“The word "essay" means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression that prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable.”
Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 6, The Additive Style, p. 62
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Stanley Fish 18
American academic 1938Related quotes
Letter to Henry Home (9 February 1848), quoted in J. Y. T. Greig, The Letters of David Hume: Volume I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), p. 111
“Everybody is forever saying that the essay is dead. This is always said in essays.”
"Funny Things to Think About and Eat" http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9900E0D7123BF937A35754C0A964948260&scp=50&sq=&st=nyt, The New York Times (4 July 1982)
"A Short Essay on Critics" in Art, Literature and the Drama (1858).
On his leaving the theater world (as quoted in the book Notable Asian Americans http://smithsonianapa.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2009/10/chin-frank.pdf)
“The essay was impelled by Clare's anxiety that his poems were slipping out if fashion.”
Clare's 'Popularity in Authorship (1824)
Source: Beyond This Horizon (1948; originally serialized in 1942), Chapter 14, “—and beat him when he sneezes”, p. 131
