Back in December, my English teacher assigned the class a practice free-response essay. However, it wasn’t a timed-essay and she assigned it to us as a take-home essay for us to work on during the weekends. I remember I was having a hard time trying to understand the passage. Maybe it’s because I was too focused on the terms I didn’t know (i.e., scrivener, liver-complaint, and wiseacres) or too frazzled at the time. Now, I feel pretty stupid because I realized I was reading WAY too into it. After reading it for a few minutes today (and not remembering the definitions of certain terms as listed above), I could extract the main ideas of his essay. It was basically a list of all the things the want of money can do to a person. :P It seemed as though Hazlitt had such a negative view on the want of money due to his word choice, of course. I wanted to post his essay (along with my response essay) because his usage of language to illustrate his points had made quite an impression on me. In this modern-day, it seems as though the ‘flowery’, descriptive language is being downsized, and we’re more concentrated on keeping our writing compositions concise and straight to the point.
Hazlitt’s essay can be found here in this PDF file: http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/ap/students/english/ap06_frq_... Read More »
