how to write 21st century in an essay

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How to Write the Century

Write centuries in either numerals or words. Names of specific centuries are spelled out in some styles and written in figures in others. Single-digit centuries are generally spelled out.

• the nineteenth century or the 19th century
• the sixth century

Don’t set the letters denoting ordinals in superscript.

• the 21st century, not the 21 st century

An apostrophe before the s in names of centuries is unnecessary, but not incorrect.

• the 1600s or the 1600’s

Avoid capitalizing names of centuries.

• the twentieth century, not the Twentieth century

What years make a century?

A century is a period of 100 years . A specific century begins with year 01: the twentieth century began in 1901 and ended at the end of the year 2000, the twenty-first century began in 2001, and so on. Centuries may be written in various styles : in numerals , words, or a combination of both, and with an apostrophe or without.

• Medical science progressed by gigantic leaps and bounds in the twentieth century .
• The 1800s saw the advent of globalization.
• Anita has written a paper on maritime trade in the 1600’s .
• One of the great discoveries of the 21st century has been the existence of gravitational waves.

The first century ran from year 1 to year 100, so each new century begins from a year ending in 01. Thus, the twenty-first century officially began on January 1, 2001. However, in popular usage, a new century is often thought to begin in the year the digits change—for example, when the year changed from 19 99 to 20 00.

Use of BC, AD, BCE, and CE

The abbreviations BCE (“before the Common Era”) and CE (“of the Common Era) or BC (“before Christ”) and AD ( anno Domini ) to denote the era may be used with centuries, though they are more often used to show the exact year. No comma is needed before the abbreviation. The abbreviations themselves generally don’t contain periods .

• In the 13th century AD , Genghis Khan began his conquest of the world.
• Alexander the Great lived and died in the fourth century BCE .

BCE and CE are alternatives to BC and AD. The two systems are numerically equivalent.

1800s or 19th century ?

Both forms of usage are correct: “the 1800s” and “the 19th (or nineteenth) century.” Since the years of the nineteenth century begin with the numerals “18,” it is also called the “1800s” (pronounced eighteen hundreds ). No apostrophe is necessary before the s .

• The 1800s was a time of industrialization. or The 19th century was a time of industrialization.
• The Renaissance began in Italy in the 1300s . or The Renaissance began in Italy in the fourteenth century .

Centuries written in numerals—e.g., “the 1600s”—may be either singular or plural ( the 1600s was or were ), depending on context and preference.

Terms like “1900s” and “2000s” can also mean the first decade of a century (e.g., 2000s, 2010s, 2020s). Context usually makes it clear whether you are referring to the century or the decade. If confusion is possible, prefer to clarify: “the 20th century,” instead of “the 1900s.”

Use of apostrophe

An apostrophe before the s in the name of a century is unnecessary (though not incorrect) and generally omitted in formal writing.

• The 1600s marked the end of the Middle Ages in Europe. 1600’s is not incorrect but unnecessary.
• The 1700s saw a revival of literature in England.
• Industrialization in the 1800s affected different regions of the world differently.

Most style guides, like the AP Stylebook , the Chicago Manual of Style , and the APA Publication Manual , advise against using an apostrophe in plural words, except when not using one would cause confusion.

Words vs. numerals

Centuries may be written in either words or numerals. Note however that in formal writing, single-digit centuries (e.g., the ninth century) are generally spelled out instead of being written in figures. Double-digit centuries may be written either way (e.g., the 21st or the twenty-first century).

• Just like us, people of the seventh century believed they lived in modern times.
• Since the 19th/nineteenth century , humans have relied on science to extend their life spans.

Always use words instead of numerals for names of centuries at the start of a sentence. (Numerals are generally not used to begin a sentence.)

• Poor: 17th-century playwrights like Shakespeare and Beaumont are still studied in schools. Better: Seventeenth-century playwrights like Shakespeare and Beaumont are still studied in schools.

Chicago vs. AP style

The Chicago Manual of Style suggests spelling out the number denoting the century, while the AP Stylebook recommends words for numbers up to 10 , and numerals thereafter.

• Chicago: The twentieth century ushered in the digital age. AP: The 20th century ushered in the digital age. For two-digit centuries, use words in Chicago style but numerals in AP style.
• Chicago, AP: Her paper discusses the role of doctors as diplomats in the sixth century AD. Spell out single-digit centuries in both Chicago and AP styles.

Style guides differ in their recommendations on whether to use numerals or words for the name of a century. Wikipedia , for instance, uses numerals for all centuries.

Whether to use numerals or words is a matter of style rather than grammar. Which style you use can depend on your field of study or the style manual followed by your university or publication. Make sure to follow a consistent style throughout your document. As an editor , respect the writer’s preference.

Superscript for ordinal numbers

Since centuries occur in chronological sequence, they are written as ordinal numbers. When using numerals, avoid using superscript for letters that denote the ordinal ( st , nd , rd , th ).

• Poor: Because of mass vaccination programs, child mortality rates fell significantly in the 20 th century. Better: Because of mass vaccination programs, child mortality rates fell significantly in the 20th century.
• Poor: This book discusses issues of privacy in the 21 st century. Better: This book discusses issues of privacy in the 21st century.

Most style guides recommend against using superscript for ordinal numbers, since it can affect readability across fonts and typefaces.

Use of hyphen

Use a hyphen to show two-digit numbers in names of centuries from the twenty-first century onward.

Hyphenate two-digit numbers for clarity ( ninety-nine cupcakes , one hundred seventy-five muffins ).

Don’t unnecessarily place a hyphen between the number and the word century .

• Incorrect: the twenty-first-century Correct: the twenty-first century

Capitalization

Don’t capitalize the names of centuries, unless part of a proper noun or a title .

• Incorrect: Her new historical novel is set in the Eighteenth century. Correct: Her new historical novel is set in the eighteenth century.
• Incorrect: The East India Company was involved in the slave trade of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries . Correct: The East India Company was involved in the slave trade of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries .

Of course, in proper nouns , capitalize as needed.

• Twentieth Century Fox

Also capitalize major words in book titles.

• The Nineteenth-Century Guide to Baking

Two or more centuries: Singular or plural?

When referring to two or more centuries together, use the plural word centuries if the names of the centuries are joined by and or through . Use the singular word century if they are joined by to or or .

• The 17th, 18th , and 19th centuries shaped the postcolonial world of the 20th century.
• The medieval period lasted from the fifth through fifteenth centuries in Europe.
• Renaissance art of the 14th to the 16th century marks a clear break from medieval values.
• Did Jane Austen live and write in the 18th or the 19th century ?

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Names of centuries may be written in either numerals or words.

Omit the apostrophe before the s in names of centuries (like “the 1400s”) in formal texts.

Hyphenate two-digit numbers in names of centuries.

Don’t capitalize the names of centuries.

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How to Write Centuries as Words and Numerals

By Erin Wright

Are Centuries Spelled Out or Written as Numerals?

The Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago style) and the Modern Language Association’s MLA Handbook (MLA style) recommend writing centuries as lowercased words: 1

During the ninth century , Vikings established permanent settlements in Ireland.

The first electric automobile was created in the early nineteenth century .

What will be the most important technological advance of the twenty-first century ?

The Associated Press Stylebook (AP style) offers two recommendations based on number value: (1) single-digit centuries should be written as lowercased words and (2) double-digit centuries should be written as numerals: 2

The Roman Empire fell in the fifth century .

Rock and roll music was invented in the 20th century .

The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA style) is silent on this issue; however, we can reasonably assume that the APA’s recommendation for general numbers, which states that numbers ten and above should be expressed as numerals unless they start a sentence, also applies to centuries. 3

Pro Tip: If your organization doesn’t follow a specific style guide or in-house guide , I strongly encourage you to use The Chicago Manual of Style for general business and formal writing. Chicago is also the industry standard for nonfiction and fiction books (although specific publishers may follow other guides).

Regardless of the style guide that you follow, ensure that your chosen style for writing centuries is consistent throughout your document.

Are Centuries Hyphenated When Used as Adjectives?

Centuries follow traditional hyphenation rules for adjectives unless otherwise stated in your style guide or in-house guide. Here are a few examples based on the recommendations mentioned above: 4

Antique Roadshow frequently features nineteenth- and twentieth-century furniture.

Antique Roadshow frequently features 19th- and 20th-century furniture.

This twenty-first-century technology will be obsolete in the twenty-second century.

This 21st-century technology will be obsolete in the 22nd century.

Enjoy more timely writing advice in these related posts:

• How to Write Decades as Words and Numerals
• When Should You Capitalize Historical Time Periods?
• When to Hyphenate Numbers with Units of Time

‎1. MLA Handbook , 8th ed. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2016), 1.5; The Chicago Manual of Style , 17th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 9.32.

2. The Associated Press Stylebook 2020–2022 (New York: Associated Press, 2020), 48.

3. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association , 7th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2020), 6.32.

4. The Associated Press Stylebook 2020–2022 (New York: Associated Press, 2020), 340–42; The Chicago Manual of Style , 17th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 7.89.

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Do You Type Out the Century in APA Format?

Tanya mozias slavin, 20 jun 2018.

The way you type centuries, dates and numerals in essays, term papers and other written work generally depends on the style guide you’re expected to follow. Some of the accepted styles you might encounter are Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago), Modern Language Association (MLA), and APA, the style guide of the American Psychological Association. Be sure to always follow the most updated guidelines for your specific style guide. The APA has a few rules when it comes to writing centuries, dates and numerals in general.

Explore this article

• How to Write Out Numerals in APA Style
• How to Write Out Centuries in APA Style

1 How to Write Out Numerals in APA Style

Generally, the APA requires numerals from one to nine to be spelled out as words, and numerals 10 and above to be written as numbers. For example:

• James has eaten nine apples.
• Maggie has sharpened 15 pencils.

The only exception is when the double-digit number appears at the beginning of the sentence. Since a sentence cannot begin with a numeral, spell out both single-digit and double-digit numbers if they appear as the first word in a sentence. For example:

• Fifteen years ago, he immigrated to the United States (correct)
• 15 years ago, he immigrated to the United States (incorrect)

Vocabulary Builder

2 how to write out centuries in apa style.

When it comes to writing dates, ages and units of time in general, the rules differ from writing numerals in general. In these cases, the APA requires writing numerals regarding of the number. Thus, a century is written as a number, regardless of whether it is under ten or above 10.

The first example follows the APA guidelines, but the second one does not:

• The internet was invented in the 20th century. (correct)
• The internet was invented in the twentieth century. (incorrect)

Similarly, the first example follows the APA guidelines, but the second does not:

• The Early Medieval Period started in the 6th century. (correct)
• The Early Medieval Period started in the sixth century. (incorrect)

In other words, don't type out the century in APA format, but always write it as a numeral.

• 1 Erin Wright: How to Write Centuries as Words and Numerals
• 2 Sage Publishing: APA style
• 3 APA Style: Comparing MLA and APA: Numbers

About the Author

Tanya Mozias Slavin is a former academic and language teacher. She writes about education and linguistic technology, and has published articles in the Washington Post, Fast Company, CBC and other places. Find her at www.tanyamoziasslavin.com

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How do I style the names of centuries in MLA style?

Note: This post relates to content in the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook . For up-to-date guidance, see the ninth edition of the MLA Handbook .

MLA style spells out the names of centuries in prose and in titles of English-language works, even when the title page uses a numeral:

Queen Victoria ruled England for most of the nineteenth century. Music of the Twentieth Century

We make an exception and retain the numeral if it precedes an abbreviation in a title:

The Ekopolitan Project: Migrant Histories and Family Genealogies from 19th and 20th c. Lagos

For the titles of foreign-language works, we follow the source. Although the th in English-language ordinal numbers is set on the baseline, the equivalent in French—the abbreviations - e  or - ième   following numerals—is set superscript:

Manet et le monde du XIX e siècle

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Everything You Need to Know about the Word “Century”

• 2-minute read
• 4th November 2015

Back in Ancient Rome, the Latin word centuria meant “group of one hundred.” It was applied to everything from agricultural land division to soldiery ( hence “centurions” ). But nowadays, “century” has a more specific meaning: a period of one hundred years.

Here, we will focus on this last meaning, as this term is common in many academic disciplines . As such, when discussing past events, it’s important to know how to use it correctly.

Century in Words and Numbers

Centuries can be written out either with words (“nineteenth century”) or numerals (“19 th century”). In academic writing, however, it’s usually better to use the full version:

Communication changed hugely in the twentieth century. – Formal

Communication changed hugely in the 20 th century. – Informal

It’s always worth checking your style guide, though, as some conventions differ. The Associated Press , for example, recommends using figures when referring to any century after the tenth.

Fin de Siècle

A common mistake when writing about the past is to conflate the numerical version of a year with the century in which it falls. In actuality, the number applies to all years up to the end of a century, not the first two digits of the year in figures. The seventeenth century, for instance, began on January 1, 1601 and ended on December 31, 1700.

As such, when referring to the year 1618, it’s important to remember that it was part of the seventeenth century, rather than the sixteenth:

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Beginning in 1618, the Thirty Years’ War left a scar on the seventeenth century. – Correct

Beginning in 1618, the Thirty Years’ War left a scar on the sixteenth century. – Incorrect

To avoid this mistake, keep in mind that the number refers to the end of the century (e.g. 1800 or 1900) and covers the preceding hundred years.

To Capitalize or Not?

It’s not uncommon for people to capitalize centuries: e.g., “Fourteenth Century” rather than “fourteenth century.” However, this is incorrect, since “century” is a measure of time, like “week” or “month,” not a proper noun.

When to Hyphenate

The final thing to remember with centuries is when to hyphenate. The rule here is the same as when using hyphens elsewhere, so it depends on whether you’re using the term adjectivally.

For example, you might describe a digital wrist watch as “twentieth-century technology.” Here, we hyphenate the century because we’re using it as a compound adjective modifying the word “technology.”

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Q. I am confused about the rules given for spelling out centuries. In CMOS 9.32 , “the 1800s” is given as an example, but paragraph 8.71 has “the nineteen hundreds.” These examples seem contradictory.

A. That example in chapter 8 is intended only to illustrate that when a decade or century is written in words, such an expression isn’t capitalized. Our usual preference would be for numerals (“1800s”), but either form is acceptable (choose one and be consistent). Note that Chicago considers “1800s” to be equivalent to “nineteenth century”—which also happens to be the more common way of expressing a century in words. (Under Chicago’s alternative rule for numbers, according to which numerals are used for numbers greater than nine, it would be “19th century”; see CMOS 9.3 .) We should also note that in Chicago style, “1800s” and “1900s” refer to the whole century, not just the first decade. For more, see our post on decades at CMOS Shop Talk .

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Everything You Need to Know about the Word ‘Century’

3-minute read

• 22nd July 2014

It isn’t just history students who need the word ‘century’ (although it might crop up more often for historians than others). And if you’re referring to the past in your work , it pays to know how this word works.

Let’s take a look at a few key factors in using the word ‘century’.

Should You Write Centuries As Word or Numerals?

We can write centuries as either words or numerals (e.g. ‘eighteenth century’ or ‘18th century’). But which should you use in your work?

This may depend on the style guide you’re using. Different guides may have different rules on how to write centuries. Thus, if your university, school, or publisher has a preferred style guide, make sure to check it for advice.

Otherwise, though, it is largely a matter of choice. We’d suggest writing centuries out in full as words in formal or academic writing. But as long as you use a clear and consistent style, either words or numerals are fine.

Know Your Boundaries

It can be hard to know when one century begins and another ends. This is because we usually start counting years at 1 AD, so everything from 1 AD to 100 AD is the first century. And that means that a century number is usually one higher than the two digits at the start of a year within that century.

For instance, the seventeenth century began in 1601 and ended in 1700, encompassing every year in between those dates. Thus, even though the year 1632 starts with a ’16’, it was part of the seventeenth century.

Remember, then, that the number of a century usually refers to the previous one hundred years, not the two digits at the start of a four-digit year.

Hyphenation

Another problem that often crops up is whether, and when, to hyphenate centuries. When used as a noun (i.e. to refer to a particular period of one hundred years), there is no need to add a hyphen:

This vase was made in the eighteenth century .

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However, when using a compound phrase including ‘century’ as an adjective, adding a hyphen helps to ensure clarity:

This is an eighteenth-century vase.

This rule applies to most other compound phrases as well. If you’re using it as an adjective, hyphenate. If you’re using it as a noun, don’t hyphenate.

Capitalisation and Abbreviation

Generally speaking, ‘century’ should not be capitalised, so it always reads ‘century’ rather than ‘Century’. The exception is when ‘century’ is used at the start of a sentence or in a proper noun (e.g. ‘20th Century Fox’).

Finally, centuries can be abbreviated. Sometimes this is just the number (e.g. 18th century) and sometimes it is the word ‘century’, too. For instance:

This C18th document sheds a lot of light on the issue.

The event likely occurred in the 18th c.

These shortened versions of the word are fine in your notes or in less formal writing as long as it is clear what they mean. But you wouldn’t usually use these abbreviated formats in academic work or formal writing!

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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Writing in the 21st Century Critical Essay

Introduction, introspection of kate’s claims, what has changed since the source was published, works cited.

Academic writing requires students to have cute information on the various styles of writing based on the systems of writing advocated for by institutions of higher education. They need to follow and adhere to certain rules. Some of these procedures include, but not limited to, referencing or rather citation rules and the avoidance of committing academic crimes such as plagiarism.

In fact, many of the literatures that describe the procedures of writing in whatsoever style do not fail to mention these two requirements of any academic essay. Kate Turabian’s Student’s Guide to Writing College Papers is perhaps one of the scholarly works entirely done with the intention of describing the writing procedures of academic works.

Though I agree with what Turabian claims, Farber and Tucker point out how crucial it is, to incorporate the period within which her claims hold based on the evident changes that have taken place since the publishing of the fourth edition of Student’s Guide to Writing College Papers .

This evident based on the various developments in writing contributed largely by the emergence of new technologies prompting new considerations in the writing styles.

Any form of academic writing has some preset purpose. Consequently, in the evaluation process of the academic writings such as essays, one has to look at some preset rules to know whether the writers have followed them.

With this in mind, Turabian’s suggestion that “Few students learn to write by memorizing formal rules before and after the writing-to talk hence need to learn about the written forms you expect them to produce, not as your personal quirky preference” (Turabian 5). Building on this line of view, the research process emerges as an experience dominated by loneliness.

Many of the people who deploy their better time to research find themselves only having the various detractions of their computers or books as the only source of company. Turabian reckons, “everything we know about writing and thinking suggests that most of us work more slowly and less well when we work alone” (19). However, this claim is challengeable.

In fact, various researchers especially the ones who often use the norms of the research process have the capacity of performing exemplarily when they accomplish their tasks alone. The word loneliness means the state of lack of company during the research time since in actual sense one cannot regard experienced researchers as lonely since, while writing, they engage with their targeted audience.

Experienced writers can evaluate what their target audience may understand, as well as what they cannot understand. According to Turabian, “…There is nothing easy for new students” (20). In support of this claim, it sounds somewhat significant for teachers to guide students in the research process by ensuring that they can follow some preset rules and regulations in writing their academic essays.

This way, they can encourage them to develop skills in rehearsing their works to suit certain audience tantamount to the expertise writers who the students seek to emulate. In this end, Turabian posits that “Most researchers rehearse their work all the time—for colleagues, friends, students, in seminars, at conferences, on e-mail lists, in grant proposals, and on and on” (20).

Arguably, as a requirement, inexperienced students deserve to build a similar interaction. However, to achieve this, students should not make decisions alone on what suits a certain audience. Talk-talk attitude about what they are investigating in their research deserves to be inculcated in them.

I immensely concur with Turabian on the significance of the talk-talk culture in helping students develop eloquent writing skills. “Orchestrate occasions and obligations for students to talk about what they are investigating, why it matters, what they are finding, what they still want to know, what parts are weak and need bolstering, and so on” (Turabian 21).

Such an occasion is significant since, more often than not, academic writing demands the rising of subtle claims coupled with supporting them profoundly.

Additionally, the value of the arguments depends on the capacity of the writer to consider the various alternative perspectives of view about the same argument and where necessary give sufficient information that confronts the various likely counter arguments if at all the argument needs remain relevant. Turabian also argues that many inexperienced writers also deploy their writing as an ample tool for thinking.

It is perhaps after writing that one peruses through his or her work to establish the weaknesses of logic. Consistent with Turabian’s claims that “students tend to see writing and speaking as merely packaging of ideas, not as a way to discover and improve them” (21). This claim is, in fact, significant especially bearing in mind the necessity for ideas regeneration and re-evaluation during the writing process.

What this means is that words need to follow ideas. However, upon accomplishing this, words need be re-evaluated to identify the likely eminent weakness in terms of delivering the intended meaning.

Even though Turabian’s ideas about academic writing are essential for persuasive writing, some criticisms about the same are still significant. Turabian posits that “When assigning a paper, one should not just set a deadline but instead, create a series of due dates that stage students’ research and writing” (21). Considering the writing of the twentieth century, the issue of not fixing deadlines is somehow out of date.

Twenty first century is characterized by times in which people must perform various tasks within fixed routines coupled to accomplishing the demands of these tasks within some fixed periods. Bearing in mind that students are trained for the purposes of later introducing them to the job market requiring compliance with demands of deadlines to execute various tasks, they need to have practiced this culture long time enough.

Arguably, one of the ways of enhancing this is by ensuring and examining student’s performance based on his/her ability to present quality work within fixed periods. Turabian also claims that teachers also deserve to “Map out milestones that will force students 21 to practice the kind of processes outlined in “Writing Your Paper,” including those requiring them to share, talk about, or reflect on their written work as they go” (22).

Unfortunately, this stages that Turabian talks of may by far end up impeding the thinking process of student while writing.

On a different line of view, perhaps the modern technologies also call for a different consideration of writing techniques. The modern technologies pose a formidable threat to value and originality in writing.

In this context, Farber argues that “The new technologies lack a convenient way of writing-while-reading, enhance plagiarism, eliminate traditional archiving methods without offering a satisfactory new substitute (presently) and give rise to a call for a revised way of citation, together with new ways of archiving and storing” (226).

Unfortunately, students have to deploy these techniques while writing. Computers, for instance, have come to enhance the writing in terms of the capacity to process word text for punctuations, spellings and correct usage of words. Modern technology, as opposed to Farber’s argument, helps to eliminate the challenges of plagiarism especially where various works that students use as reference material are available on the World Wide Web.

Consequently, perhaps congruent with Henneberg argument “For people who make their living selling words to readers—and indeed for readers themselves—these are times of upheaval” (116). With the development of the word processors, compliance with certain writing rules becomes much easier to achieve.

As a way example, referencing styles can be accustomed so that whenever an error occurs whether in the punctuation or format the writer can easily identify these errors. The twenty first century is a century of simplification of almost every task performed by humankind!

Arguably, the advent of the information technology has the capacity to render textual contents explosion. The advantage of information technology in influencing the manner in which writing in the 21st century is accomplished is that “More people are engaging in more conversations, sharing more opinions, learning more, and learning faster than anyone could have imagined just a few decades ago” (Tucker 17).

As a result, people are able to access scholarly works much faster and hence building on the ideas that one’s intends to incorporate in his or her written work becomes also easier. Any academic writing is driven by academic curiosity. The information revolution consequently serves to enhance ease of information access available to the immense number of sources while incurring minimal costs.

As Tucker Reckons, incorporation of new technologies in the research process infers “opportunity to become a source, trustworthy or otherwise, and to share an opinion with the world the second the whim strikes to do so” (17). In this line of view, Farber’s accusation of the new technologies to influence writing negatively in the twenty first century as priory stipulated perhaps lacks substance.

An essential guide that Turabian raises is perhaps the manner in which teachers should mark the papers of the students. Turabian advices, “The most efficient way to mark a paper is to analyze it before you read closely enough to mark it up” (22).

This proposition is incredible especially by noting that more often than not, the ideas that are presented in the academic essay by students depends more on the validity of claims and the magnitude of support offered to the claims. As consequence, paying ample attention to the information contained in the introduction, conclusion and sections of paragraphs introducing topic sentences is essential.

In this end, in case the ideas development in the essay follows the top-down approach, the very first sentences of every paragraph are essential and require thorough scrutiny.

It is also essential to consider critically the last sentences of every paragraph in case one uses the down-top approach in the paragraph development. Fortunately, no matter the technology in use in writing, whether considering writing approaches in the twenty first century or at the time Turabian was writing Student’s Guide to Writing College, the concepts of the manner of developing the paragraphs still holds.

Teachers need to compel inexperienced writers to write according to some certain prescribed rules to promote compliance to standardized writing practices including punctuation, citation, both in the texts and in references.

Even though changes have emerged in relation to the manner in which information is availed to writers, with the twenty first century giving writers an ease of information access in terms of saving time and cost, the paper recognizes the relevance of the Turabian’s writing guides even in the modern writing world.

Farber, Miriam. How shall we write and read in twenty-first century academy? Notes on the margin of electronic publishing. Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society 5.2(2007): 226 – 234.

Henneberg, Sylvia. Developing Age Studies through Literature. NWSA Journal 18.1 (2006): 106-126.

Tucker, Patrick. The 21 st writer. A Magazine of Forecasts, Trends and Ideas about Future 42.4(2008): 16-17.

Turabian, Kate. Instructors Guide to Students Guide to Writing College Papers , 2011. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2019, July 3). Writing in the 21st Century. https://ivypanda.com/essays/writing-in-the-21st-century/

"Writing in the 21st Century." IvyPanda , 3 July 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/writing-in-the-21st-century/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Writing in the 21st Century'. 3 July.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Writing in the 21st Century." July 3, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/writing-in-the-21st-century/.

1. IvyPanda . "Writing in the 21st Century." July 3, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/writing-in-the-21st-century/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Writing in the 21st Century." July 3, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/writing-in-the-21st-century/.

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• Understanding Research Methods in Technology
• Process Involved in Choosing a Measurement Tool for Variables in Research
• Components of a Research Proposal & Recursive Nature of Action Research
• Action Research in Science Education

Essay on Life In 21st Century

Students are often asked to write an essay on Life In 21st Century in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Life In 21st Century

Introduction.

Life in the 21st century is marked by rapid changes and advancements. It’s a time of technology, innovation, and global connections. We have seen improvements in many areas, from communication to healthcare.

The 21st century is known as the digital age. We use smartphones, laptops, and the internet daily. These tools have changed how we work, learn, and connect with others. They offer convenience and open up new opportunities.

Globalization

Our world has become a global village. We can communicate with people from different cultures and backgrounds. This has increased our understanding and appreciation of diversity.

Advancements in healthcare have improved our lives. New treatments and medicines have been developed. Diseases that were once deadly can now be cured or managed.

Despite these advancements, the 21st century also presents challenges. Issues like climate change, inequality, and cyber threats require our attention and action.

Life in the 21st century is exciting but also challenging. We must use the advancements wisely and work together to overcome the challenges.

250 Words Essay on Life In 21st Century

The 21st century lifestyle.

The 21st century is a time of rapid change and progress. We live in a world where technology is at our fingertips, making our lives easier and more comfortable.

Technology and Communication

One of the most significant changes in the 21st century is the advancement in technology. Today, we can communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world, in just a few seconds. Smartphones, the internet, and social media platforms have transformed the way we interact.

Education and Learning

Education has also seen a massive transformation. Online learning is now a reality, allowing students to learn at their own pace from anywhere. This has made education more accessible to everyone, regardless of their location or circumstances.

Health and Medicine

The field of health and medicine has also evolved. New treatments and medicines have been developed, increasing the average lifespan. People are now more aware of their health and are taking steps to lead healthier lives.

Challenges of the 21st Century

Despite all these advancements, the 21st century also brings new challenges. Environmental issues like pollution and climate change are major concerns. There is also a growing gap between the rich and the poor, leading to social problems.

In conclusion, life in the 21st century is a mix of advancements and challenges. We have the tools to make our lives better, but we also have the responsibility to use them wisely for the benefit of all.

500 Words Essay on Life In 21st Century

Life in the 21st century is full of excitement and challenges. It is a time of rapid change and amazing progress. We live in an era where technology has become a key part of our lives.

One of the most important parts of life in the 21st century is technology. It has made our lives easier in many ways. We can now talk to friends and family who live far away by using our phones or computers. We can also use the internet to learn new things and find information quickly. But, it’s important to remember that too much screen time can be bad for our health. We need to balance our use of technology with other activities.

Education has also changed a lot in the 21st century. Now, not only do we learn in classrooms, but we also have the option to learn online. This has made education more accessible to everyone. We can learn from the best teachers and experts from all over the world without leaving our homes.

Health and Lifestyle

Life in the 21st century is also different because of changes in our health and lifestyle. We now know more about how to take care of our bodies. We understand the importance of eating healthy food and exercising regularly. But, the busy pace of life can make it hard to find time for these things.

Environment

One of the biggest challenges we face in the 21st century is taking care of our environment. We now understand that our actions can harm the Earth. We need to find ways to live that are good for the environment. This means using less energy, recycling, and finding new ways to make things that don’t harm the Earth.

Life in the 21st century is full of both challenges and opportunities. We have amazing technology and access to information. But, we also face problems like taking care of our health and the environment. It’s an exciting time to be alive, and we all have a part to play in shaping the future.

Remember, the 21st century is our time. Let’s make the most of it!

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Life History
• Essay on Life Goals
• Essay on Life Choice

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Writing in the 21st Century

Laurence o'bryan.

• 29 November 2012

I believe fiction writing is changing. I think the connected world we live in is having an impact on the art and craft of writing.

You cannot deny that writing has evolved over the centuries. And I see no reason to believe that it has stopped evolving. I read a novel from a hundred years ago a while back and after page one I wanted to stop reading. The style was long-winded. Every sentence had thirty words. I could imagine the lives people lived back then, when the next interruption would be the bell for lunch, two hours from now.

Readers these days live in a world of constant interruption. Social media, mobile phones and TV lure people away from books all the time. Our job as writers is to provide fiction that can be assimilated between other tasks these days.

In order to achieve the goal of writing in an up to date style I suggest you consider the following four characteristics of compelling early 21st century fiction, characteristics that are driving the evolution of fiction writing in my opinion:

Accuracy. Accuracy is now realistically attainable for fiction writers. We can find out how the Welsh valleys look in December, how hot Paris is in the Spring, and listen to the sound of a wren whenever we want because of the internet. Flights of fancy are good, at times, but reality has a power that can be used for good effect. The truth is often stranger than fiction. Finding out that Paris is no warmer than London in Spring is the sort of information that leads to readers being able to place themselves in the city.

Being Fantastic. Fantastic to me means being absurd, exotic and imaginative, to choose some of the long list of definition words in my dictionary for fantastic. So add a fantastical sparkle to your fiction. Yes, I know it’s interesting that Aunt Maud went to work in a shop for twenty years and Uncle Fred made her tea every night, but I want to see Aunt Maud going to work in a man’s suit, with a flat cap, and learn that Uncle Fred was a circus midget with six brothers who shared his bedroom for six months of the year and got drunk on Guinness every night. Absurd, exotic and imaginative novels can be seen on the bookshelves of all good bookshops these days.

Being Sensuous. To me being sensuous is about being passionate, in touch with our senses. We all know what being passionate is in the traditional sense, but I also think it is about having passion for your work, for your writing. Being in touch with your senses means being able to describe how something feels. Take raining for instance. We should be able to describe the taste of rainwater, the silky feel of it on our faces, the sound of it tapping with a million tiny hammers at our windows and the little waves it makes in the puddles. That’s what makes writing jump of the page.

And Gripping. With all the distractions around us, it is an essential element of 21st century writing to be gripping. Something must happen. There must be conflict. There must be tension. There must be mystery. What keeps me, and millions of readers of crime, romance, mystery and the better literary novels interested is a desire to find out what is going to happen next. You can do that by making us feel with the characters. Being gripping is something you cannot disdain if you want a large readership.

If your writing has these characteristics you have a real chance of getting published and getting readers in the 21 st century.

This post is the last in a short series about getting your writing noticed in the 21 st century in the lead up to the launch of my new novel, The Jerusalem Puzzle . The paperback will arrive in bookshops in Ireland on January 3 rd . I hope you have enjoyed these posts.

If you would like to know more about the author please visit www.lpobryan.com

About the author

(c) L P O’Bryan

went to school in south Dublin, drank way too much, studied business, then IT. While a student, he worked as a kitchen porter and lived a rollercoaster existence.

After that he spent ten years working in London. He met his wife there. Soon after their daughter was born they came back to Dublin. That was in the year 2000. He worked in IT marketing for many years and was made redundant last year, just in time for the publication of The Istanbul Puzzle . That novel has now been shortlisted for Ireland AM Irish Crime Novel of 2012 and translated into 9 languages. The Istanbul Puzzle is his first novel to be published. The Jerusalem Puzzle , his second, is coming out January 31 2013 in paperback and Dec 3 2012 in ebook. In 2007 he won the Outstanding Novel award at the Southern California writer’s conference. That winning novel, on which he worked for six years, became The Istanbul Puzzle . He is a member of the UK Crime Writer’s Association, the Irish Writing Centre, two “live” writing groups in Dublin and online writing communities including Writing.ie. His research takes him all over the world and he still thoroughly enjoys looking at the stars and listening to the stories of strangers. His website/blog is: www.lpobryan.com His Twitter name: @LPOBryan

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The Making of a 21st-Century Educator

• Posted December 1, 2003
• By News editor

“Just as highly skilled practitioners do not emerge up and running from medical school, we cannot expect beginning teachers to graduate as high-functioning professionals.”

“Will standardizing the field of education truly help educators do their jobs more effectively?”

“As long as study results are open to replication and professional scrutiny, we will have a professional body of research on which to base reform efforts.”

“It is time for schools of education to see how they can support their students and alumni in K-12 schools in their surrounding communities.”

“Education research could...shed more light on what policies and practices best foster high achievement levels for every child.”

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

Writing In The 21st Century

What are the arts but products of the human mind which resonate with our aesthetic and emotional faculties? What are social issues, but ways in which humans try to coordinate their behavior and come to working arrangements that benefit everyone? There's no aspect of life that cannot be illuminated by a better understanding of the mind from scientific psychology. And for me the most recent example is the process of writing itself. 

Introduction

Psychologist Steven Pinker's 1994 book  The Language Instinct  discussed all aspects of language in a unified, Darwinian framework, and in his next book,  How The Mind Works  he did the same for the rest of the mind, explaining "what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life."

He has written four more consequential books:  Words and Rules (1999 ), The Blank Slate (2002 ), The Stuff of Thought (2007 ), and  The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) .  The evolution in his thinking, and the expansion of his range, the depth of his vision, are evident in his contributions on many important issues on these pages over the years:  "A Biological Understanding of Human Nature,"   "The Science of Gender and Science,"   "A Preface to Dangerous Ideas,"   "Language and Human Nature,"   "A History of Violence,"   "The False Allure of Group Selection,"   "Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument,"   and "Science Is Not Your Enemy."  In addition to his many honors, he is the Edge Question Laureate, having suggested three of Edge's Annual Questions: "What Is Your Dangerous Idea?"; What Is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, Or Beautiful Explanation?"; and "What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?". He is a consummate third culture intellectual.

In the conversation below, Pinker begins by stating his belief that "science can inform all aspects of life, particularly psychology, my own favorite science. Psychology looks in one direction to biology, to neuroscience, to genetics, to evolution. And it looks in another direction to the rest of intellectual and cultural life—because what are the arts but products of the human mind which resonate with our aesthetic and emotional faculties? What are social issues but ways in which humans try to coordinate their behavior and come to working arrangements that benefit everyone? There's no aspect of life that cannot be illuminated by a better understanding of the mind from scientific psychology. And for me the most recent example is the process of writing itself."...

— John Brockman

STEVEN PINKER is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He is the author of ten books, including  The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works,   The Better Angels of Our Nature , and  The Sense of Style  (September).  Steven Pinker's Edge Bio page

WRITING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

I believe that science can inform all aspects of life, particularly psychology, my own favorite science. Psychology looks in one direction to biology, to neuroscience, to genetics, to evolution. And it looks in another direction to the rest of intellectual and cultural life—because what are the arts but products of the human mind which resonate with our aesthetic and emotional faculties? What are social issues but ways in which humans try to coordinate their behavior and come to working arrangements that benefit everyone? There's no aspect of life that cannot be illuminated by a better understanding of the mind from scientific psychology. And for me the most recent example is the process of writing itself. 

I'm a psychologist who studies language—a psycholinguist—and I'm also someone who uses language in my books and articles to convey ideas about, among other things, the science of language itself. But also, ideas about war and peace and emotion and cognition and human nature. The question I'm currently asking myself is how our scientific understanding of language can be put into practice to improve the way that we communicate anything, including science?

In particular, can you use linguistics, cognitive science, and psycholinguistics to come up with a better style manual—a 21st century alternative to the classic guides like Strunk and White's  The Elements of Style ?

Writing is inherently a topic in psychology. It's a way that one mind can cause ideas to happen in another mind. The medium by which we share complex ideas, namely language, has been studied intensively for more than half a century. And so if all that work is of any use it ought to be of use in crafting more stylish and transparent prose. 

From a scientific perspective, the starting point must be different from that of traditional manuals, which are lists of dos and don'ts that are presented mechanically and often followed robotically. Many writers have been the victims of inept copyeditors who follow guidelines from style manuals unthinkingly, never understanding their rationale.

For example, everyone knows that scientists overuse the passive voice. It's one of the signatures of academese: "the experiment was performed" instead of "I performed the experiment." But if you follow the guideline, "Change every passive sentence into an active sentence," you don't improve the prose, because there's no way the passive construction could have survived in the English language for millennia if it hadn't served some purpose. 

The problem with any given construction, like the passive voice, isn't that people use it, but that they use it too much or in the wrong circumstances. Active and passive sentences express the same underlying content (who did what to whom) while varying the topic, focus, and linear order of the participants, all of which have cognitive ramifications. The passive is a better construction than the active when the affected entity (the thing that has moved or changed) is the topic of the preceding discourse, and should therefore come early in the sentence to connect with what came before; when the affected entity is shorter or grammatically simpler than the agent of the action, so expressing it early relieves the reader's memory load; and when the agent is irrelevant to the story, and is best omitted altogether (which the passive, but not the active, allows you to do). To give good advice on how to write, you have to understand what the passive can accomplish, and therefore you should not blue-pencil every passive sentence into an active one (as one of my copyeditors once did).

Ironically, the aspect of writing that gets the most attention is the one that is least important to good style, and that is the rules of correct usage. Can you split an infinitive, that is, say, "to boldly go where no man has gone before,"or must you say to "go boldly"? Can you use the so-called fused participle—"I approve of Sheila taking the job"—as opposed to "I approve of Sheila's taking the job" (with an apostrophe "s")? There are literally (yes, "literally") hundreds of traditional usage issues like these, and many are worth following. But many are not, and in general they are not the first things to concentrate on when we think about how to improve writing. 

The first thing you  should  think about is the stance that you as a writer take when putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Writing is cognitively unnatural. In ordinary conversation, we've got another person across from us. We can monitor the other person's facial expressions: Do they furrow their brow, or widen their eyes? We can respond when they break in and interrupt us. And unless you're addressing a stranger you know the hearer's background: whether they're an adult or child, whether they're an expert in your field or not. When you're writing you have none of those advantages. You're casting your bread onto the waters, hoping that this invisible and unknowable audience will catch your drift.

The first thing to do in writing well—before worrying about split infinitives—is what kind of situation you imagine yourself to be in. What are you simulating when you write, and you're only pretending to use language in the ordinary way? That stance is the main thing that iw distinguishes clear vigorous writing from the mush we see in academese and medicalese and bureaucratese and corporatese.

The literary scholars Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas have identified the stance that our best essayists and writers implicitly adopt, and that is a combination of vision and conversation. When you write you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that's interesting, that you are directing the attention of your reader to that thing in the world, and that you are doing so by means of conversation. 

That may sound obvious. But it's amazing how many of the bad habits of academese and legalese and so on come from flouting that model. Bad writers don't point to something in the world but areself-conscious about not seeming naïve about the pitfalls of their own enterprise. Their goal is not to show something to the reader but to prove that they are nota bad lawyer or a bad scientist or a bad academic. And so bad writing is cluttered with apologies and hedges and "somewhats" and reviews of the past activity of people in the same line of work as the writer, as opposed to concentrating on something in the world that the writer is trying to get someone else to see with their own eyes. 

That's a starting point to becoming a good writer. Another key is to be an attentive reader. One of the things you appreciate when you do linguistics is that a language is a combination of two very different mechanisms: powerful rules, which can be applied algorithmically, and lexical irregularities, which must be memorized by brute force: in sum, words and rules.

All languages contain elegant, powerful, logical rules for combining words in such a way that the meaning of the combination can be deduced from the meanings of the words and the way they're arranged. If I say "the dog bit the man" or "the man bit the dog," you have two different images, because of the way those words are ordered by the rules of English grammar.

On the other hand, language has a massive amount of irregularity: idiosyncrasies, idioms, figures of speech, and other historical accidents that you couldn't possibly deduce from rules, because often they are fundamentally illogical. The past tense of "bring" is "brought," but the past tense of "ring" is "rang," and the past tense of "blink" is "blinked." No rule allows you to predict that; you need raw exposure to the language. That's also true for many rules of punctuation. . If I talk about "Pat's leg," it's "Pat-apostrophe-s." But If I talk about "its leg," I can't use apostrophe S; that would be illiterate. Why? Who knows? That's just the way English works. Peole who spell possessive "its" with an apostrophe are not being illogical; they're being  too  logical, while betraying the fact that they haven't paid close attention to details of the printed page.

So being a good writer depends not just on having mastered the logical rules of combination but on having absorbed tens or hundreds of thousands of constructions and idioms and irregularities from the printed page. The first step to being a good writer is to be a good reader: to read a lot, and to savor and reverse-engineer good prose wherever you find it. That is, to read a passage of writing and think to yourself, … "How did the writer achieve that effect? What was their trick?" And to read a good sentence with a consciousness of what makes it so much fun to glide through.

Any handbook on writing today is going to be compared to Strunk & White's  The Elements of Style , a lovely little book, filled with insight and charm, which I have read many times. But William Strunk, its original author, was born in 1869. This is a man who was born before the invention of the telephone, let alone the computer and the Internet and the smartphone. His sense of style was honed in the later decades of the 19th century!

We know that language changes. You and I don't speak the way people did in Shakespeare's era, or in Chaucer's. As valuable as  The Elements of Style  is (and it's tremendously valuable), it's got a lot of cockamamie advice, dated by the fact that its authors were born more than a hundred years ago. For example, they sternly warn, "Never use 'contact' as a verb. Don't say 'I'm going to contact him.' It's pretentious jargon, pompous and self-important. Indicate that you intend to 'telephone' someone or 'write them' or 'knock on their door.'" To a writer in the 21st century, this advice is bizarre. Not only is "to contact" thoroughly entrenched and unpretentious, but it's indispensable. Often it's extremely useful to be able to talk about getting in touch with someone when you don't care by what medium you're going to do it, and in those cases, "to contact" is the perfect verb. It may have been a neologism in Strunk and White's day, but all words start out as neologisms in their day. If you read  The Elements of Style  today, you have no way of appreciating that what grated on the ears of someone born in 1869 might be completely unexceptionable today.

The other problem is that  The Elements of Style  was composed before there existed a science of language and cognition. A lot of Strunk and White's advice depended completely on their gut reactions from a lifetime of practice as an English professor and critic, respectively. Today we can offer deeper advice, such as the syntactic and discourse functions of the passive voice—a construction which, by the way, Strunk & White couldn't even consistently identify, not having being trained in grammar.

Another advantage of modern linguistics and psycholinguistics is that it provides a way to think your way through a pseudo-controversy that was ginned up about 50 years ago between so-called prescriptivists and descriptivists. According to this fairy tale there are prescriptivists who prescribe how language ought to be used and there are descriptivists, mainly academic linguists, who describe how language in fact is used. In this story there is a war between them, with prescriptivist dictionaries competing with descriptivist . dictionaries.

Inevitably my own writing manual is going to be called "descriptivist," because it questions a number of dumb rules that are routinely flouted by all the best writers and had no business being in stylebooks in the first place. These pseudo-rules violate the logic of English but get passed down as folklore from one style sheet to the next. But debunking stupid rules is not the same thing as denying the existence of rules, to say nothing of advice on writing.  The Sense of Style  is clearly prescriptive: it consists of 300 pages in which I boss the reader around.

This pseudo-controversy was created when  Webster's Third International Dictionary  was published in the early 1960s. Like all dictionaries, it paid attention to the way that language changes. If a dictionary didn't do that it would be useless: writers who consulted it would be guaranteed to be misunderstood. For example, there is an old prescriptive rule that says that "nauseous," which most people use to mean nauseated, cannot mean that. It must mean creating nausea, namely, "nauseating." You must write that a roller coaster ride was nauseous, or a violentmovie was nauseous, not I got nauseous riding on the roller coaster or watching the movie. Nowadays, no one obeys this rule. If a dictionary were to stick by its guns and say it's an error to say that the movie made me nauseous, it would be a useless dictionary: it wouldn't be doing what a dictionary has to do. This has always been true of dictionaries. 

But there's a myth that dictionaries work like the rulebook of Major League Baseball; they legislate what is correct. I can speak with some authority in saying that this is false. I am the Chair of the Usage Panel of  The American Heritage Dictionary , which is allegedly the prescriptivist alternative to the descriptivist  Webster's . But when I asked the editors how they decide what goes into the dictionary, they replied, "By paying attention to the way people use language."

Of course dictionary editors can't pay attention to the way  everyone  uses language, because people use language in different ways. When you write, you're writing for a virtual audience of well-read, literate fellow readers. And those are the people that we consult in deciding what goes into the dictionary, particularly in the usage notes that comment on controversies of usage, so that readers will know what to anticipate when they opt to obey or flout an alleged rule.

This entire approach is sometimes criticized by literary critics who are ignorant of the way that language works, and fantasize about a golden age in which dictionaries legislated usage. But language has always been a grassroots, bottom-up phenomenon. The controversy between "prescriptivists" and "descriptivists" is like the choice in "America: Love it or leave it" or "Nature versus Nurture"—a euphonious dichotomy that prevents you from thinking.

Many people get incensed about so-called errors of grammar which are perfectly unexceptionable. There was a controversy in the 1960s over the advertising slogan "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should." The critics said it should be " as  a cigarette should" and moaned about the decline of standards. . A more recent example was an SAT question that asked students whether there was an error in "Toni Morrison's genius allows her to write novels that capture the African American condition." Supposedly the sentence is ungrammatical: you can't have "Toni Morrison's" as an antecedent to the pronoun "she." Now that is a complete myth: there was nothing wrong with the sentence.

Once a rumor about a grammatical error gets legs, it can proliferate like an urban legend about alligators in the sewers. Critics and self-appointed guardians of the language will claim that language is deteriorating because people violate the rule—which was never a rule in the first place. It's so much fun to be in high dudgeon over the decline of language and civilization that these critics don't stop to check the rulebooks and dictionaries to discover how great writers write or to learn the logic of the English language.

Poets and novelists often have a better feel for the language than the self-appointed guardians and the pop grammarians because for them language is a medium. It's a way of conveying ideas and moods with sounds. The most gifted writers—the Virginia Woolfs and H.G. Wellses and George Bernard Shaws and Herman Melvilles—routinely used words and constructions that the guardians insist are incorrect. And of course avant-garde writers such as Burroughs and Kerouac, and poets pushing the envelope or expanding the expressive possibilities of the language, will deliberately flout even the genuine rules that most people obey. But even non-avant garde writers, writers in the traditional canon, write in ways that would be condemned as grammatical errors by many of the purists, sticklers and mavens. 

Another bit of psychology that can make anyone a better writer is to be aware of a phenomenon sometimes called The Curse of Knowledge. It goes by many names, and many psychologists have rediscovered versions of it, including defective Theory of Mind, egocentrism, hindsight bias, and false consensus. They're all versions of an infirmity afflicting every member of our species, namely that it's hard to imagine what it's like not to know something that you do know. 

It's easiest to see it in children. In one famous experiment, kid comes into a room, opens a box of candy, finds pencils inside, and the kid is surprised. Then you say to him, "Now Jason's going to come into the room. What does  he  think is in the box?" And the child will say "pencils." Of course, Jason has no way of knowing that the box had pencils, but the first child is projecting his own state of knowledge onto Jason, forgetting that other people may not know what he knows.

Now we laugh at the kids, but it's true of all of us. We as writers often use technical terms, abbreviations, assumptions about typical experimental methods, assumptions about what questions we ask in our research, that our readers have no way of knowing because they haven't been through the same training that we have. Overcoming the curse of knowledge may be the single most important requirement in becoming a clear writer. 

Contrary to the common accusation that academic writing is bad because professors are trying to bamboozle their audience with highfalutin gobbledygook, I don't think that most bad prose is deliberate. I think it is inept. It is a failure to get inside the head of your reader. We also know from psychology that simply trying harder to get inside the head of your reader is not the ideal way to do it. No matter how hard we try, we're at best okay, but not great, at anticipating another person's state of knowledge.

Instead, you have to ask. You've got to show people a draft. Even if you're writing for laypeople, your reviewers don't all have to be laypeople; a colleague is better than no one. I'm often astonished at things that I think are obvious that turn out to be not so obvious to other people.

Another implication of the curse of knowl.edge is that having an editor is a really good thing. Supposedly there are writers who can dash off a perfectly comprehensible, clear, and coherent essay without getting feedback from a typical reader, but most of us don't have that clairvoyance. We need someone to say "I don't understand this" or " What the hell are you talking about?" To say nothing of attention to the fine points of punctuation, grammar, sentence structure, and other ways in which a sophisticated copyeditor can add value to your written work. 

How much of this advice comes from my experience as a writer and how much from my knowledge as a psycholinguist? Some of each. I often reflect on psychology behind the thousands of decisions I make as a writer in the lifelong effort to improve my prose, and I often think about how to apply experiments on sentence comprehension and the history of words and the logic (and illogic) of grammar to the task of writing. I might think, ", Aha, the reason I rewrote this sentence that way is because of the memory demands of subject versus object relative clauses,."

This combination of science and letters is emblematic of what I hope to be a the larger trend we spoke of earlier, namely the application of science, particularly psychology and cognitive science, to the traditional domains of humanities. There's no aspect of human communication and cultural creation that can't benefit from a greater application of psychology and the other sciences of mind. We would have an exciting addition to literary studies, for example, if literary critics knew more about linguistics.Poetry analysts could apply phonology (the study of sound structure) and the cognitive psychology of metaphor. An analysis of plot in fiction could benefit from a greater understanding of the conflicts and confluences of ultimate interests in human social relationshipos. The genre of biography would be deepened by an understanding of the nature of human memory, particularly autobiographical memory. How much of the memory of our childhood is confabulated? Memory scientists have a lot to say about that. How much do we polish our image of ourselves in describing ourselves to others, and more importantly, recollecting our own histories? Do we edit our memories in an Orwellian manner to make ourselves more coherent in retrospect? Syntax and semantics are relevant as well. How does a writer use the tense system of English to convey a sense of immediacy or historical distance? 

In music the sciences of auditory and speech perception have much to contribute to understanding how musicians accomplish their effects. The visual arts could revive an old method of analysis going back to Ernst Gombrich and Rudolf Arnheim in collaboration with the psychologist Richard Gregory Indeed, even the art itself in the 1920s was influenced by psychology, thanks in part to Gertrude Stein, who as an undergraduate student of William James did a wonderful thesis on divided attention, and then went to Paris and brought the psychology of perception to the attention of artists like Picasso and Braque. Gestalt psychology may have influenced Paul Klee and the expressionists. Since then we have lost that wonderful synergy between the science of visual perception and the creation of visual art. 

Going beyond the arts, the social sciences, such as political ,science could benefit from a greater understanding of human moral and social instincts, such as the psychology of dominance, the psychology of revenge and forgiveness, and the psychology of gratitude and social competition. All of them are relevant, for example, to international negotiations. We talk about one country being friendly to another or allying or competing, but countries themselves don't have feelings. It's the elites and leaders who do, and a lot of international politics is driven by the psychology of its leaders.

Even beyond applying the findings of psychology and cognitive science and social and affective neuroscience, it's the mindset of science that ought to be exported to cultural and intellectual life as a whole. That consists in increased skepticism and scrutiny about factual conventional wisdom: How much of what you think is true really  is  true if you go to the, the numbers? For me this has been a salient issue in analyzing violence, because the conventional wisdom is that we're living in extraordinarily violent times.

But if you take into account the psychology of risk perception, as pioneered by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Paul Slovic, Gerd Gigerenzer, and others, you realize that the conventional wisdom is systematically distorted by the source of our information about the world, namely the news. News is about the stuff that happens; it's not about the stuff that doesn't happen. Human risk perception is affected by memorable examples, according to Tversky and Kahneman's availability heuristic. No matter what the rate of violence is objectively, there are always enough examples to fill the news. And since our perception of risk is influenced by memorable examples, we'll always think we're living in violent times. It's only when you apply the scientific mindset to world events, to political science and history, and try to  count  how many people are killed now as opposed to ten years ago, a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago that you get an accurate picture about the state of the world and the direction that it's going, which is largely downward. That conclusion only came from applying an empirical mindset to the traditional subject matter of history and political science. 

The other aspect of the scientific mindset that ought to be exported to the rest of intellectual life is the search for explanations. That is, not to just say that history is one damn thing after another, that stuff happens, and there's nothing we can do to explain why, but to relate phenomena to more basic or general phenomena … and to try to explain those phenomena with still more basic phenomena. We've repeatedly seen that happen in the sciences, where, for example, biological phenomena were explained in part at the level of molecules, which were explained by chemistry, which was explained by physics.

There's no reason that that this process of explanation can't continue. Biology gives us a grasp of the brain, and human nature is a product of the organization of the brain, and societies unfold as they do because they consist of brains interacting with other brains and negotiating arrangements to coordinate their behavior, and so on.

Now I know that there is tremendous resistance to this idea, because it's confused with a boogeyman called "reductionism"—the fear that we must explain World War I in terms of genes or even elementary particles.

But  explanation  does not imply  reduction . You reduce the building blocks of an explanation to more complex phenomena one level down, but you don't discard the explanation of the phenomenon itself. So World War I obviously is not going to be explained in terms of neuroscience.On the other hand, World War I  could  be explained in terms of the emotions of fear and dominance and prestige among leaders, which fell into a deadly combination at that moment in history. And instead of just saying, "Well, that's the way things are, and there's nothing more we can say about it," we can ask, , " Why  do people compete for prestige? Why do people have the kinds of fears that they do?

The answer doesn't have to be, "Because I said so" or "Because that's the way it is." You can ask, "How does the psychology of fear work? How does the psychology of dominance work? How does the psychology of coalitions work?" Having done that, you get a deeper understanding of some of the causes of World War I. That doesn't mean you throw out the conventional history of World War I, it just means that you enrich it, you diversity it, you deepen it. A program of unifying the arts and humanities with the psychological sciences and ultimately the biological sciences promises tremendous increases of depth of understanding for all the fields. 

I'm often asked, "Who are the leaders of this movement? Whose writings should we be reading and discussing?" But that misses the point. It's not about individual people. It's more revolutionary than just reading this, that or the other person. There has to be a change in mindset coming from both directions. It's not just a question of getting traditional scholars from the humanities and social sciences to start incorporating more science, to start thinking more like scientists. It's got to work the other direction as well. A lot of scientists really are philistines when it comes to history and political theory and philosophy. We need to break down the idea that there are these separate disciplines and modes of study.

In trying to figure out what would give us the deepest, most insightful, most informative understanding of the world and ourselves, we have to be aware of the turf battles: who gets the franchise for talking about what matters. That is one reason that there is cadre of traditional intellectuals who have been hostile to science. I'm not talking about the climate deniers or the vaccine kooks but those who resent the idea that the discussion of what matters, of morality, of politics, of meaning, of purpose should be taken on by these philistines called scientists or social scientists. They act as if the franchise for these heavyweight topics has been given to critics and literary scholars and commentators on religion.

But we need not give credence to people who are simply protecting their turf. It's becoming increasingly clear over the decades and centuries that an understanding of science is central to our understanding of the deepest questions of who we are, where we came from, what matters. If you aren't aware of what science has to say about who we are and what we're like as a species, then you're going to be missing a lot of insight about human life. The fact that this upsets certain traditional bastions of commentary shouldn'tmatter. People always protect their turf.

That's why I'm reluctant to answer when I'm asked who are the people we should be reading, what names can we associate with this approach. It's not about people. It's about the ideas, and the ideas inevitably come piecemeal from many thinkers. The ideas are refined, exchanged, accumulated, and improved by a community of thinkers, each of whom will have some a few ideas and a lot of bad ideas. What we've been talking about is a direction that I hope the entire intellectual culture goes in. It's not about anointing some guru.

Another intellectual error we must be suspicious of is the ever-present tendency to demonize the younger generation and the direction in which culture and society are going. In every era there are commentators who say that the kids today are dumbing down the culture and taking human values with them. Today the accusations are often directed at anything having to do with the Web and other electronic technologies—as if the difference between being printed on dead trees and displayed as pixels on a screen is going to determine the content of ideas. We're always being told that young people suck: that they are illiterate and unreflective and un-thoughtful, all of which ignores the fact that every generation had that said about them by the older generation. Yet somehow civilization persists.

An appreciation of psychology can remind us that we as a species are prone to these bad habits. When we comment on the direction that intellectual life is going, we should learn to discount our own prejudices, our own natural inclination to say "I and my tribe are entitled to weigh in on profound issues, but members of some other guild or tribe or clique are not." And "My generation is the embodiment of wisdom and experience, and the younger generation is uncouth, illiterate, unwashed and uncivilized." better

There is no "conflict between the sciences and humanities," or at least there shouldn't be. There should be no turf battle as to who gets to speak about what matters. What matters are ideas. We should seek the ideas that give us the deepest, richest, best-informed understanding of the human condition, regardless of which people or what discipline originates them. That has to include the sciences, but it can't come only from the sciences. The focus should be on ideas, not on people, disciplines, or academic traditions.

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Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

A collection of new essays by an interdisciplinary team of authors that gives a comprehensive introduction to race and ethnicity. Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe. Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are , but rather sets of actions that people do . Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a “post-race” world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

Develop 21st Century Learning Environments

Change ideas of time and space for learning.

Our traditional notion of learning environments has centered mainly on places and spaces. It’s natural to associate the quality of our learning with the quality of our learning environments, but a fancy building with big LCD monitors and gigabit Ethernet may not be a 21st century school at all. In fact, an effective learning environment doesn’t have to be a particular place or space. Effective learning environments do not limit themselves to time or space, but comprise a variety of support systems that take into consideration the ways in which we learn best as well as the unique learning needs of each student.

Today’s classrooms look very different from those of the past. Students do not necessarily sit in rows of desks; teachers are as often working alongside students as lecturing in front of them. In many schools, students enjoy the luxury of a laptop for every learner. Learning environments today need to embrace the variety of places, ideas, and people that the modern world demands and reflect a flexibility of space, time, people, and technology.

Physical learning environments need to sustain and promote multiple modes of students learning, supporting both individual and group work, providing space for presentation and exploration, promoting interaction and a sense of community, and fostering both formal and informal learning.

Expanding our notion of learning environments to encompass more than physical space allows us to provide students with more opportunities for meaningful learning. Whether students are working in their communities to tackle problems through internships and service projects, or networking with peers using social networking tools to gather and share data on global issues, our learners are acquiring knowledge in a context that is meaningful and taking responsibility for their own learning. We are finding out that powerful learning is happening outside of schools through online learning, community service, and internships.

Technology can help seamlessly support a 21st century learning environment by blending physical and digital arrangements. This often includes online course work, access to outside experts, and the wealth of information in the online community. One-to-one technology, ubiquitous networking, and exciting new tools like Wixie allow students to turn ANY environment into a learning environment.

Many schools are also looking toward creative ways to expand time for learning. One common approach has been the block schedule, which creates bigger and more flexible time slots for student learning, as well as professional development and planning for educators. Some schools have extended school year calendars and the length of the school day to provide additional opportunities for learning and create a stronger link between schools, families, and the community.

Expanding the where and when of learning, however, does not guarantee the results yearned for by many administrators. Effectively using the time available to us is more important than ever before. Schools will need to move away from the idea of measuring accomplishments by the amount of time spent on a topic, focusing instead on the demonstration of what students have learned.

To be prepared for the world of the 21st century, students need to be inspired. Peers, teachers, educators, parents, entrepreneurs, and civic leaders can all provide the human component necessary to encourage students to become intellectual risk-takers and creative problem solvers. We need to praise students for generating ideas and encourage innovative thinking, and we must challenge students to push further to refine their most unique ideas into high-quality projects.

Each school is a unique amalgamation of leadership, instructional strategies, and teaching talents that meets the learning needs of its community. The belief that every child deserves and wants to learn, and the commitment to achieve that goal, is shared throughout all effective school communities.

There is no single right answer to developing a 21st century learning environment, but expanding our notions beyond the spatial and temporal restraints of our school building and school day will help us truly provide environments that support anytime, anywhere learning.

by Joseph Machado

Joseph Machado has been implementing technology and project-based learning for 10 years. He currently is advancing his education in embodied learning at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

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Writing an Effective Essay

All 21st Century Scholars are required to write an essay as part of their application. Here are some quick, easy tips to ensure your essay is effective.

• Take five minutes to think about the this question before responding.
• Brainstorm and create a rough outline for what you want to say.
• Show your passion and interest through strong examples.
• Use a college-level vocabulary (and use it correctly).
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• Have a qualified individual proofread your essay and give you feedback.
• Be yourself.  

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