essay writing about 21st century

The Editor’s Manual

Free learning resource on English grammar, punctuation, usage, and style.

How to Write the Century

Write centuries in either numerals or words. Names of specific centuries are spelled out in some styles and written in figures in others. Single-digit centuries are generally spelled out.

• the nineteenth century or the 19th century
• the sixth century

Don’t set the letters denoting ordinals in superscript.

• the 21st century, not the 21 st century

An apostrophe before the s in names of centuries is unnecessary, but not incorrect.

• the 1600s or the 1600’s

Avoid capitalizing names of centuries.

• the twentieth century, not the Twentieth century

What years make a century?

A century is a period of 100 years . A specific century begins with year 01: the twentieth century began in 1901 and ended at the end of the year 2000, the twenty-first century began in 2001, and so on. Centuries may be written in various styles : in numerals , words, or a combination of both, and with an apostrophe or without.

• Medical science progressed by gigantic leaps and bounds in the twentieth century .
• The 1800s saw the advent of globalization.
• Anita has written a paper on maritime trade in the 1600’s .
• One of the great discoveries of the 21st century has been the existence of gravitational waves.

The first century ran from year 1 to year 100, so each new century begins from a year ending in 01. Thus, the twenty-first century officially began on January 1, 2001. However, in popular usage, a new century is often thought to begin in the year the digits change—for example, when the year changed from 19 99 to 20 00.

Use of BC, AD, BCE, and CE

The abbreviations BCE (“before the Common Era”) and CE (“of the Common Era) or BC (“before Christ”) and AD ( anno Domini ) to denote the era may be used with centuries, though they are more often used to show the exact year. No comma is needed before the abbreviation. The abbreviations themselves generally don’t contain periods .

• In the 13th century AD , Genghis Khan began his conquest of the world.
• Alexander the Great lived and died in the fourth century BCE .

BCE and CE are alternatives to BC and AD. The two systems are numerically equivalent.

1800s or 19th century ?

Both forms of usage are correct: “the 1800s” and “the 19th (or nineteenth) century.” Since the years of the nineteenth century begin with the numerals “18,” it is also called the “1800s” (pronounced eighteen hundreds ). No apostrophe is necessary before the s .

• The 1800s was a time of industrialization. or The 19th century was a time of industrialization.
• The Renaissance began in Italy in the 1300s . or The Renaissance began in Italy in the fourteenth century .

Centuries written in numerals—e.g., “the 1600s”—may be either singular or plural ( the 1600s was or were ), depending on context and preference.

Terms like “1900s” and “2000s” can also mean the first decade of a century (e.g., 2000s, 2010s, 2020s). Context usually makes it clear whether you are referring to the century or the decade. If confusion is possible, prefer to clarify: “the 20th century,” instead of “the 1900s.”

Use of apostrophe

An apostrophe before the s in the name of a century is unnecessary (though not incorrect) and generally omitted in formal writing.

• The 1600s marked the end of the Middle Ages in Europe. 1600’s is not incorrect but unnecessary.
• The 1700s saw a revival of literature in England.
• Industrialization in the 1800s affected different regions of the world differently.

Most style guides, like the AP Stylebook , the Chicago Manual of Style , and the APA Publication Manual , advise against using an apostrophe in plural words, except when not using one would cause confusion.

Words vs. numerals

Centuries may be written in either words or numerals. Note however that in formal writing, single-digit centuries (e.g., the ninth century) are generally spelled out instead of being written in figures. Double-digit centuries may be written either way (e.g., the 21st or the twenty-first century).

• Just like us, people of the seventh century believed they lived in modern times.
• Since the 19th/nineteenth century , humans have relied on science to extend their life spans.

Always use words instead of numerals for names of centuries at the start of a sentence. (Numerals are generally not used to begin a sentence.)

• Poor: 17th-century playwrights like Shakespeare and Beaumont are still studied in schools. Better: Seventeenth-century playwrights like Shakespeare and Beaumont are still studied in schools.

Chicago vs. AP style

The Chicago Manual of Style suggests spelling out the number denoting the century, while the AP Stylebook recommends words for numbers up to 10 , and numerals thereafter.

• Chicago: The twentieth century ushered in the digital age. AP: The 20th century ushered in the digital age. For two-digit centuries, use words in Chicago style but numerals in AP style.
• Chicago, AP: Her paper discusses the role of doctors as diplomats in the sixth century AD. Spell out single-digit centuries in both Chicago and AP styles.

Style guides differ in their recommendations on whether to use numerals or words for the name of a century. Wikipedia , for instance, uses numerals for all centuries.

Whether to use numerals or words is a matter of style rather than grammar. Which style you use can depend on your field of study or the style manual followed by your university or publication. Make sure to follow a consistent style throughout your document. As an editor , respect the writer’s preference.

Superscript for ordinal numbers

Since centuries occur in chronological sequence, they are written as ordinal numbers. When using numerals, avoid using superscript for letters that denote the ordinal ( st , nd , rd , th ).

• Poor: Because of mass vaccination programs, child mortality rates fell significantly in the 20 th century. Better: Because of mass vaccination programs, child mortality rates fell significantly in the 20th century.
• Poor: This book discusses issues of privacy in the 21 st century. Better: This book discusses issues of privacy in the 21st century.

Most style guides recommend against using superscript for ordinal numbers, since it can affect readability across fonts and typefaces.

Use of hyphen

Use a hyphen to show two-digit numbers in names of centuries from the twenty-first century onward.

Hyphenate two-digit numbers for clarity ( ninety-nine cupcakes , one hundred seventy-five muffins ).

Don’t unnecessarily place a hyphen between the number and the word century .

• Incorrect: the twenty-first-century Correct: the twenty-first century

Capitalization

Don’t capitalize the names of centuries, unless part of a proper noun or a title .

• Incorrect: Her new historical novel is set in the Eighteenth century. Correct: Her new historical novel is set in the eighteenth century.
• Incorrect: The East India Company was involved in the slave trade of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries . Correct: The East India Company was involved in the slave trade of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries .

Of course, in proper nouns , capitalize as needed.

• Twentieth Century Fox

Also capitalize major words in book titles.

• The Nineteenth-Century Guide to Baking

Two or more centuries: Singular or plural?

When referring to two or more centuries together, use the plural word centuries if the names of the centuries are joined by and or through . Use the singular word century if they are joined by to or or .

• The 17th, 18th , and 19th centuries shaped the postcolonial world of the 20th century.
• The medieval period lasted from the fifth through fifteenth centuries in Europe.
• Renaissance art of the 14th to the 16th century marks a clear break from medieval values.
• Did Jane Austen live and write in the 18th or the 19th century ?

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Names of centuries may be written in either numerals or words.

Omit the apostrophe before the s in names of centuries (like “the 1400s”) in formal texts.

Hyphenate two-digit numbers in names of centuries.

Don’t capitalize the names of centuries.

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• Writing Tips

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

• 2-minute read
• 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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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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Essay on Life In 21st Century

Students are often asked to write an essay on Life In 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 Life In 21st Century

Introduction.

Life in the 21st century is marked by rapid changes and advancements. It’s a time of technology, innovation, and global connections. We have seen improvements in many areas, from communication to healthcare.

The 21st century is known as the digital age. We use smartphones, laptops, and the internet daily. These tools have changed how we work, learn, and connect with others. They offer convenience and open up new opportunities.

Globalization

Our world has become a global village. We can communicate with people from different cultures and backgrounds. This has increased our understanding and appreciation of diversity.

Advancements in healthcare have improved our lives. New treatments and medicines have been developed. Diseases that were once deadly can now be cured or managed.

Despite these advancements, the 21st century also presents challenges. Issues like climate change, inequality, and cyber threats require our attention and action.

Life in the 21st century is exciting but also challenging. We must use the advancements wisely and work together to overcome the challenges.

250 Words Essay on Life In 21st Century

The 21st century lifestyle.

The 21st century is a time of rapid change and progress. We live in a world where technology is at our fingertips, making our lives easier and more comfortable.

Technology and Communication

One of the most significant changes in the 21st century is the advancement in technology. Today, we can communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world, in just a few seconds. Smartphones, the internet, and social media platforms have transformed the way we interact.

Education and Learning

Education has also seen a massive transformation. Online learning is now a reality, allowing students to learn at their own pace from anywhere. This has made education more accessible to everyone, regardless of their location or circumstances.

Health and Medicine

The field of health and medicine has also evolved. New treatments and medicines have been developed, increasing the average lifespan. People are now more aware of their health and are taking steps to lead healthier lives.

Challenges of the 21st Century

Despite all these advancements, the 21st century also brings new challenges. Environmental issues like pollution and climate change are major concerns. There is also a growing gap between the rich and the poor, leading to social problems.

In conclusion, life in the 21st century is a mix of advancements and challenges. We have the tools to make our lives better, but we also have the responsibility to use them wisely for the benefit of all.

500 Words Essay on Life In 21st Century

Life in the 21st century is full of excitement and challenges. It is a time of rapid change and amazing progress. We live in an era where technology has become a key part of our lives.

One of the most important parts of life in the 21st century is technology. It has made our lives easier in many ways. We can now talk to friends and family who live far away by using our phones or computers. We can also use the internet to learn new things and find information quickly. But, it’s important to remember that too much screen time can be bad for our health. We need to balance our use of technology with other activities.

Education has also changed a lot in the 21st century. Now, not only do we learn in classrooms, but we also have the option to learn online. This has made education more accessible to everyone. We can learn from the best teachers and experts from all over the world without leaving our homes.

Health and Lifestyle

Life in the 21st century is also different because of changes in our health and lifestyle. We now know more about how to take care of our bodies. We understand the importance of eating healthy food and exercising regularly. But, the busy pace of life can make it hard to find time for these things.

Environment

One of the biggest challenges we face in the 21st century is taking care of our environment. We now understand that our actions can harm the Earth. We need to find ways to live that are good for the environment. This means using less energy, recycling, and finding new ways to make things that don’t harm the Earth.

Life in the 21st century is full of both challenges and opportunities. We have amazing technology and access to information. But, we also face problems like taking care of our health and the environment. It’s an exciting time to be alive, and we all have a part to play in shaping the future.

Remember, the 21st century is our time. Let’s make the most of it!

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Life History
• Essay on Life Goals
• Essay on Life Choice

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Writing in the 21st Century Critical Essay

Introduction, introspection of kate’s claims, what has changed since the source was published, works cited.

Academic writing requires students to have cute information on the various styles of writing based on the systems of writing advocated for by institutions of higher education. They need to follow and adhere to certain rules. Some of these procedures include, but not limited to, referencing or rather citation rules and the avoidance of committing academic crimes such as plagiarism.

In fact, many of the literatures that describe the procedures of writing in whatsoever style do not fail to mention these two requirements of any academic essay. Kate Turabian’s Student’s Guide to Writing College Papers is perhaps one of the scholarly works entirely done with the intention of describing the writing procedures of academic works.

Though I agree with what Turabian claims, Farber and Tucker point out how crucial it is, to incorporate the period within which her claims hold based on the evident changes that have taken place since the publishing of the fourth edition of Student’s Guide to Writing College Papers .

This evident based on the various developments in writing contributed largely by the emergence of new technologies prompting new considerations in the writing styles.

Any form of academic writing has some preset purpose. Consequently, in the evaluation process of the academic writings such as essays, one has to look at some preset rules to know whether the writers have followed them.

With this in mind, Turabian’s suggestion that “Few students learn to write by memorizing formal rules before and after the writing-to talk hence need to learn about the written forms you expect them to produce, not as your personal quirky preference” (Turabian 5). Building on this line of view, the research process emerges as an experience dominated by loneliness.

Many of the people who deploy their better time to research find themselves only having the various detractions of their computers or books as the only source of company. Turabian reckons, “everything we know about writing and thinking suggests that most of us work more slowly and less well when we work alone” (19). However, this claim is challengeable.

In fact, various researchers especially the ones who often use the norms of the research process have the capacity of performing exemplarily when they accomplish their tasks alone. The word loneliness means the state of lack of company during the research time since in actual sense one cannot regard experienced researchers as lonely since, while writing, they engage with their targeted audience.

Experienced writers can evaluate what their target audience may understand, as well as what they cannot understand. According to Turabian, “…There is nothing easy for new students” (20). In support of this claim, it sounds somewhat significant for teachers to guide students in the research process by ensuring that they can follow some preset rules and regulations in writing their academic essays.

This way, they can encourage them to develop skills in rehearsing their works to suit certain audience tantamount to the expertise writers who the students seek to emulate. In this end, Turabian posits that “Most researchers rehearse their work all the time—for colleagues, friends, students, in seminars, at conferences, on e-mail lists, in grant proposals, and on and on” (20).

Arguably, as a requirement, inexperienced students deserve to build a similar interaction. However, to achieve this, students should not make decisions alone on what suits a certain audience. Talk-talk attitude about what they are investigating in their research deserves to be inculcated in them.

I immensely concur with Turabian on the significance of the talk-talk culture in helping students develop eloquent writing skills. “Orchestrate occasions and obligations for students to talk about what they are investigating, why it matters, what they are finding, what they still want to know, what parts are weak and need bolstering, and so on” (Turabian 21).

Such an occasion is significant since, more often than not, academic writing demands the rising of subtle claims coupled with supporting them profoundly.

Additionally, the value of the arguments depends on the capacity of the writer to consider the various alternative perspectives of view about the same argument and where necessary give sufficient information that confronts the various likely counter arguments if at all the argument needs remain relevant. Turabian also argues that many inexperienced writers also deploy their writing as an ample tool for thinking.

It is perhaps after writing that one peruses through his or her work to establish the weaknesses of logic. Consistent with Turabian’s claims that “students tend to see writing and speaking as merely packaging of ideas, not as a way to discover and improve them” (21). This claim is, in fact, significant especially bearing in mind the necessity for ideas regeneration and re-evaluation during the writing process.

What this means is that words need to follow ideas. However, upon accomplishing this, words need be re-evaluated to identify the likely eminent weakness in terms of delivering the intended meaning.

Even though Turabian’s ideas about academic writing are essential for persuasive writing, some criticisms about the same are still significant. Turabian posits that “When assigning a paper, one should not just set a deadline but instead, create a series of due dates that stage students’ research and writing” (21). Considering the writing of the twentieth century, the issue of not fixing deadlines is somehow out of date.

Twenty first century is characterized by times in which people must perform various tasks within fixed routines coupled to accomplishing the demands of these tasks within some fixed periods. Bearing in mind that students are trained for the purposes of later introducing them to the job market requiring compliance with demands of deadlines to execute various tasks, they need to have practiced this culture long time enough.

Arguably, one of the ways of enhancing this is by ensuring and examining student’s performance based on his/her ability to present quality work within fixed periods. Turabian also claims that teachers also deserve to “Map out milestones that will force students 21 to practice the kind of processes outlined in “Writing Your Paper,” including those requiring them to share, talk about, or reflect on their written work as they go” (22).

Unfortunately, this stages that Turabian talks of may by far end up impeding the thinking process of student while writing.

On a different line of view, perhaps the modern technologies also call for a different consideration of writing techniques. The modern technologies pose a formidable threat to value and originality in writing.

In this context, Farber argues that “The new technologies lack a convenient way of writing-while-reading, enhance plagiarism, eliminate traditional archiving methods without offering a satisfactory new substitute (presently) and give rise to a call for a revised way of citation, together with new ways of archiving and storing” (226).

Unfortunately, students have to deploy these techniques while writing. Computers, for instance, have come to enhance the writing in terms of the capacity to process word text for punctuations, spellings and correct usage of words. Modern technology, as opposed to Farber’s argument, helps to eliminate the challenges of plagiarism especially where various works that students use as reference material are available on the World Wide Web.

Consequently, perhaps congruent with Henneberg argument “For people who make their living selling words to readers—and indeed for readers themselves—these are times of upheaval” (116). With the development of the word processors, compliance with certain writing rules becomes much easier to achieve.

As a way example, referencing styles can be accustomed so that whenever an error occurs whether in the punctuation or format the writer can easily identify these errors. The twenty first century is a century of simplification of almost every task performed by humankind!

Arguably, the advent of the information technology has the capacity to render textual contents explosion. The advantage of information technology in influencing the manner in which writing in the 21st century is accomplished is that “More people are engaging in more conversations, sharing more opinions, learning more, and learning faster than anyone could have imagined just a few decades ago” (Tucker 17).

As a result, people are able to access scholarly works much faster and hence building on the ideas that one’s intends to incorporate in his or her written work becomes also easier. Any academic writing is driven by academic curiosity. The information revolution consequently serves to enhance ease of information access available to the immense number of sources while incurring minimal costs.

As Tucker Reckons, incorporation of new technologies in the research process infers “opportunity to become a source, trustworthy or otherwise, and to share an opinion with the world the second the whim strikes to do so” (17). In this line of view, Farber’s accusation of the new technologies to influence writing negatively in the twenty first century as priory stipulated perhaps lacks substance.

An essential guide that Turabian raises is perhaps the manner in which teachers should mark the papers of the students. Turabian advices, “The most efficient way to mark a paper is to analyze it before you read closely enough to mark it up” (22).

This proposition is incredible especially by noting that more often than not, the ideas that are presented in the academic essay by students depends more on the validity of claims and the magnitude of support offered to the claims. As consequence, paying ample attention to the information contained in the introduction, conclusion and sections of paragraphs introducing topic sentences is essential.

In this end, in case the ideas development in the essay follows the top-down approach, the very first sentences of every paragraph are essential and require thorough scrutiny.

It is also essential to consider critically the last sentences of every paragraph in case one uses the down-top approach in the paragraph development. Fortunately, no matter the technology in use in writing, whether considering writing approaches in the twenty first century or at the time Turabian was writing Student’s Guide to Writing College, the concepts of the manner of developing the paragraphs still holds.

Teachers need to compel inexperienced writers to write according to some certain prescribed rules to promote compliance to standardized writing practices including punctuation, citation, both in the texts and in references.

Even though changes have emerged in relation to the manner in which information is availed to writers, with the twenty first century giving writers an ease of information access in terms of saving time and cost, the paper recognizes the relevance of the Turabian’s writing guides even in the modern writing world.

Farber, Miriam. How shall we write and read in twenty-first century academy? Notes on the margin of electronic publishing. Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society 5.2(2007): 226 – 234.

Henneberg, Sylvia. Developing Age Studies through Literature. NWSA Journal 18.1 (2006): 106-126.

Tucker, Patrick. The 21 st writer. A Magazine of Forecasts, Trends and Ideas about Future 42.4(2008): 16-17.

Turabian, Kate. Instructors Guide to Students Guide to Writing College Papers , 2011. Web.

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