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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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Home Essay Samples History

Essay Samples on 21St Century

Navigating the 21st century: understanding of modern learning.

The 21st century has ushered in a new era of unprecedented change, progress, and innovation. As the world evolves at an astonishing pace, so too must the methods of learning and education. This essay delves into the essence of the 21st century as it pertains...

• 21St Century

The Essential Role of Human Values in the 21st Century

The 21st century presents a myriad of challenges and opportunities that call for a renewed emphasis on human values as guiding principles to shape individual behaviors, societal norms, and global interactions. In an era marked by technological advancements, cultural diversification, and interconnectedness, the role of...

The Dynamic Role of Media in the 21st Century

The 21st century has ushered in a new era of media that transcends traditional boundaries, transforming the way information is disseminated, consumed, and shared. In this age of digitalization and connectivity, media in the 21st century holds unprecedented power to shape public opinion, influence cultural...

• Role of Media

Human Values in 21st Century: A Blueprint for a Better World

The 21st century presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities that demand a reevaluation of the values that guide human behavior. In this era of rapid technological advancements, cultural diversification, and interconnectedness, the importance of human values in the 21st century cannot be overstated....

Feminism in the 21st Century: Empowerment and Progress

The 21st century has witnessed a remarkable evolution in the feminist movement, with women and gender equality advocates making significant strides towards dismantling barriers, challenging stereotypes, and reshaping societal norms. Feminism in the 21st century is characterized by a global and intersectional approach that transcends...

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Education in the 21st Century: Navigating a Transformative Landscape

The 21st century has brought about profound changes in every aspect of human life, including education. The traditional classroom model is being reshaped by rapid technological advancements, shifts in pedagogical approaches, and evolving societal demands. Education in the 21st century is not only about imparting...

• Technology in Education

Communication in the 21st Century: Navigating the Digital Age

The 21st century has witnessed an unprecedented transformation in the way people communicate. Rapid technological advancements have reshaped the landscape of communication in the 21st century, enabling instant global connectivity, diverse modes of expression, and new challenges and opportunities. This essay explores the multifaceted nature...

• Communication

Beauty in the 21st Century: Embracing Diversity and Empowerment

The concept of beauty has evolved significantly in the 21st century, reflecting a cultural shift towards inclusivity, diversity, and empowerment. No longer confined to narrow standards, beauty in the 21st century celebrates individuality, challenges stereotypes, and embraces a broader range of ideals. This essay explores...

Advantages of 21st Century Learning: A Transformative Educational Landscape

The 21st century has brought about a paradigm shift in education, ushering in a new era of learning that is characterized by innovation, technology integration, and a focus on holistic skill development. The advantages of 21st century learning are manifold, revolutionizing the educational landscape and...

Exploring the Impact of 21st Century Technology

The 21st century has witnessed a technological revolution that has reshaped every facet of human existence. From communication to commerce, education to entertainment, the influence of 21st century technology is pervasive and transformative. This essay delves into the profound impact of technology in this era,...

• Modern Technology

The 21st Century Teacher: Education's Transformative

The role of a teacher has evolved significantly in the 21st century, reflecting the dynamic changes in education, technology, and the needs of modern learners. The 21st century teacher is not merely an instructor but a guide, mentor, and facilitator of learning. This essay delves...

Nurturing 21st Century Skills: Preparing for Success in the Modern World

The 21st century is characterized by rapid technological advancements, shifting global dynamics, and a growing need for individuals to possess a distinct set of skills that go beyond traditional academics. The acquisition of 21st century skills has become a critical component of education, enabling individuals...

Transforming Education in the 21st Century

Education in the 21st century has undergone a profound transformation, driven by the rapid advancement of technology, changing societal demands, and a growing recognition of the need for holistic skill development. This essay delves into the landscape of 21st century education, exploring the key features...

The 2020 Mark: Reflecting on a New Decade of Transformation

The transition into the new decade marked by 2020 was a moment of anticipation and reflection. As the previous decade drew to a close, and the dawn of the 2020s emerged, I found myself looking both backward and forward, considering the lessons learned and the...

Digital Piracy as Main Crime of 21st-Century

Humans have been performing illegal activities for years. With today’s 21st-century society being technology, illegal activity within the technological/internet-based realm is a major occurrence. Digital piracy is the illegal trade in software, videos, digital video devices, and music. Piracy occurs when someone other than the...

• Digital Era

John Dewey, and the 21st Century Cinematic Aesthetic Experience 

John Dewey in his tenth volume written in 1934, Art as Experience, gave his theory on the arts and created a change in the way people viewed aesthetics and how artists created. Even though Dewey does not talk about film in his volume, except briefly...

To What Extent is NATO Still Relevant in the 21st Century

Introduction In 1949 a new military alliance was finalised bringing together 12 nations for mutual defence. However, now in the 21st century, the world has changed and it is time to re-evaluate NATO’s relevance. President Trump has already questioned the commitment of other countries to...

Gun Control: The Controversial Issue of the 21st Century

Do you want a safer future for both you and your family? Do you want America to actually be great again? Then help solve one of America’s biggest problems since it declared its independence in 1776: Guns. This topic is considered one of the most...

• Controversial Issue
• Gun Control

China's Vision of the Silk Road for the 21st Century

Since the break-up of the Soviet Union and the establishment of the independent Central Asian States, China has been extremely active in its effort to rehabilitate the concept of the “Silk Road”. This endeavour eventually helped shaped the Chinese government’s grand initiative “One Belt and...

“To Be Or Not To Be?” How Relevant Is Shakespeare

Shakespeare has been dead for over four hundred years now. Four hundred two years now to be exact. Many people recognize the name William Shakespeare but when was the last time you have read one of his poems or stories or even watched one of...

• William Shakespeare

Data In The 21St Century And Its Importance

In the 21st century, globalization is the spreading of everything around the world, especially the internet. Now, internet has become an important tool for the business success. The internet has helped the organizations to gathers and records data. In the 21st century, data is the...

• Data Collection
• Effects of Technology

Obsolescence Of Major War Between Great Powers In The 21st Century

Ever since the collapse of Communism in 1991, the international society has been experiencing perhaps the most peaceful era in history. However, others argue that threats to national security have not yet been completely eliminated and the potential for the next major war still prevails....

• Separation of Powers

Anthropological Pieces To Understand A Culture

More Than Just Words If you were asked to define your culture in one sentence, what would you say? Would you mention the food, clothing, or beliefs? Would you feel satisfied with your answer, or feel the need to add more? Describing your culture to...

• Anthropology

Best topics on 21St Century

1. Navigating the 21st Century: Understanding of Modern Learning

2. The Essential Role of Human Values in the 21st Century

3. The Dynamic Role of Media in the 21st Century

4. Human Values in 21st Century: A Blueprint for a Better World

5. Feminism in the 21st Century: Empowerment and Progress

6. Education in the 21st Century: Navigating a Transformative Landscape

7. Communication in the 21st Century: Navigating the Digital Age

8. Beauty in the 21st Century: Embracing Diversity and Empowerment

9. Advantages of 21st Century Learning: A Transformative Educational Landscape

10. Exploring the Impact of 21st Century Technology

11. The 21st Century Teacher: Education’s Transformative

12. Nurturing 21st Century Skills: Preparing for Success in the Modern World

13. Transforming Education in the 21st Century

14. The 2020 Mark: Reflecting on a New Decade of Transformation

15. Digital Piracy as Main Crime of 21st-Century

• Civil Rights Movement
• American History
• Florence Nightingale
• African Diaspora
• Industrial Revolution
• Eleanor Roosevelt
• Monroe Doctrine
• Alexander The Great

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Essays on 21st Century

Choosing 21st century essay topics.

As we navigate through the 21st century, the world around us is constantly evolving, and this evolution comes with a plethora of complex issues and topics that are ripe for exploration and discussion. When it comes to selecting an essay topic for your academic assignments, it's important to choose a subject that is not only relevant but also engaging and thought-provoking. In this article, we will delve into the importance of choosing a 21st-century essay topic, provide advice on how to select a topic, and offer a detailed list of recommended essay topics across various categories.

The Importance of the Topic

Choosing a relevant and impactful essay topic is crucial for several reasons. Firstly, it allows you to engage with current events and trends, fostering a deeper understanding of the world around us and its complexities. Secondly, a well-chosen topic can spark meaningful discussions and debates, both within academic circles and in society at large. Additionally, selecting a 21st-century essay topic can help you develop critical thinking and analytical skills, as you navigate through the complexities of contemporary issues.

Advice on Choosing a Topic

When it comes to selecting an essay topic, it's important to consider your interests, as well as the relevance and significance of the subject matter. Start by brainstorming a list of topics that intrigue you and align with your academic goals. Consider the potential impact of the topic and its relevance to modern society. Research the latest developments and debates surrounding the topic to ensure that you have access to current and credible sources. Lastly, make sure the topic is broad enough to provide you with ample research material, but also specific enough to allow for in-depth exploration.

Recommended Essay Topics

Social issues.

• The impact of social media on mental health
• Income inequality in the 21st century
• The rise of fake news and its implications
• The role of activism in contemporary society

Technology and Innovation

• The ethical implications of artificial intelligence
• The future of renewable energy sources
• Privacy and data protection in the digital age
• The impact of technology on the job market

Environmental Concerns

• The effects of climate change on global communities
• Sustainable practices for a greener future
• The role of activism in environmental conservation
• The intersection of environmentalism and social justice

Global Politics

• International responses to humanitarian crises
• Nationalism and its impact on global diplomacy
• The role of the United Nations in the 21st century
• The rise of populism and its implications for global governance

Cultural Identity

• The impact of globalization on cultural diversity
• The portrayal of gender and race in contemporary media
• The intersection of technology and cultural heritage
• The role of art and literature in shaping cultural identities

These are just a few examples of the myriad of topics that you can explore for your 21st-century essay. Remember to choose a topic that resonates with you and aligns with your academic interests. By delving into the complexities of contemporary issues, you can develop a deeper understanding of the world around us and contribute to meaningful discussions and debates.

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A Look at Racism in The 21st Century and Efforts to Stop It

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Geothermal Energy as The Solution to The 21st Century Problem of Energy

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Comparison of Online Dating and Traditional Dating

Comic books in the 21st century, a lesson to never give up in "the odyssey", a poem by homer, organizational structure and management: alibaba and the 21st century, challenges faced by native americans in 21str century, trump and the rise of 21st century fascism, princess diana’s memoir, a study on the impact of corporate accountability, understanding the craze behind esports, the changing role of accountants in the 21st century, sylvia plath’s presentation of feelings and standards on women as described in her book, the bell jar, analysis on communication as a factor in relationships, understanding the representation of black females sexual desirability in the u.s, how lucky i am to be born in this century, consensual cannibalism in the 21st century.

The beginning of the 21st century was the rise of a global warming, global economy and Third World consumerism, increased private enterprise and terrorist attacks. Many great and many bad things happened in the current century. Many natural and man-made disasters made their impact on the world.

In the 21st century the effects of social development have affected different countries and different social groups differently. Although social development upgraded life standards of population.

The main challenges in the 21st century are: climate change, plastic pollution in the oceans, natural hazards, air pollution, hunger and increased inequalities.

Technology in the 21st century has enabled to humans to make strides that our ancestors could only dream of. People in the 21st century live in a technology and media-suffused environment.

The world population was about 6.1 billion at the start of the 21st century and reached 7.8 billion by March 2020.

Economically and politically, the United States and Western Europe were dominant at the beginning of the century. By the 2010s, China became an emerging global superpower and the world's largest economy. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are increasing in popularity worldwide.

The 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers, Hurricane Katrina, Same-Sex Marriage Legalisation, Haiti Earthquake, The Arab Spring, Brexit

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• Jack The Ripper
• Roaring Twenties
• 19Th Century
• Moon Landing
• China Crisis
• Cuban Missile Crisis
• Cuban Revolution
• Mother Teresa

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Essay About 21st Century

21st Century America

Part 2 -What kind of world do we want for the 21st century? In today's society, when people are asked the question “what are your hopes for the world”, many automatically respond with “achieving world peace” and this is a great dream, but it is just a dream, not reality. People have begun to fight for world peace without thinking rationally about what it means because world wide conflict has become a very substantial conflict in the world today. People around the world have recognized that raising

Life In The 21st Century

we like, while others create fear and anxiety. Several predictions were made that the world will end in 2012 based on the rollover of the Mayan calendar but all these forecasting were proved to be fictitious. On the contrary we are living in the 21st century, 2025 and the world has changed tremendously in the last 13 years. The world has been transformed by the digital revolution and advances in medicine and human knowledge. The present-day civilization stands on two legs, one is spirituality, and

The Beginning Of The 21st Century

The 21st Century, the time period that we all live in today, smothered in continuous social, economic and political issues. An interesting era for films of this genre is the late 1930’s to early 1940’s which we see reflections in the literature today. War World 2 was a turning point in history and was a time of sheer horror in many places such as Spain, Germany, Poland and Eastern Europe. In today’s age, contemporary literature writers often draw their inspiration and ideas from the writers that

21st Century Skills in Education

In the 21st century, the world is changing and becoming increasingly complex as the flow of information increases and becomes more accessible day by day. The world is radically more different than it was just a few years ago, hard to imagine that it’s such a short period of time - the world and its people, economies and cultures have become inextricably connected, driven by the Internet, new innovations and low-cost telecommunications technology. A computer is a must, to be a successful student

The Importance Of Education In The 21st Century

Teaching and learning in the 21st century develop skills beyond listening, watching and remembering. Education in the 21st century incorporates advanced learning tools, development of skills, while actively involved in your own learning and environment. Also, education today is motivating while inspiring and preparing students for today’s world. Students gain the ability to adapt when needed for the changing world of tomorrow. Twenty-first century education is understanding how students learn with

The Role Of A Teacher In The 21st Century

The role of the teacher in the 21st century education consists of the teacher demonstrating leadership among the staff and with the administration-bringing consensus and common, shared ownership of the school’s vision and purpose. It is important for the teacher to make the instructional content engaging, relevant, and meaningful to students’ lives; teach core content that includes critical thinking, problem solving, addition to information and communications technology (ICT) literacy; and facilitate

21st Century Literacy In Education

times, they are a-changin” (Robinson, McKenna & Conradi, 2012, p. 223). Robinson, McKenna and Conradi discuss in their research about a common myth of 21st-Century literacy; that “21st-century literacy is about technology only” (Robinson, McKenna & Conradi, 2012, p. 227). As an educator, I agree with Robinson, McKenna and Conradi that 21st-Century literacy is not only about technology. Technology is a wonderful supplement to learning literacy, however it does not take the place of learning to read

Spooky Superstitions In The 21st Century

Superstitions Step on a crack and you will break your mother's back, a long ago, superstition but yet is still heard in the 21st century. Today lots of the things humans use has been through both innovation and science, but yet people still are wary of superstitions even though most have been disproven. The 5 main superstitions that are still prevalent in the 21st century are buildings not having a 13th floor, opening an umbrella inside, saying bless you, naming boats, and the most recently big

Forensic Science in the 21st Century

Forensic Science in the 21st Century Gertrude West Forensic Science and Psychological Profiling /CJA590 May 30, 2011 Edward Baker Forensic Science in the 21st Century Forensic science has various influences on crime, investigation and the people that are involved. Forensic science has a connection with the courts to ensure crimes are getting solved and justice is being served to those that commit crimes. With the help of forensic science, crimes are being solved from a human and technological

Tyranny : Slavery Of The 21st Century

Tyranny: Slavery Of the 21st century The last twenty-six years have been the most painful years for the Eritrean people. For more than two decades Eritreans went through the most brutal acts of evil. Here, I would like to share my personal experience and testimony. I vividly remember the colourful and joyful day when Eritrea was liberated from the Ethiopia rule in 1991. Though I was only six-years old my memory is still clear, and I remember the joy and happiness that Eritreans expressed then. We

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To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

Writing In The 21st Century

What are the arts but products of the human mind which resonate with our aesthetic and emotional faculties? What are social issues, but ways in which humans try to coordinate their behavior and come to working arrangements that benefit everyone? There's no aspect of life that cannot be illuminated by a better understanding of the mind from scientific psychology. And for me the most recent example is the process of writing itself. 

Introduction

Psychologist Steven Pinker's 1994 book  The Language Instinct  discussed all aspects of language in a unified, Darwinian framework, and in his next book,  How The Mind Works  he did the same for the rest of the mind, explaining "what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life."

He has written four more consequential books:  Words and Rules (1999 ), The Blank Slate (2002 ), The Stuff of Thought (2007 ), and  The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) .  The evolution in his thinking, and the expansion of his range, the depth of his vision, are evident in his contributions on many important issues on these pages over the years:  "A Biological Understanding of Human Nature,"   "The Science of Gender and Science,"   "A Preface to Dangerous Ideas,"   "Language and Human Nature,"   "A History of Violence,"   "The False Allure of Group Selection,"   "Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument,"   and "Science Is Not Your Enemy."  In addition to his many honors, he is the Edge Question Laureate, having suggested three of Edge's Annual Questions: "What Is Your Dangerous Idea?"; What Is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, Or Beautiful Explanation?"; and "What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?". He is a consummate third culture intellectual.

In the conversation below, Pinker begins by stating his belief that "science can inform all aspects of life, particularly psychology, my own favorite science. Psychology looks in one direction to biology, to neuroscience, to genetics, to evolution. And it looks in another direction to the rest of intellectual and cultural life—because what are the arts but products of the human mind which resonate with our aesthetic and emotional faculties? What are social issues but ways in which humans try to coordinate their behavior and come to working arrangements that benefit everyone? There's no aspect of life that cannot be illuminated by a better understanding of the mind from scientific psychology. And for me the most recent example is the process of writing itself."...

— John Brockman

STEVEN PINKER is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He is the author of ten books, including  The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works,   The Better Angels of Our Nature , and  The Sense of Style  (September).  Steven Pinker's Edge Bio page

WRITING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

I believe that science can inform all aspects of life, particularly psychology, my own favorite science. Psychology looks in one direction to biology, to neuroscience, to genetics, to evolution. And it looks in another direction to the rest of intellectual and cultural life—because what are the arts but products of the human mind which resonate with our aesthetic and emotional faculties? What are social issues but ways in which humans try to coordinate their behavior and come to working arrangements that benefit everyone? There's no aspect of life that cannot be illuminated by a better understanding of the mind from scientific psychology. And for me the most recent example is the process of writing itself. 

I'm a psychologist who studies language—a psycholinguist—and I'm also someone who uses language in my books and articles to convey ideas about, among other things, the science of language itself. But also, ideas about war and peace and emotion and cognition and human nature. The question I'm currently asking myself is how our scientific understanding of language can be put into practice to improve the way that we communicate anything, including science?

In particular, can you use linguistics, cognitive science, and psycholinguistics to come up with a better style manual—a 21st century alternative to the classic guides like Strunk and White's  The Elements of Style ?

Writing is inherently a topic in psychology. It's a way that one mind can cause ideas to happen in another mind. The medium by which we share complex ideas, namely language, has been studied intensively for more than half a century. And so if all that work is of any use it ought to be of use in crafting more stylish and transparent prose. 

From a scientific perspective, the starting point must be different from that of traditional manuals, which are lists of dos and don'ts that are presented mechanically and often followed robotically. Many writers have been the victims of inept copyeditors who follow guidelines from style manuals unthinkingly, never understanding their rationale.

For example, everyone knows that scientists overuse the passive voice. It's one of the signatures of academese: "the experiment was performed" instead of "I performed the experiment." But if you follow the guideline, "Change every passive sentence into an active sentence," you don't improve the prose, because there's no way the passive construction could have survived in the English language for millennia if it hadn't served some purpose. 

The problem with any given construction, like the passive voice, isn't that people use it, but that they use it too much or in the wrong circumstances. Active and passive sentences express the same underlying content (who did what to whom) while varying the topic, focus, and linear order of the participants, all of which have cognitive ramifications. The passive is a better construction than the active when the affected entity (the thing that has moved or changed) is the topic of the preceding discourse, and should therefore come early in the sentence to connect with what came before; when the affected entity is shorter or grammatically simpler than the agent of the action, so expressing it early relieves the reader's memory load; and when the agent is irrelevant to the story, and is best omitted altogether (which the passive, but not the active, allows you to do). To give good advice on how to write, you have to understand what the passive can accomplish, and therefore you should not blue-pencil every passive sentence into an active one (as one of my copyeditors once did).

Ironically, the aspect of writing that gets the most attention is the one that is least important to good style, and that is the rules of correct usage. Can you split an infinitive, that is, say, "to boldly go where no man has gone before,"or must you say to "go boldly"? Can you use the so-called fused participle—"I approve of Sheila taking the job"—as opposed to "I approve of Sheila's taking the job" (with an apostrophe "s")? There are literally (yes, "literally") hundreds of traditional usage issues like these, and many are worth following. But many are not, and in general they are not the first things to concentrate on when we think about how to improve writing. 

The first thing you  should  think about is the stance that you as a writer take when putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Writing is cognitively unnatural. In ordinary conversation, we've got another person across from us. We can monitor the other person's facial expressions: Do they furrow their brow, or widen their eyes? We can respond when they break in and interrupt us. And unless you're addressing a stranger you know the hearer's background: whether they're an adult or child, whether they're an expert in your field or not. When you're writing you have none of those advantages. You're casting your bread onto the waters, hoping that this invisible and unknowable audience will catch your drift.

The first thing to do in writing well—before worrying about split infinitives—is what kind of situation you imagine yourself to be in. What are you simulating when you write, and you're only pretending to use language in the ordinary way? That stance is the main thing that iw distinguishes clear vigorous writing from the mush we see in academese and medicalese and bureaucratese and corporatese.

The literary scholars Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas have identified the stance that our best essayists and writers implicitly adopt, and that is a combination of vision and conversation. When you write you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that's interesting, that you are directing the attention of your reader to that thing in the world, and that you are doing so by means of conversation. 

That may sound obvious. But it's amazing how many of the bad habits of academese and legalese and so on come from flouting that model. Bad writers don't point to something in the world but areself-conscious about not seeming naïve about the pitfalls of their own enterprise. Their goal is not to show something to the reader but to prove that they are nota bad lawyer or a bad scientist or a bad academic. And so bad writing is cluttered with apologies and hedges and "somewhats" and reviews of the past activity of people in the same line of work as the writer, as opposed to concentrating on something in the world that the writer is trying to get someone else to see with their own eyes. 

That's a starting point to becoming a good writer. Another key is to be an attentive reader. One of the things you appreciate when you do linguistics is that a language is a combination of two very different mechanisms: powerful rules, which can be applied algorithmically, and lexical irregularities, which must be memorized by brute force: in sum, words and rules.

All languages contain elegant, powerful, logical rules for combining words in such a way that the meaning of the combination can be deduced from the meanings of the words and the way they're arranged. If I say "the dog bit the man" or "the man bit the dog," you have two different images, because of the way those words are ordered by the rules of English grammar.

On the other hand, language has a massive amount of irregularity: idiosyncrasies, idioms, figures of speech, and other historical accidents that you couldn't possibly deduce from rules, because often they are fundamentally illogical. The past tense of "bring" is "brought," but the past tense of "ring" is "rang," and the past tense of "blink" is "blinked." No rule allows you to predict that; you need raw exposure to the language. That's also true for many rules of punctuation. . If I talk about "Pat's leg," it's "Pat-apostrophe-s." But If I talk about "its leg," I can't use apostrophe S; that would be illiterate. Why? Who knows? That's just the way English works. Peole who spell possessive "its" with an apostrophe are not being illogical; they're being  too  logical, while betraying the fact that they haven't paid close attention to details of the printed page.

So being a good writer depends not just on having mastered the logical rules of combination but on having absorbed tens or hundreds of thousands of constructions and idioms and irregularities from the printed page. The first step to being a good writer is to be a good reader: to read a lot, and to savor and reverse-engineer good prose wherever you find it. That is, to read a passage of writing and think to yourself, … "How did the writer achieve that effect? What was their trick?" And to read a good sentence with a consciousness of what makes it so much fun to glide through.

Any handbook on writing today is going to be compared to Strunk & White's  The Elements of Style , a lovely little book, filled with insight and charm, which I have read many times. But William Strunk, its original author, was born in 1869. This is a man who was born before the invention of the telephone, let alone the computer and the Internet and the smartphone. His sense of style was honed in the later decades of the 19th century!

We know that language changes. You and I don't speak the way people did in Shakespeare's era, or in Chaucer's. As valuable as  The Elements of Style  is (and it's tremendously valuable), it's got a lot of cockamamie advice, dated by the fact that its authors were born more than a hundred years ago. For example, they sternly warn, "Never use 'contact' as a verb. Don't say 'I'm going to contact him.' It's pretentious jargon, pompous and self-important. Indicate that you intend to 'telephone' someone or 'write them' or 'knock on their door.'" To a writer in the 21st century, this advice is bizarre. Not only is "to contact" thoroughly entrenched and unpretentious, but it's indispensable. Often it's extremely useful to be able to talk about getting in touch with someone when you don't care by what medium you're going to do it, and in those cases, "to contact" is the perfect verb. It may have been a neologism in Strunk and White's day, but all words start out as neologisms in their day. If you read  The Elements of Style  today, you have no way of appreciating that what grated on the ears of someone born in 1869 might be completely unexceptionable today.

The other problem is that  The Elements of Style  was composed before there existed a science of language and cognition. A lot of Strunk and White's advice depended completely on their gut reactions from a lifetime of practice as an English professor and critic, respectively. Today we can offer deeper advice, such as the syntactic and discourse functions of the passive voice—a construction which, by the way, Strunk & White couldn't even consistently identify, not having being trained in grammar.

Another advantage of modern linguistics and psycholinguistics is that it provides a way to think your way through a pseudo-controversy that was ginned up about 50 years ago between so-called prescriptivists and descriptivists. According to this fairy tale there are prescriptivists who prescribe how language ought to be used and there are descriptivists, mainly academic linguists, who describe how language in fact is used. In this story there is a war between them, with prescriptivist dictionaries competing with descriptivist . dictionaries.

Inevitably my own writing manual is going to be called "descriptivist," because it questions a number of dumb rules that are routinely flouted by all the best writers and had no business being in stylebooks in the first place. These pseudo-rules violate the logic of English but get passed down as folklore from one style sheet to the next. But debunking stupid rules is not the same thing as denying the existence of rules, to say nothing of advice on writing.  The Sense of Style  is clearly prescriptive: it consists of 300 pages in which I boss the reader around.

This pseudo-controversy was created when  Webster's Third International Dictionary  was published in the early 1960s. Like all dictionaries, it paid attention to the way that language changes. If a dictionary didn't do that it would be useless: writers who consulted it would be guaranteed to be misunderstood. For example, there is an old prescriptive rule that says that "nauseous," which most people use to mean nauseated, cannot mean that. It must mean creating nausea, namely, "nauseating." You must write that a roller coaster ride was nauseous, or a violentmovie was nauseous, not I got nauseous riding on the roller coaster or watching the movie. Nowadays, no one obeys this rule. If a dictionary were to stick by its guns and say it's an error to say that the movie made me nauseous, it would be a useless dictionary: it wouldn't be doing what a dictionary has to do. This has always been true of dictionaries. 

But there's a myth that dictionaries work like the rulebook of Major League Baseball; they legislate what is correct. I can speak with some authority in saying that this is false. I am the Chair of the Usage Panel of  The American Heritage Dictionary , which is allegedly the prescriptivist alternative to the descriptivist  Webster's . But when I asked the editors how they decide what goes into the dictionary, they replied, "By paying attention to the way people use language."

Of course dictionary editors can't pay attention to the way  everyone  uses language, because people use language in different ways. When you write, you're writing for a virtual audience of well-read, literate fellow readers. And those are the people that we consult in deciding what goes into the dictionary, particularly in the usage notes that comment on controversies of usage, so that readers will know what to anticipate when they opt to obey or flout an alleged rule.

This entire approach is sometimes criticized by literary critics who are ignorant of the way that language works, and fantasize about a golden age in which dictionaries legislated usage. But language has always been a grassroots, bottom-up phenomenon. The controversy between "prescriptivists" and "descriptivists" is like the choice in "America: Love it or leave it" or "Nature versus Nurture"—a euphonious dichotomy that prevents you from thinking.

Many people get incensed about so-called errors of grammar which are perfectly unexceptionable. There was a controversy in the 1960s over the advertising slogan "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should." The critics said it should be " as  a cigarette should" and moaned about the decline of standards. . A more recent example was an SAT question that asked students whether there was an error in "Toni Morrison's genius allows her to write novels that capture the African American condition." Supposedly the sentence is ungrammatical: you can't have "Toni Morrison's" as an antecedent to the pronoun "she." Now that is a complete myth: there was nothing wrong with the sentence.

Once a rumor about a grammatical error gets legs, it can proliferate like an urban legend about alligators in the sewers. Critics and self-appointed guardians of the language will claim that language is deteriorating because people violate the rule—which was never a rule in the first place. It's so much fun to be in high dudgeon over the decline of language and civilization that these critics don't stop to check the rulebooks and dictionaries to discover how great writers write or to learn the logic of the English language.

Poets and novelists often have a better feel for the language than the self-appointed guardians and the pop grammarians because for them language is a medium. It's a way of conveying ideas and moods with sounds. The most gifted writers—the Virginia Woolfs and H.G. Wellses and George Bernard Shaws and Herman Melvilles—routinely used words and constructions that the guardians insist are incorrect. And of course avant-garde writers such as Burroughs and Kerouac, and poets pushing the envelope or expanding the expressive possibilities of the language, will deliberately flout even the genuine rules that most people obey. But even non-avant garde writers, writers in the traditional canon, write in ways that would be condemned as grammatical errors by many of the purists, sticklers and mavens. 

Another bit of psychology that can make anyone a better writer is to be aware of a phenomenon sometimes called The Curse of Knowledge. It goes by many names, and many psychologists have rediscovered versions of it, including defective Theory of Mind, egocentrism, hindsight bias, and false consensus. They're all versions of an infirmity afflicting every member of our species, namely that it's hard to imagine what it's like not to know something that you do know. 

It's easiest to see it in children. In one famous experiment, kid comes into a room, opens a box of candy, finds pencils inside, and the kid is surprised. Then you say to him, "Now Jason's going to come into the room. What does  he  think is in the box?" And the child will say "pencils." Of course, Jason has no way of knowing that the box had pencils, but the first child is projecting his own state of knowledge onto Jason, forgetting that other people may not know what he knows.

Now we laugh at the kids, but it's true of all of us. We as writers often use technical terms, abbreviations, assumptions about typical experimental methods, assumptions about what questions we ask in our research, that our readers have no way of knowing because they haven't been through the same training that we have. Overcoming the curse of knowledge may be the single most important requirement in becoming a clear writer. 

Contrary to the common accusation that academic writing is bad because professors are trying to bamboozle their audience with highfalutin gobbledygook, I don't think that most bad prose is deliberate. I think it is inept. It is a failure to get inside the head of your reader. We also know from psychology that simply trying harder to get inside the head of your reader is not the ideal way to do it. No matter how hard we try, we're at best okay, but not great, at anticipating another person's state of knowledge.

Instead, you have to ask. You've got to show people a draft. Even if you're writing for laypeople, your reviewers don't all have to be laypeople; a colleague is better than no one. I'm often astonished at things that I think are obvious that turn out to be not so obvious to other people.

Another implication of the curse of knowl.edge is that having an editor is a really good thing. Supposedly there are writers who can dash off a perfectly comprehensible, clear, and coherent essay without getting feedback from a typical reader, but most of us don't have that clairvoyance. We need someone to say "I don't understand this" or " What the hell are you talking about?" To say nothing of attention to the fine points of punctuation, grammar, sentence structure, and other ways in which a sophisticated copyeditor can add value to your written work. 

How much of this advice comes from my experience as a writer and how much from my knowledge as a psycholinguist? Some of each. I often reflect on psychology behind the thousands of decisions I make as a writer in the lifelong effort to improve my prose, and I often think about how to apply experiments on sentence comprehension and the history of words and the logic (and illogic) of grammar to the task of writing. I might think, ", Aha, the reason I rewrote this sentence that way is because of the memory demands of subject versus object relative clauses,."

This combination of science and letters is emblematic of what I hope to be a the larger trend we spoke of earlier, namely the application of science, particularly psychology and cognitive science, to the traditional domains of humanities. There's no aspect of human communication and cultural creation that can't benefit from a greater application of psychology and the other sciences of mind. We would have an exciting addition to literary studies, for example, if literary critics knew more about linguistics.Poetry analysts could apply phonology (the study of sound structure) and the cognitive psychology of metaphor. An analysis of plot in fiction could benefit from a greater understanding of the conflicts and confluences of ultimate interests in human social relationshipos. The genre of biography would be deepened by an understanding of the nature of human memory, particularly autobiographical memory. How much of the memory of our childhood is confabulated? Memory scientists have a lot to say about that. How much do we polish our image of ourselves in describing ourselves to others, and more importantly, recollecting our own histories? Do we edit our memories in an Orwellian manner to make ourselves more coherent in retrospect? Syntax and semantics are relevant as well. How does a writer use the tense system of English to convey a sense of immediacy or historical distance? 

In music the sciences of auditory and speech perception have much to contribute to understanding how musicians accomplish their effects. The visual arts could revive an old method of analysis going back to Ernst Gombrich and Rudolf Arnheim in collaboration with the psychologist Richard Gregory Indeed, even the art itself in the 1920s was influenced by psychology, thanks in part to Gertrude Stein, who as an undergraduate student of William James did a wonderful thesis on divided attention, and then went to Paris and brought the psychology of perception to the attention of artists like Picasso and Braque. Gestalt psychology may have influenced Paul Klee and the expressionists. Since then we have lost that wonderful synergy between the science of visual perception and the creation of visual art. 

Going beyond the arts, the social sciences, such as political ,science could benefit from a greater understanding of human moral and social instincts, such as the psychology of dominance, the psychology of revenge and forgiveness, and the psychology of gratitude and social competition. All of them are relevant, for example, to international negotiations. We talk about one country being friendly to another or allying or competing, but countries themselves don't have feelings. It's the elites and leaders who do, and a lot of international politics is driven by the psychology of its leaders.

Even beyond applying the findings of psychology and cognitive science and social and affective neuroscience, it's the mindset of science that ought to be exported to cultural and intellectual life as a whole. That consists in increased skepticism and scrutiny about factual conventional wisdom: How much of what you think is true really  is  true if you go to the, the numbers? For me this has been a salient issue in analyzing violence, because the conventional wisdom is that we're living in extraordinarily violent times.

But if you take into account the psychology of risk perception, as pioneered by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Paul Slovic, Gerd Gigerenzer, and others, you realize that the conventional wisdom is systematically distorted by the source of our information about the world, namely the news. News is about the stuff that happens; it's not about the stuff that doesn't happen. Human risk perception is affected by memorable examples, according to Tversky and Kahneman's availability heuristic. No matter what the rate of violence is objectively, there are always enough examples to fill the news. And since our perception of risk is influenced by memorable examples, we'll always think we're living in violent times. It's only when you apply the scientific mindset to world events, to political science and history, and try to  count  how many people are killed now as opposed to ten years ago, a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago that you get an accurate picture about the state of the world and the direction that it's going, which is largely downward. That conclusion only came from applying an empirical mindset to the traditional subject matter of history and political science. 

The other aspect of the scientific mindset that ought to be exported to the rest of intellectual life is the search for explanations. That is, not to just say that history is one damn thing after another, that stuff happens, and there's nothing we can do to explain why, but to relate phenomena to more basic or general phenomena … and to try to explain those phenomena with still more basic phenomena. We've repeatedly seen that happen in the sciences, where, for example, biological phenomena were explained in part at the level of molecules, which were explained by chemistry, which was explained by physics.

There's no reason that that this process of explanation can't continue. Biology gives us a grasp of the brain, and human nature is a product of the organization of the brain, and societies unfold as they do because they consist of brains interacting with other brains and negotiating arrangements to coordinate their behavior, and so on.

Now I know that there is tremendous resistance to this idea, because it's confused with a boogeyman called "reductionism"—the fear that we must explain World War I in terms of genes or even elementary particles.

But  explanation  does not imply  reduction . You reduce the building blocks of an explanation to more complex phenomena one level down, but you don't discard the explanation of the phenomenon itself. So World War I obviously is not going to be explained in terms of neuroscience.On the other hand, World War I  could  be explained in terms of the emotions of fear and dominance and prestige among leaders, which fell into a deadly combination at that moment in history. And instead of just saying, "Well, that's the way things are, and there's nothing more we can say about it," we can ask, , " Why  do people compete for prestige? Why do people have the kinds of fears that they do?

The answer doesn't have to be, "Because I said so" or "Because that's the way it is." You can ask, "How does the psychology of fear work? How does the psychology of dominance work? How does the psychology of coalitions work?" Having done that, you get a deeper understanding of some of the causes of World War I. That doesn't mean you throw out the conventional history of World War I, it just means that you enrich it, you diversity it, you deepen it. A program of unifying the arts and humanities with the psychological sciences and ultimately the biological sciences promises tremendous increases of depth of understanding for all the fields. 

I'm often asked, "Who are the leaders of this movement? Whose writings should we be reading and discussing?" But that misses the point. It's not about individual people. It's more revolutionary than just reading this, that or the other person. There has to be a change in mindset coming from both directions. It's not just a question of getting traditional scholars from the humanities and social sciences to start incorporating more science, to start thinking more like scientists. It's got to work the other direction as well. A lot of scientists really are philistines when it comes to history and political theory and philosophy. We need to break down the idea that there are these separate disciplines and modes of study.

In trying to figure out what would give us the deepest, most insightful, most informative understanding of the world and ourselves, we have to be aware of the turf battles: who gets the franchise for talking about what matters. That is one reason that there is cadre of traditional intellectuals who have been hostile to science. I'm not talking about the climate deniers or the vaccine kooks but those who resent the idea that the discussion of what matters, of morality, of politics, of meaning, of purpose should be taken on by these philistines called scientists or social scientists. They act as if the franchise for these heavyweight topics has been given to critics and literary scholars and commentators on religion.

But we need not give credence to people who are simply protecting their turf. It's becoming increasingly clear over the decades and centuries that an understanding of science is central to our understanding of the deepest questions of who we are, where we came from, what matters. If you aren't aware of what science has to say about who we are and what we're like as a species, then you're going to be missing a lot of insight about human life. The fact that this upsets certain traditional bastions of commentary shouldn'tmatter. People always protect their turf.

That's why I'm reluctant to answer when I'm asked who are the people we should be reading, what names can we associate with this approach. It's not about people. It's about the ideas, and the ideas inevitably come piecemeal from many thinkers. The ideas are refined, exchanged, accumulated, and improved by a community of thinkers, each of whom will have some a few ideas and a lot of bad ideas. What we've been talking about is a direction that I hope the entire intellectual culture goes in. It's not about anointing some guru.

Another intellectual error we must be suspicious of is the ever-present tendency to demonize the younger generation and the direction in which culture and society are going. In every era there are commentators who say that the kids today are dumbing down the culture and taking human values with them. Today the accusations are often directed at anything having to do with the Web and other electronic technologies—as if the difference between being printed on dead trees and displayed as pixels on a screen is going to determine the content of ideas. We're always being told that young people suck: that they are illiterate and unreflective and un-thoughtful, all of which ignores the fact that every generation had that said about them by the older generation. Yet somehow civilization persists.

An appreciation of psychology can remind us that we as a species are prone to these bad habits. When we comment on the direction that intellectual life is going, we should learn to discount our own prejudices, our own natural inclination to say "I and my tribe are entitled to weigh in on profound issues, but members of some other guild or tribe or clique are not." And "My generation is the embodiment of wisdom and experience, and the younger generation is uncouth, illiterate, unwashed and uncivilized." better

There is no "conflict between the sciences and humanities," or at least there shouldn't be. There should be no turf battle as to who gets to speak about what matters. What matters are ideas. We should seek the ideas that give us the deepest, richest, best-informed understanding of the human condition, regardless of which people or what discipline originates them. That has to include the sciences, but it can't come only from the sciences. The focus should be on ideas, not on people, disciplines, or academic traditions.

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The 21st century is characterized by rapid technological advancements, globalization, and a greater emphasis on social awareness and environmental sustainability. It is a time of increasing interconnectedness through the internet and social media, leading to a more diverse and varied cultural landscape. The world is facing new challenges, such as climate change and geopolitical instabilities, which require innovative solutions and cooperation among nations. Despite these challenges, the 21st century offers unprecedented opportunities for creativity, innovation, and growth.

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Home / IELTS, CAE, FCE Writing Samples / IELTS Writing Task 2: 21st Century

IELTS Writing Task 2: 21st Century

Many people are optimistic of the 21st century and see it as an opportunity to make positive changes to the world. To what extent do you share their optimism? What changes would you like to see in the new century?

It has been claimed by few individuals that 21st century is an era of opportunities and many people aspire to bring great changes to the world. In my opinion , even I am optimistic about future and like to see some drastic changes in protecting our environment (1) . Being optimistic is the key to happy life and I believe, every individual should always think positively which in turn create positive vibes around the world (2) . I am delighted to share the optimistic thoughts of people who are on the verge of bringing changes to the world. Narendra Modi is the prime example who brought some real changes to our nation which was supported by citizens of our country wholeheartedly (3) . He achieved something which was quite impossible by his will and optimism which is commendable (4) . There are few areas which need immediate attention from everyone (5) . First and foremost, humans have destroyed the environment to an extent which can not be recovered again (6) . The only thing what we ought to do at the current situation is to stop deforestation and reduce the emission of carbon-di-oxide (7) . In addition, we should also plant some trees to make the earth greener and better environment to leave (8) . In conclusion, an optimistic view can transform the whole world and bring a positive change in it. Some fields which need quick attention is Global warming, which has a devastating effect if not addressed. As a whole, we can bring changes within us to minimize the Global warming to make our world livable (9) . 260 words

The commentaries are marked in brackets with number (*). The numbered commentaries are found below. The part in italics is taken from the text, the word underlined is the suggested correction. Words in (brackets) are the suggested addition to the original phrase or sentence.

•  I would ditch the introductory ‘In my opinion’ since you’re talking about yourself — it’s pretty much self-explanatory. Try going with something more straightforward like: > “as for me/myself …” — true and tried, even if it seems a bit simplistic > “the way I see it…” — might need to rephrase the sentence if you opt for this one > “I for one think/believe/hold it that” — go for this construction if you believe your opinion is different from that of majority. The choice of a rebel.
• Being optimistic is the key to a happy life and I believe, every individual should always think positively which in turn creates positive vibes around the world  — ‘happy life’ takes an indefinite article here — a happy life of some person; ‘to create’ refers to ‘which’ and should be used in singular. See this article on  articles in English .
• Narendra Modi is the prime example who brought some real changes to our nation which were supported by citizens of our country wholeheartedly — I assumed that ‘which’ refers to ‘changes’ and swapped ‘was’ for ‘were’. However, if you meant the fact of changes, then ‘was’ is justified.
• He achieved something that  was quite impossible by his will and optimism which is commendable  — this is a so-called restrictive clause that needs ‘that’ instead of ‘which’. Restrictive clauses give essential information that can’t be taken out of the sentence. This sentence also has a non-restrictive clause — ‘ which is commendable ‘. It is an addition to the main idea and can be taken out of context without ruining the sentence. More on relative clauses .
• There are few areas that need immediate attention from everyone — another restrictive clause.
• First and foremost, humans have harmed/damaged the environment to an extent which can not be recovered again — ‘destroy the environment’ is usually used in Continuous Tense to show that something affects the environment badly, e.g. ‘Coal power plants are destroying the environment at an alarming rate’. The words I suggested are more commonly used to describe the extent of damage humanity causes.
• The first (?) thing that  we ought to do at the current situation is to stop deforestation and reduce the emission of carbon- dioxide  — ‘the only thing’ implies that there should be no other relief efforts to undo the damage. Alternatively change ‘ought to’ to ‘could’: ‘The only thing that we could do…’. Carbon-dioxide spelling.
• In addition, we should also plant some trees to make  Earth greener and better environment to live in  — ‘Some’ implies a small amount or number. Unless you did it intentionally, I would use a more appropriate adjective here. Earth is a proper noun and should be capitalised. Using ‘the earth’ would mean the actual dirt under your feet — in that case it shouldn’t be capitalised and it takes a definite article. ‘Leave’ changed to ‘live in’ : ‘to live in a more friendly environment’).
• ‘Global warming’ shouldn’t be capitalised — it is not a proper noun.

Another solid, balanced essay. The structure is well-defined and easy to follow. The idea however might seem a bit vague: to undo the damage we have to maintain positive outlook of the situation and plant some trees. This isn’t a crucial point in deciding your score, but it could become of use later on — try to make the idea of your essay more pronounced.

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Writing in the 21st Century

Laurence o'bryan.

• 29 November 2012

I believe fiction writing is changing. I think the connected world we live in is having an impact on the art and craft of writing.

You cannot deny that writing has evolved over the centuries. And I see no reason to believe that it has stopped evolving. I read a novel from a hundred years ago a while back and after page one I wanted to stop reading. The style was long-winded. Every sentence had thirty words. I could imagine the lives people lived back then, when the next interruption would be the bell for lunch, two hours from now.

Readers these days live in a world of constant interruption. Social media, mobile phones and TV lure people away from books all the time. Our job as writers is to provide fiction that can be assimilated between other tasks these days.

In order to achieve the goal of writing in an up to date style I suggest you consider the following four characteristics of compelling early 21st century fiction, characteristics that are driving the evolution of fiction writing in my opinion:

Accuracy. Accuracy is now realistically attainable for fiction writers. We can find out how the Welsh valleys look in December, how hot Paris is in the Spring, and listen to the sound of a wren whenever we want because of the internet. Flights of fancy are good, at times, but reality has a power that can be used for good effect. The truth is often stranger than fiction. Finding out that Paris is no warmer than London in Spring is the sort of information that leads to readers being able to place themselves in the city.

Being Fantastic. Fantastic to me means being absurd, exotic and imaginative, to choose some of the long list of definition words in my dictionary for fantastic. So add a fantastical sparkle to your fiction. Yes, I know it’s interesting that Aunt Maud went to work in a shop for twenty years and Uncle Fred made her tea every night, but I want to see Aunt Maud going to work in a man’s suit, with a flat cap, and learn that Uncle Fred was a circus midget with six brothers who shared his bedroom for six months of the year and got drunk on Guinness every night. Absurd, exotic and imaginative novels can be seen on the bookshelves of all good bookshops these days.

Being Sensuous. To me being sensuous is about being passionate, in touch with our senses. We all know what being passionate is in the traditional sense, but I also think it is about having passion for your work, for your writing. Being in touch with your senses means being able to describe how something feels. Take raining for instance. We should be able to describe the taste of rainwater, the silky feel of it on our faces, the sound of it tapping with a million tiny hammers at our windows and the little waves it makes in the puddles. That’s what makes writing jump of the page.

And Gripping. With all the distractions around us, it is an essential element of 21st century writing to be gripping. Something must happen. There must be conflict. There must be tension. There must be mystery. What keeps me, and millions of readers of crime, romance, mystery and the better literary novels interested is a desire to find out what is going to happen next. You can do that by making us feel with the characters. Being gripping is something you cannot disdain if you want a large readership.

If your writing has these characteristics you have a real chance of getting published and getting readers in the 21 st century.

This post is the last in a short series about getting your writing noticed in the 21 st century in the lead up to the launch of my new novel, The Jerusalem Puzzle . The paperback will arrive in bookshops in Ireland on January 3 rd . I hope you have enjoyed these posts.

If you would like to know more about the author please visit www.lpobryan.com

About the author

(c) L P O’Bryan

went to school in south Dublin, drank way too much, studied business, then IT. While a student, he worked as a kitchen porter and lived a rollercoaster existence.

After that he spent ten years working in London. He met his wife there. Soon after their daughter was born they came back to Dublin. That was in the year 2000. He worked in IT marketing for many years and was made redundant last year, just in time for the publication of The Istanbul Puzzle . That novel has now been shortlisted for Ireland AM Irish Crime Novel of 2012 and translated into 9 languages. The Istanbul Puzzle is his first novel to be published. The Jerusalem Puzzle , his second, is coming out January 31 2013 in paperback and Dec 3 2012 in ebook. In 2007 he won the Outstanding Novel award at the Southern California writer’s conference. That winning novel, on which he worked for six years, became The Istanbul Puzzle . He is a member of the UK Crime Writer’s Association, the Irish Writing Centre, two “live” writing groups in Dublin and online writing communities including Writing.ie. His research takes him all over the world and he still thoroughly enjoys looking at the stars and listening to the stories of strangers. His website/blog is: www.lpobryan.com His Twitter name: @LPOBryan

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21st-Century Learning: What It Is and Why It’s Important

21st-century learning  is a term used to describe a shift in education from the traditional methods of the past to a more modern approach. This new approach focuses on preparing students for the future by teaching them the skills they need to be successful in a global economy. 21st-century learning is not memorization or recitation but critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration. It is about preparing students for the real world, not just for a test.

Table of Contents

Introduction

It is becoming increasingly clear that 21st-century learning is essential for students to be successful in an ever-changing global economy. 21st-century learning is not simply an update to traditional education; it is a fundamental shift in how we think about and prepare students for their future.

21st-century learning is more than just the 3Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic). It emphasizes the importance of critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication – skills essential for students to thrive in the 21st century.

What is also clear is that 21st-century learning cannot occur in a traditional classroom setting. Students need to be actively engaged in their learning and have opportunities to apply what they are learning to real-world situations.

There are several ways that schools can incorporate 21st-century learning into their curriculum. One way to integrate 21st-century learning into the classroom is to focus on project-based learning. In project-based learning, students work on a project together. They use their creativity and critical thinking skills to solve problems. This type of learning is effective because it helps students learn how to work together and think critically.

Another way to incorporate 21st-century learning is to use technology in the classroom. Technology can facilitate collaboration and communication and provide students with opportunities to be creative and think critically.

The bottom line is that 21st-century learning is essential for students to be successful in the 21st century. It is about much more than just the 3Rs and cannot occur in a traditional classroom setting. Schools need to be creative in incorporating 21st-century learning into their curriculum.

21st-Century Skills Students Need for Learning

As the world changes, so do students’ skills to succeed. Here are 21st-century skills students need for learning:

• Communication:  Good communication skills are essential for students to work together and share their ideas.
• Critical Thinking:  The student needs to be able to think critically to analyze information and solve problems.
• Collaboration:  One must work effectively with others to achieve a common goal.
• Creativity:  Students need to think creatively to generate new ideas and solve problems innovatively.
• Digital Literacy:  Students must use technology effectively to access and create digital information.
• Information Literacy:  They must find, evaluate, and use information effectively.
• Media Literacy:  Students must critically analyze media messages to understand their impact on individuals and society. This critical analysis will help them understand how media messages can influence individuals and society.
• Problem-Solving:  Students must identify and solve problems to improve their learning.
• Self-Management:  Students need to be able to manage their learning to be successful independent learners.
• Social and Cultural Awareness:  Students need to be aware of the influence of social and cultural factors on their learning.
• Technological Literacy:  Students must use technology effectively to access and create digital information.
• Flexibility and Adaptability:  Students need to be able to adapt their learning to new situations and technologies.
• Initiative and Self-Direction:  Students need to take the initiative and be self-directed in their learning to be successful.
• Productivity and Accountability:  They must be productive and take responsibility for their learning.
• Leadership:  The students must take the lead in their education and motivate others to join them in learning.
• Social Responsibility:  Students must be aware of how their learning affects those around them and be respectful of others while learning.
• Sustainability:  It is essential for students to be aware of the impact their learning can have on the environment and to be considerate of environmental sustainability when they are learning.
• Ethical Responsibility:  Students need to be aware of the ethical implications of their learning and consider ethical responsibility in their learning.
• Global Perspective:  It is essential for students to be aware of the global context of their learning and to be considerate of international perspectives in their learning.
• Cultural Competence:  It is vital for students to be aware of the influence of culture on their learning and to be competent in cross-cultural communication.
• Diversity:  Students need to be aware of the diversity of perspectives and experiences in the world and be respectful of diversity in their learning.

These are just some skills students need to learn in the 21st century. As the world changes, so do students’ skills to succeed. Educators must stay up-to-date on the latest research and trends to prepare their students for the future.

The Importance of 21st-Century Learning

Here are just a few of the reasons why 21st-century learning is so important:

1.  It helps students develop the skills they need for the real world.

In the 21st century, employers are looking for workers who are not only knowledgeable but also adaptable, creative, and able to work collaboratively. 21st-century learning helps students develop these essential skills.

2.  It prepares students for an increasingly globalized world.

In today’s world, it’s more important than ever for students to be able to communicate and work with people from other cultures. 21st-century learning helps students develop the global perspective they need to be successful in an increasingly connected world.

3.  It helps students learn how to learn.

In a world where information is constantly changing, students need to be able to learn new things quickly and effectively. 21st-century learning helps students develop the metacognitive skills they need to be lifelong learners.

4.  It helps students develop a love of learning.

21st-century learning is hands-on, interactive, and engaging. This helps students develop a love of learning that will stay with them throughout their lives.

5.  It’s more relevant to students’ lives.

21st-century learning is relevant to students’ lives and the world they live in. It’s not just about memorizing facts but about developing the skills, students need to be successful in their personal and professional lives.

The importance of 21st-century learning cannot be overstated. In a constantly changing world, it’s more important than ever for students to develop the skills they need to be successful.

The Challenges of 21st-Century Learning

In the 21st century, learning is becoming increasingly complex and challenging. With the rapid pace of change in the world, it is difficult for students to keep up with the latest information and skills. In addition, they must also be able to apply what they have learned to real-world situations.

The following are some of the challenges of 21st-century learning:

1.  The pace of change is accelerating.

In the past, knowledge and skills were acquired slowly over time. However, in the 21st century, the pace of change is much faster, meaning students must learn more quickly to keep up with the latest information.

2.  The world is becoming more complex.

As the world becomes more complex and interconnected, students must be able to understand and navigate complex systems. They must also be able to think critically and solve problems.

3.  Students must be able to apply what they have learned.

In the past, students were often tested on their ability to remember and regurgitate information. However, in the 21st century, students need to be able to apply what they have learned to real-world situations. This requires them to be creative and to think critically.

4.  There is a greater emphasis on collaboration.

In the 21st century, there is a greater emphasis on collaboration. This means that students must be able to work effectively with others to achieve common goals. They must also be able to communicate effectively.

5.  Technology is changing the way we learn.

Technology is changing the way students learn. With the advent of the internet and mobile devices, students can now access information and resources that were previously unavailable. This has changed how students learn and made it possible for students to learn anywhere and at any time.

6.  Learning is no longer just about acquiring knowledge.

In the 21st century, learning is about more than just acquiring knowledge; it is also about developing skills, values, and attitudes. This means that students must be able to learn how to learn and adapt to change and different situations.

The 21st century presents many challenges for learners. However, it also provides many opportunities. With the right approach, students can overcome these challenges and be successful in the 21st century.

How Educators Can Support 21st-Century learning

There are several ways in which educators can support 21st-century learning. 

First,  they can create learning experiences relevant to the real world.  This means incorporating problems and scenarios that students will likely encounter in their future lives and careers.

Second,  educators can use technology to support 21st-century learning.  Technology can be used to create engaging and interactive learning experiences, and it can also be used to provide students with access to information and resources that they would not otherwise have.

Finally,  educators can model 21st-century learning for their students.  This means being flexible and adaptable in their teaching and using technology and real-world examples to illustrate their points. By modeling 21st-century learning, educators can show their students that learning can be relevant, engaging, and fun.

In the 21st century, educators must be prepared to meet the challenges of an ever-changing world. By creating relevant learning experiences, using technology to support learning, and modeling 21st-century learning for their students, educators can provide students with the skills they need to be successful in the 21st century.

Final Thoughts

As educators, we must prepare our students for the 21st century. We can do this by providing opportunities for them to develop essential 21st-century skills. Project-based learning is one of the best ways to do this.

Ultimately, we must commit to giving our students the 21st-century learning they deserve. This way, they will have the tools they need to thrive in a constantly changing world. They will also have the skills they need to succeed in whatever they choose to do.

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

Llego, M. A. (2022, September 14). 21st-Century Learning: What It Is and Why It’s Important. TeacherPH. Retrieved September 14, 2022 from, https://www.teacherph.com/21st-century-learning/

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Mark Anthony Llego

Mark Anthony Llego, a visionary from the Philippines, founded TeacherPH in October 2014 with a mission to transform the educational landscape. His platform has empowered thousands of Filipino teachers, providing them with crucial resources and a space for meaningful idea exchange, ultimately enhancing their instructional and supervisory capabilities. TeacherPH's influence extends far beyond its origins. Mark's insightful articles on education have garnered international attention, featuring on respected U.S. educational websites. Moreover, his work has become a valuable reference for researchers, contributing to the academic discourse on education.

1 thought on “21st-Century Learning: What It Is and Why It’s Important”

so informative thank you for giving me the opportunity to read your manuscripts. Worth sharing.

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18th or Eighteenth? How to Write Centuries in Formal Writing

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• 6th May 2022

If you’re writing a research paper , marketing copy, or other professional document, you’ll want to know how to write dates and centuries correctly. Should you use numbers or words? Is it necessary to hyphenate or capitalize centuries? And, finally, just when did the 18th century take place? Read on for more!

Numbers Versus Words

There is no hard-and-fast rule about when to use numbers and when to use words in writing centuries, as long as you are clear and consistent. A guideline that is often adopted is that centuries after the tenth are represented using numerals (e.g., “16th century”), whereas earlier centuries are spelled out in words (e.g., “seventh century”); this is the rule that is followed by this blog post. If you’re using a style guide , however, it’s always worth checking its specifications.

When to Hyphenate Centuries

When centuries are used as adjective phrases preceding the nouns they modify, they are hyphenated:

It’s a 21st-century problem.

The ninth-century church is situated in the heart of the village.

However, when a century is used as a noun phrase , you should not use a hyphen:

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The 20th century was an era of technological innovation.

Napoleon invaded Russia in the 19th century .

This is consistent with genera hyphenation rules .

When to Capitalize Centuries

There’s a simple answer to this question: never! While you may come across the capitalization of centuries in writing (e.g., “12th Century”), it’s never correct, as “century” is simply a measure of time and not a proper noun .

How to Number Centuries

This is a slightly more confusing issue. Many people assume that the 18th century, for example, lasted from 1800 to 1899; the clue’s in the name, right? Wrong! The first century started in the year 1 A.D. and lasted until the year 100, so therefore, the second century lasted from 101 to 200. Therefore, the 18th century consists of the 1700s rather than the 1800s.

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Essay on Teaching In The 21St Century

Students are often asked to write an essay on Teaching In The 21St Century in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Teaching In The 21St Century

The digital age of learning.

In the 21st century, teaching has transformed dramatically due to the rise of technology. Classrooms are no longer confined to physical spaces; instead, they have expanded to include virtual platforms, making education accessible to learners worldwide.

Technology as a Teaching Tool

Technology has become an indispensable tool in modern classrooms. Interactive whiteboards, tablets, and laptops allow teachers to engage students with dynamic presentations, videos, and simulations. Online platforms facilitate collaboration, enabling students to work together on projects regardless of location.

Personalized Learning

With the aid of technology, teachers can tailor instruction to meet the unique needs of each student. Adaptive learning software tracks individual progress and adjusts the curriculum accordingly. This approach ensures that every student receives targeted support and has the opportunity to succeed.

Global Connectivity

The internet has broken down geographical barriers, allowing students to connect with peers from different cultures and backgrounds. Virtual exchange programs and online forums provide opportunities for students to learn about diverse perspectives and develop global awareness.

Lifelong Learning

The role of the teacher.

While technology has transformed teaching methods, the role of the teacher remains crucial. Teachers are no longer solely providers of information; instead, they are facilitators of learning. They guide students in navigating the vast ocean of information available online, helping them develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

Challenges and Opportunities

The integration of technology in education also presents challenges. Ensuring equitable access to technology and addressing the digital divide are ongoing concerns. Additionally, teachers must continuously adapt to new technologies and pedagogical approaches. However, these challenges also bring forth opportunities to create more engaging, personalized, and globally connected learning experiences.

Teaching in the 21st century is characterized by the transformative power of technology. Classrooms have evolved into dynamic digital spaces, providing students with personalized learning experiences, global connectivity, and lifelong learning opportunities. As technology continues to advance, teachers play a pivotal role in guiding students through this rapidly changing educational landscape.

250 Words Essay on Teaching In The 21St Century

Teaching in the 21st century: embracing innovation and technology.

The 21st century has brought about profound changes in teaching and learning. Educators have witnessed a transition from traditional chalk-and-talk methods to a more dynamic and student-centered approach to education. In this modern era, teachers have embraced innovation and technology, recognizing their transformative potential in shaping the minds of young learners.

Technology as a Catalyst for Learning

Blended learning: a fusion of modalities, empowering students through personalized learning.

In the 21st century, teaching has undergone a shift from a one-size-fits-all approach to personalized learning. Teachers utilize data-driven insights to tailor instruction to each student’s needs, interests, and learning styles. By identifying learning gaps and strengths, educators can provide targeted support and create differentiated learning pathways. This personalized approach ensures that all students have the opportunity to thrive and reach their full potential.

Fostering Collaboration and Communication

The 21st century teaching emphasizes collaboration and communication skills, preparing students for a globalized and interconnected world. Teachers encourage students to work together on projects, engage in peer-to-peer learning, and participate in discussions. These opportunities develop teamwork, problem-solving abilities, and effective communication skills, which are highly valued in the modern workplace.

500 Words Essay on Teaching In The 21St Century

Teaching in the 21st century.

Teaching methods have undergone a profound transformation in the 21st century, driven by technological advancements, globalization, and changing student demographics. In this modern era, effective teaching embraces a dynamic and engaging approach that empowers students to thrive in a rapidly evolving world.

Technology-Enabled Learning

The integration of technology has revolutionized the teaching and learning landscape. Interactive whiteboards, tablets, and laptops have become essential tools in classrooms, allowing for multimedia presentations, online research, and collaborative projects. Virtual learning platforms facilitate blended learning, where students access digital resources and engage in online discussions, enhancing their learning experience beyond the physical classroom.

Student-Centered Approach

Global citizenship and cultural awareness.

Globalization has made it essential for students to develop a global mindset and an appreciation for diverse cultures. Teachers incorporate global issues and perspectives into their lessons, helping students understand the interconnectedness of the world and the importance of empathy and understanding. They also encourage students to learn foreign languages, which opens doors to new opportunities and enhances intercultural communication.

Entrepreneurial Thinking and Innovation

In a rapidly changing job market, students need to be equipped with entrepreneurial skills and a mindset that embraces innovation. Teachers foster creativity and encourage students to think outside the box. Project-based learning, where students work on real-world problems, helps them develop problem-solving skills and the ability to collaborate effectively. Encouraging students to embrace failure as a learning opportunity builds resilience and promotes a growth mindset.

Lifelong Learning and Adaptability

In conclusion, teaching in the 21st century is about preparing students for success in a dynamic and interconnected world. By embracing technology, adopting a student-centered approach, promoting global citizenship, fostering entrepreneurial thinking, and nurturing lifelong learning, teachers empower students to become active, informed, and responsible members of society.

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21st Century Communication Technology Essay

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The changing communication technology and the presence of the internet have greatly impacted the way firms conduct business. It is now possible to conduct business using resources that are virtual in nature while still earning a reasonable revenue of profit and revenue from the operations with minimal investments. The communications technology has dramatically changed the way people in a company interact and communicate with each other for business as well as personal purposes.

The most common forms of technology that have been used over the period of time for communication in a company pertain to face to face communication, memos, letters, bulletin boards as well as financial reports. The selection of type of media is based on the purpose of the communication and the audience being targeted. Face to face communication is personal in nature and an immediate form of communication where a two way flow of ideas is possible.

On the other hand, communication media like bulletin boards and financial reports are drawn up for a certain audience targeting mass reach. In the 21st century however it is now possible to conduct business and communicate with the employees using innovative technologies like email, SMS, video conferencing and hand held devices like PDA’s and BlackBerry (Lengel & Daft, 1988) The use of this technology can also help the company increase two way communication in the management making way for an efficient flow of ideas. Strategic implementation of the media can help in connecting with the lower management and performing any conflict resolution that would otherwise go untreated leading to increase in employee dissatisfaction (‘Whispering Class Must Be Heard’, 2008)

A firm that works on the tax returns for clients needs to communicate with the clients and their staff in an efficient and immediate manner for resolving any issues that may come up during the drawing of papers and the pre[parathion of tax returns. In this regard it is beneficial for the fri9mtomake use of modern communication technology for communicating with their clients and their staff. The firm can make use of SMS to communicate with their staff and inform of any urgent meetings to them.

The SMS option can also be used to inform the clients about any sudden change in plans or to schedule a meeting with them where direct communication at the moment is not possible. Aside from this Email is a option that can be employed to provide the clients with updates in their tax returns and inform of any discrepancies and issues that may come up. The staff can also be delegated work and kept in the work loop using detailed emails with attachments for tax return evidence etc.

The video conferencing option can be used to establish a communication link between the client and the staff working on the tax returns for face to face meetings where a direct face to face meeting is not possible due to geographic or time constraints.

While the modern communication media can be expensive to acquire and use in the firm, it is important to note as well, that its use and implementation can help the firm attain competitive advantage in operations through greater efficiency and increased personal services that it can offer to its customers. The 21st century communication media can be used to strategically motivate and reward the employees where instead of providing them with cash bonus or raise, a BlackBerry or an iPod can be provided. (‘Rewarding a Job Well Done’, 2008) This helps increase the motivation of the employees with returns that are substantial in nature and can be used for business purposes as well.

‘Rewarding a Job Well Done’, LW , 2008.

‘Whispering Class Must Be Heard’, 2008.

Lengel, R.H., Daft, R.L., ‘The Selection of Communication Media as an Executive Skill’, Academy of Management Executive , 1998, 2, no. 3, pp. 225-32.

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Writing-Related Software Tutorials

How to Write Centuries as Words and Numerals

By Erin Wright

Are Centuries Spelled Out or Written as Numerals?

The Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago style) and the Modern Language Association’s MLA Handbook (MLA style) recommend writing centuries as lowercased words: 1

During the ninth century , Vikings established permanent settlements in Ireland.

The first electric automobile was created in the early nineteenth century .

What will be the most important technological advance of the twenty-first century ?

The Associated Press Stylebook (AP style) offers two recommendations based on number value: (1) single-digit centuries should be written as lowercased words and (2) double-digit centuries should be written as numerals: 2

The Roman Empire fell in the fifth century .

Rock and roll music was invented in the 20th century .

The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA style) is silent on this issue; however, we can reasonably assume that the APA’s recommendation for general numbers, which states that numbers ten and above should be expressed as numerals unless they start a sentence, also applies to centuries. 3

Pro Tip: If your organization doesn’t follow a specific style guide or in-house guide , I strongly encourage you to use The Chicago Manual of Style for general business and formal writing. Chicago is also the industry standard for nonfiction and fiction books (although specific publishers may follow other guides).

Regardless of the style guide that you follow, ensure that your chosen style for writing centuries is consistent throughout your document.

Are Centuries Hyphenated When Used as Adjectives?

Centuries follow traditional hyphenation rules for adjectives unless otherwise stated in your style guide or in-house guide. Here are a few examples based on the recommendations mentioned above: 4

Antique Roadshow frequently features nineteenth- and twentieth-century furniture.

Antique Roadshow frequently features 19th- and 20th-century furniture.

This twenty-first-century technology will be obsolete in the twenty-second century.

This 21st-century technology will be obsolete in the 22nd century.

Enjoy more timely writing advice in these related posts:

• How to Write Decades as Words and Numerals
• When Should You Capitalize Historical Time Periods?
• When to Hyphenate Numbers with Units of Time

‎1. MLA Handbook , 8th ed. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2016), 1.5; The Chicago Manual of Style , 17th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 9.32.

2. The Associated Press Stylebook 2020–2022 (New York: Associated Press, 2020), 48.

3. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association , 7th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2020), 6.32.

4. The Associated Press Stylebook 2020–2022 (New York: Associated Press, 2020), 340–42; The Chicago Manual of Style , 17th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 7.89.

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Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

A collection of new essays by an interdisciplinary team of authors that gives a comprehensive introduction to race and ethnicity. Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe. Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are , but rather sets of actions that people do . Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a “post-race” world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

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Essay on “India in 21 Century” Complete Essay for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

India in 21 Century

4 Best Essays on “India in 21st Century” 

Essay No. 01

The twentieth century is about to come to its end. We are making preparations for the 21 st century which is expected to come after one year. Now it is the right time to think what will be the position of India in the 21 st century.

We presume that India will surely occupy an important position in the world in the new century. The world will recognize her as the leader or torch-bearer of Asia.

Every country in the world will try to have friendly relations with India. She will have good relations with our neighbouring countries.  Indo- Pak relations will improve and there will be free trade and communication between these two countries. India and China will succeed in settling their border disputes in the coming century and both will have very good relations with each other. The new century will see India and Sri Lanka as good friends. In the same way, India’s relation with Nepal, Bhutan, and Burma will improve considerably.

In the economic field, the country will make great progress, in the 21 st century. The standard of living of all persons will rise. India will become a big exporting country in the coming century. She will not stand in the need of taking loans from the world bank. The country will be able to put a check upon the rising prices of all necessary commodities. The country will make great progress in industry and agriculture will be modernized.

In the scientific field, India will become the most advanced country in Asia. In making inventions she will leave Japan behind. She will not stand in the need of borrowing technology from any country of the world. She will make wonderful progress in space technology. she will launch more rockets in the 21 st century from her own launch complex.

She will also make great progress in the cultural field. She will patronize her national culture in music, dancing, painting, and sculpture. The artists of the country will win a great name in the international exhibitions of art.

In the 21 st century, India will be in the front in the educational field. She will overhaul her present system of education. Technical and vocational training will become an integral part of the education of the youth of the country. There will be no educated unemployment in India in the coming century. This will be possible on account of the change in her educational policy. The county will be free from illiteracy.

In the social field, India will get rid of many social customs in the 21 st century. The Dowry system will be put to an end. There will no trouble for our women. Nobody will pour kerosene oil on her body to put an end to her life.  

Essay No. 02

India in the twenty-first century

According to the Hindu Calendar and Vikram Samvat, we are already in the middle of the twenty-first century. But according to Christian Era, the twenty-first century is a decade away. Time is eternal and a ceaseless flow that does not admit any break or division. It is for our convenience that we have divided time into periods like years, decades, centuries, etc. It is not easy to imagine what would be the shape of things and life to come in the next century. However, it is exciting to think about India which would be after a couple of decades. We may just guess from what has already happened and from what is happening about things to come at the turn of the century. It is a kind of speculation to guess what would be there in India after the present century.

To imagine the coming century we have to see what has happened in the present century during the past three-four decades. In these years many fundamental changes have taken place as a result of rapid and radical advancement in the field of science and technology. We have harnessed atomic energy, space and time have been conquered to some extent. With the help of supersonic aeroplanes, the barrier of sound has been crossed, and now we can travel at tremendous speed. The increasing use of computers has revolutionized our life. In the field of entertainment television and audio systems have transformed life completely. Man has landed on the moon and space labs have become a reality. People have become better aware as regards family planning and welfare, and are accepting the norm of small families. Many of the diseases, previously regarded as fatal, have now been controlled and eradicated. But diseases like cancer and AIDS have posed a new challenge.

In the coming century life in India would become more automatic, mechanical and computerized. Man will become more materialistic, comfort-loving and dependent upon machines. Many things would be computer-controlled. Students in India would depend on computers even for simple arithmetic problems. Housewives will have more leisure and spare time because of the computerization of the home and the hearth. The twenty-first century would be virtually a century of computers in India as well as in other countries.

There would be greater industrial and technological development in India in the coming century. As a result, there would be more and more luxury items and consumer durables. There would be no shortage of consumer goods and food items. The farm technology would be further improved and food production would increase in spite of the increase in the population. In the next century

India’s population may surpass that of China. There would be marked improvement in the living standards of the people in general. They would become comparatively better off than they are at present. India is deeply religious. There are many faiths and religions in India. It is a secular country. India would remain secular in the spirit in the next century but the faith of the majority community would prevail over others. As a result of this, the bonds of nationalism and patriotism would be further strengthened. The problems of casteism, regionalism, and communalism would be solved giving rise to better discipline and progress. India would emerge as a world power in terms of economy, industry and military strength. In politics there exist at all. The public would be far more politically and. parties would not be only national parties and regional socially enlightened. The masses would exercise their right to vote with great care and would favor only those parties and candidates who do not indulge in corrupt and undesirable practices. The irresponsible form of politics would have no place at all. Then there would be greater awareness among the people about our rich and ancient culture and heritage. People would be proud of being Indians in the real sense of the term and pseudo-patriots would be exposed and suitably punished. There would be more cohesiveness, unity and integrity than now in the coming century. There would prevail one uniform civil code for all classes and communities.

In the field of education, much of the system would be computerized. Distance education would become more popular, and there would be hardly any illiteracy. The T.V. shall play a more important and bigger role in the spread of education. By means of the latest electronic devices, education will reach the door-steps of most people. People will not be required to reach distant universities and institutions of learning. The medium of instruction would be Hindi or the mother tongue of a student at the school level. English, would remain but would lose much of its present importance. The percentage of failure would be reduced to a great extent and education would be more realistic and work and job-oriented. Because of the increase in general awareness among the people and better economic conditions, exploitation, particularly of weaker sections like women, children, village folk, etc., would decrease to a great extent. The caste barriers would be further removed and there would\ be frequent inter-caste and inter-community marriages. Sex education in schools and colleges would become a routine and an accepted thing. There would be more accepting of free sex, and liberal views would prevail in the matters of marriage, sex, love, and family life. But with the increase in automation, industrialization, and materialism, bonds of the family would be further loosened. The population of the senior citizens and the aged people would increase tremendously. It would create many new problems. The environs of the big cities like Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, Bangalore, Madras, etc., would be so polluted that people would have to wear oxygen masks regularly. To solve the crisis of energy, we will have to depend more and more on solar and atomic energy. The conventional sources of energy would be more or less exhausted. Space travel would become common as air travel is today among rich people. Recycling waste products would become a necessity in India of the next century.

There are thousands of things that cannot be visualized at this point in time. Only the coming decades would show the exact shape of things to come. We can just make arguments in broad terms, on the basis of present scientific, technological, social and political developments, about the condition that would prevail in India after 20, 30 or more years.

Essay No. 03

India in The 21st Century

We have stepped into a new century. Talking about the future is always exciting. Man wants to peep into the future to find out what is in store for him and his fellow beings. Man’s curiosity to know about the future and the shape of things and events to come has given rise to such subjects as astronomy, astrology, and palmistry, etc., which try to predict the events to come.

Now, what would be the future of India in the coming years of this century. Can we project and predict the future of India as a nation with some certainty and precision? Are we in a position to predict the conditions that are likely to prevail in future? How would the country look like, say after a decade? These are really very crucial questions. Should we expect a brave new world, full of peace, prosperity, hope, dynamism and health or a world congested, overpopulated, and full of despair, selfishness, polluted and dominated by narrow, parochial and self-seeking politicians? Perhaps, we cannot answer these questions with the desired precision, accuracy and exactness. However, the subject is really thrilling, exciting and interesting. There is no harm in making a guess about the shape of events and things in the coming years.

Our late Prime Minister, Mr Rajiv Gandhi. often talked of taking India into the 21st century. He was very optimistic and enthusiastic about the future of India and his faith and optimism were quite well-founded. But, unfortunately, he was not destined to lead the country into the new century. He wanted to shape the destiny of India but did not know about his own tragic and untimely end. It sounds ironical, but in no way does it lessen his faith, hope, optimism and dynamism about the future of the country. Physically he is no more with us but his ideals, optimism, faith, enthusiasm and dynamism are with us. He symbolised the country’s youth and bright future and continues to live in the form of young men and women • of India. What is important is the spirit and it never dies.

Judging from the winds of change sweeping across, a fair and some sure future image of the country can easily be formed. In order to imagine the future image of the country, it is essential that we review the major trends, events and happenings in the past few decades, because future projections cannot be made correctly by ignoring present events and past happenings. The past, the present and the future present a logical time-sequence. They are like links of the same chain.

As a result of rapid and radical advancement in the fields of science, technology, medicine, and agriculture, many changes of far-reaching significance have taken place during the last two to three decades. Atomic energy has been harnessed and space and time have been conquered to some extent. With the help of supersonic aeroplanes, the barrier of sound has been crossed, and now we can travel at tremendous speeds. People and countries have come closer in terms of time and distance and the world looks like one big country, marked by pleasant diversities. Man has landed on the moon, and space laboratories have become a reality. The ominous clouds of the Cold War, threatening world peace and harmony, have receded. The wide use of computers and super-computers has revolutionised our life. In the field of entertainment, television and audio systems have transformed life completely. People have become better aware of issues like family planning, child and woman-welfare and have begun to accept the norm of a small, planned family. General awareness about ecology and the environment is also on the increase. Many diseases, previously regarded as fatal, have now been controlled and eradicated, but diseases like cancer and AIDS have raised their ugly and deadly heads. On the basis of these developments, we look forward to a promising new era, with occasional gloom and despair.

In the coming years and decades, life in India will certainly be more convenient, comfortable and easy but real happiness and contentment will be more scarce. With the increased use of modern gadgets and devices, working, learning, communication and transportation will become easier, quicker, more comprehensive, and less time-consuming. Man will become more and more materialistic, comfort-loving and competitive. Religion will be further pushed into the background and many of the present-day superstitions will be eliminated. People will have more leisure and spare time and so traveling and sightseeing will become more popular. The coming years will bring greater industrial, economical, scientific and technological developments and India will be one of the leading lights in these areas. Consumerism will have rapid growth and there will be many more new luxury items and consumer durables.

Many items, which are now considered a luxury, will not be so then as they will become ordinary things of daily domestic use. Farm technology will be further improved and food production will increase. Consequently, there will be no shortage of food items, edible oils, vegetables and dairy products. Thus, there will be a marked improvement in the living standards of the people in general. They will be comparatively better off than they are at present. Many of the present towns will change into big cities and centres of trade and business.

As far as our population is concerned, it will perhaps surpass that of China in the coming years. At present, our population is over one billion, approximately one-sixth of the world population. Consequently, there will be pressure on our land, water and power resources. Housing and shelter will remain a serious problem. By the year 2020, metropolitan cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai will become huge urban excrescence as a major portion of each of them will be covered by jhuggis and slums for want of adequate housing facilities. A few decades hence, India will emerge as a more powerful, strong, united and leading nation and, as such, will play a far more deciding and vital role in international affairs, especially in those of the U.N. and other world bodies. In the coming decades, secularism will prevail and people will become more tolerant, appreciative and broad-minded to one another’s religious faiths and way of living. In the matter of marriage, sex and love, there will be an increased liberal outlook and the gap between the two sexes will be further bridged. There will be more frequent cases of separation and divorce. The size of the family will be further reduced and the number of the old and the aged will rise rapidly. In the same proportion, the population of the children will decrease.

Secularism apart, India will remain religious at heart but much of religious observations and formalities will be causalities. The faith of the people will lead to further strengthening of the bonds of nationalism, national integration and unity. The problems of casteism, regionalism and communalism will be solved to a great extent, giving rise to better discipline, progress and a sense of patriotism. Gradually, the regional parties will be erased from the political scene of the country. The public will be more enlightened and aware about their-political and social lights and duties and will exercise far more diligence in the exercise of their votes. People will be proud of being Indians in the real sense of the term and pseudo-patriots along with political gurus, will be exposed. In the coming decades, there will be more cohesiveness, uniformity, unity and integrity than now. The country may even have one civil code for all classes and communities in respect of marriage, etc.

These are some of the broad and rough outlines of the future. On the basis of scientific, technological, social, political and world developments that have taken place in the past, we can only guess. Finer details about what may happen can be left for the future. The 21st century in itself is a very big period and the changes that will take place during these long years will be far more radical, fast, astonishing and unpredictable than those of the last century. Thus, only the coming decades will show the exact shape of things and events to come. There are thousands of things and possibilities which cannot be visualized at this point of time. One thing is certain. The future of our country is bright, hopeful, assuring and such as would inspire confidence, faith and optimism. But we must exert our best to make it doubly sure. Let us resolve to march ahead into the 21st century with confidence, fortitude, hope, courage and determination to face the new challenges of the new century. India as a nation has vast human and material resources at its command to scale new heights and establish new records in space technology, computer science, exploitation of non-conventional energy, the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes, genetic engineering, bio-technology, micro-electronics and a host of other related fields of human activity.

Essay No. 04

It would be nice for us if we stopped daydreaming and expecting the India of the 21st Century to be very much better than what it is at the end of the 20th Century. The trend that is obviously visible in all walks of life is neither very encouraging nor very full of hope.

Now let us study threadbare the possibilities in most of the important spheres. Politically the 1998 government has completed its full term. Bus as expected the corrupt brand of policies is still visible. We may not expect a bright future till the corrupt brand of a politician be a finished product though it has toward it some extent.

More than that is not possible in less than ten years because the damage done in fifty years cannot be done away within a magical moment. The trend may be that the new politicians may learn some lessons from the fate of their unruly powerful predecessors and improve their brand. The young politicians may start from good beginnings realizing that, evil, corruption, nepotism cannot last for long, and this feeling will give them the jitters, and they may never indulge in the dirt of politics. Besides the politician, the electorate may also use its own thinking power for this, the trend has become obvious.

The electorate has become aware and alert regarding the misuse of power by the politician and they may never tolerate it in the future. Regarding the multi-party system that has surfaced in India, I suspect that by the first decade of the 21st Century only, this system may be thrown to the winds, and the viability of a multiparty system in India may be scrapped, and a distinct bi-party system may emerge. A multi-party system in a place like India is an experiment in futility, this fact will be soon realized, as the stock of our politicians is the ones to adapt and adjust.

Every individual politician wants his piece of cake and is least bothered for the country he has promised to serve. Since this is the situation on the ground, by the first decade of the 21st Century only, I personally feel that a clear bi-party system could emerge, after some experiments in the adventure of multi-party Governments.

The administration of the Government offices may also be functioning better by the early years of the next Century as the corrupt and anti-work lobby by then may have brought India’s administration to a grinding halt. With the new Government has taken the reins at the end of the 20th Century it may be the lessons of the past, help them to tone up the administration, and help it come out of the woods. The Government may become very efficient and fast and prompt as the sluggish working of previous administrations have got the public come to a point of breakdown and revolt. To uplift the mood of the depressed public, the Government may set for itself a new and strict code for conducting itself, and if this is done, India will be having a wonderful administration

In trade, the 21st Century will certainly see the growth of International trade, and there will also be ample encouragement for our local cottage industries. This will see a positive rise in Indian business and culture. With our national economy taking strides ahead, I can hope that the gap between the Haves and Have Nots in India will be reduced and we may see less poverty in the country.

Socially the 21st Century will be either more depressing than the 20th has been or, if the social attitudes take a somersault, we may once again become a socially homogeneous country. In the 20th Century, the onslaught of Western culture in our society has been well nigh complete, and heartbreaking. Our beautiful family has given way under pressures of western studies, our dresses have become vulgar, our choice of art has been shaped by western choices, in short, and I’d say the murder of Indian society has been complete. Regarding this aspect, the 21st Century has two possibilities, one is, further increase in Westernization in thought and action, in art and culture. The second chance is that realizing the drawbacks and the impact of Westernization, the 21st Century society may come back to our own original Indian social norms. These two chances are visible on the Indian social horizon let’s see what is in store.

The knowledge of Science and Technology will go up in leaps and bounds and I am sure we will not be very far behind any of the progressed countries. We may be the ones to teach the world how to use nuclear science for the benefit of mankind.

After having seen the 20th Century observing the total decline of moral values, the 21st Century may witness a rise or rather the comeback of morality in India. The vagaries of the lack of morality have made the Indians suffer so much, in every sphere that, in the 21st Century they may realize that lack of morality and character have been the real bane of India’s fortunes. If people really start thinking in this direction it could be that the 21st Century ushers in for India a period of high moral standards of individual characters. If this happens India would have learned its lessons of the 20th Century.

With a possible revival of morality and character among Indians, the 21st Century may bring for India its golden period of growth and development. If we scrutinize carefully the drawbacks of the 20th Century, all of the coil down to a basic lack of character. So, if this great quality comes back to us we surely have a century of successes ahead.

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Rights of Nature: a 21st century legal revolution

Anthropocentrism is one of the most destructive ideas in human history. The notion that humans are separate from nature and that nature is a dead resource merely to be used for human ends is at the root of many of the crises now engulfing the world, from climate change, deforestation, catastrophic declines in biodiversity and many more. Sadly, English lawyers had a big hand in imbuing this idea within our both the common law legal system and in our dominant worldview.

Drawing on the biblical injunction of human dominion over nature in Genessis, Blackstone in his Commentaries states, “The Earth therefore and all things therein, are the general property of all mankind, exclusive of other beings from the immediate gift of the creator”. This ‘despotic dominion’ view of human ownership of nature is sadly one of the most entrenched principles in the common law and it has been exported around the world under the auspices of common law legal theory and governance, causing immense harm and damage.

Rights of Nature

It is an urgent necessity for humanity to begin to see nature as more than merely something to be extracted from or dumped into. Instead, we must begin to see it as a living system with its own rights and interests and to incorporate that idea into our legal, political, economic and social systems. How do we begin to deal with a problem so all-encompassing? Environmental law has clearly shown itself to be insufficient for the task, approaching the problem as it does from the same theory that nature is a resource to be used for human ends, but with some management of that resource. What we need is an idea that goes to the route of the problem: both the philosophical and jurisprudential underpinning of the law. In the last 20 years, the ecosystem of interventions we need to implement that idea have begun to be formed around the world, being given the title of ‘Rights of Nature’.

One of the most well-known instances of substantive Rights of Nature is in Ecuador, with Article 71 of the Ecuadorean Constitution stating:

“Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.”

What is perhaps most exciting about the example of Ecuador is that it is not merely a high-sounding constitutional principle with little practical effect. These Rights of Nature provisions have been argued, and upheld, in dozens of cases before the Ecuadorian courts, most famously in the Los Cedros case, where the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court cancelled mining licences that would have destroyed an ecologically rich cloud forest and thus infringe its constitutional rights. 

Translating into a UK context

Although such substantive Rights of Nature provisions show that the doctrine is legally possible, they will clearly need translating to a UK constitutional context. This is where barristers could have an important role in drawing the substantive Rights of Nature for a UK context and shaping an Act of Parliament. This could look like a Human Rights Act-style framework for nature, which embeds the Rights of Nature across all of our laws, with reasonable and proportionality tests reflecting the fact that balancing the interests of humans and nature will be of greater importance in industrialised, highly populated countries like the UK.

Legal personhood

Another key aspect of Rights of Nature is legal personhood. It is perhaps a testimony to the ingenuity of English lawyers that we managed to devise legal rights and legal personhood for completely fictitious entities like companies before natural entities like trees and rivers which existed long before humans even came to these islands and which we fundamentally rely on for our own existence.

Giving legal personality to trees or rivers might sound strange at first, but it is already a legal reality including in Europe, where the Mar Menor was granted rights and legal personhood by way of legislation in 2022, after a citizens referendum. Perhaps most interesting, given the similarity of the New Zealand legal system to our own, is the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017. In this Act, the New Zealand Parliament recognised the sacredness of the Whanganui River to Māori people and granted the river legal personhood, self-ownership and a guardianship body to represent the interests of the river and uphold its rights.

It is increasingly clear that the nature rights may well be to the 21 st century what human rights were to the 20 th century and we now have many examples from around the world about what Rights of Nature can look like. We now need the ingenuity of English lawyers to translate these ideas into our legal system in order halt the destruction of nature and create a new legal system designed to protect and enrich the natural world and all life.

Watch the 21st Annual Law Reform Lecture: Reimagining law for the Earth

Read barrister Fiona Peterson's 'Reflections on the Law Reform Lecture'