone knows times and cultures are plural. If you come back a shrugging relativist or tongue-tied absolutist, then what? If you spend hours a day looking around, high astraddle the warp or woof of your people's wall, then what new wisdom can you take to your grave for worms to untangle? Well, maybe you will not go into advertising."
    
    
11. "Two Ways of Seeing a River," by Mark Twain (1883)
    "Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived."
    Reading Quiz on "Two Ways of Seeing a River"
    
    
12. "Why I Write," by Joan Didion (1976)
    "In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It's an aggressive, even a hostile act."

ESSAY SAMPLERS: Models of Good Writing
Part One
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five