That was great.

yeah. I first saw the American Scholar lying on the shelves in a room I was breaking down after an event at college and its back cover was a whole article by someone about how high school essay writing didn't prepare her for college level essay writing. Now lately I've been following the AS online, almost a decade later, and they still seem way more interested than your average literary journal in thinking about the nature of undergrad academic essays.

Actually, my disastrous academic career might not have been quite so disastrous were it not for the humanities courses' huge dependency on essays that I didn't feel like writing, so maybe -- given how widely this form is used in American academia, and how little value student writing provides to writers or readers (readers being almost completely limited to evaluators/graders) -- there may be an interesting larger pedagogical question here. A while ago I saw someone in a foreign policy magazine say something related to this:

I cannot imagine the American system of higher education producing anyone quite like him, and especially not the typical American Ph.D. program in the social sciences. Whatever his flaws may have been, Hitchens was wide-ranging, provocative, willing to take unpopular positions, and above all fun to read. Whereas graduate education in the United States is increasingly designed to take smart and ambitious young students, stamp most of the fire and creativity out of them, and make them safe, largely indistinguishable from each other, and above all, boring. (There's a reason we call them "academic disciplines"). So if Hitchens is your role model, for god's (note the small "g") sake don't go get a Ph.D.

Now hold on while I rewrite this comment into an intro, a thesis, three supporting segments and a conclusion.

Shoes. Most of them want shoes.

Equal pay. Equal opportunity. Pockets in all my pants and skirts.

I like shoes, but prefer to get them for myself.

So maybe the best thing to do is to ask them

That's always been my response. And individually, not collectively. You know, like we do for men. Seems obvious, isn't.