The Art of Writing

Unlike academic writing, the essay is usually written for the general or "common" reader rather than for experts or students; for someone in a deck chair rather than at a desk. There should neither be footnotes nor much information in an essay; as a form, it is a meditation rather than an act of persuasion – though Robert Louis Stevenson's fine essay "An Apology for Idlers" has encouraged me, as it should, towards a greater indolence: "Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things." 

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