How To Say Everything In 500 Words is a short essay written by a English professor and professional linguist, Paul Roberts. Roberts used a central analogy of you, a high school freshman, being assigned a 500 word essay on Friday right before the weekend. The essay is on a topic that must students don't have a particular interest in, College Football. Roberts goes through saying how this "essay" that most students end up writing is horrid and by the end of the five-hundred words it really doesn't get anywhere. After using this analogy to represent what happens to most students when they write class essays, Roberts then goes over stuff to avoid and stuff to include. He states that any obvious argument that most other kids would use, should be left out. Another suggestion he presents is that you should use concretized material instead of the abstracts that most students use.
After reading Paul Roberts' essay I can conclude that his intended audience is composed of students anywhere from middle school to college that are plagued with this very common essay writing problem. One rhetorical strategy Roberts employed is a hypophora. In the beginning of the essay Roberts basically asked the reader, what should you do when you are assigned a paper that's due in a few days? Roberts then went on to answer his own question by stating the various things to avoid and to include into your paper.
I feel the main reason Paul Roberts wrote this short piece was to just overall help students understand how to improve their essay writing abilities. He wants to inform the general public about the common mistakes students make when writing an essay. This was the most intriguing and helpful article for me as a student. Roberts accomplished his purpose because he impacted me with what he said. Now when I have to write an essay, I have this piece bookmarked so I can quickly review over what he said to think about when writing.
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