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People rarely read essays because they prefer reading literary works such as short
stories, novel, etc. because they think literary works are more entertaining than essays.
Edward Hoagland, an essayist and also a lecture in University of Iowa, tries to persuade
the readers that reading essays is fun. In his essay entitled On Essays, he not only
provides the advantages of reading essays, but also he compares essays and other kinds
of works such as fictions and articles.
In his study, Edward Hoagland introduces essays as an old-fashioned form based
on what most people say about it. However, the marketplace argues quite the
otherwise. By comparing between essays and short stories, he argues that the market
demands on essays are bigger than them on short stories, which is saying that people
like essays more than they do on short stories. Next, the essayist compares essays and
short stories on their period of time. While short stories have a permanence, which will
not be influenced by time, essays are more flexible. By using metaphor to represent an
essay, a greased pig, he tries to explain the inevitability of essays, which will suit the time
they are written.
Continuing his viewpoint, he states that a personal essay is the human voice
talking, its order the minds natural row, instead of a systematized outline of ideas. The
style of the essayist has a nap to it, a combination of personality and originality and
energetic loose ends that stand up like the nap on a piece of wool and cannot be
brushed flat. With that, he emphasizes that essays are purely based on the writers mind
based on their personal opinions. Also, he argues that essays may have fewer levels
than fiction, because we are not supposed to argue about their meaning. Along the way,
he states that reading essays is like mind speaking to mind, because they are
addressed to certain people, such as an educated, perhaps a middle-class reader with
certain presuppositions, a frame of reference, even a commitment to civility that is
shared. On the other hand, short stories are more universal.
According to Hoagland, the artful I of an essay can be as chameleon as any
narrator in fiction; and essays do tell a story quite as often as short story stakes a claim
to a particular viewpoint. By providing Mark Twains experience, he intends to tell that
in fictions, there will be another story aside of the real story which was happened, while