Typically, an essay has five paragraphs: an introduction, a conclusion, and three body paragraphs. However, there is no set rule about the number of paragraphs in an essay.
The number of paragraphs can vary depending on the type and scope of your essay. An expository or argumentative essay may require more body paragraphs to include all the necessary information, whereas a narrative essay may need fewer.
To enhance the coherence and readability of your essay, it’s important to follow certain rules regarding the structure. Take a look:
1. Arrange your information from the most simple to the most complex bits. You can start the body paragraph off with a general statement and then move on to specifics.
2. Provide the necessary background information at the beginning of your essay to give the reader the context behind your thesis statement.
3. Select topic statements that provide value, more information, or evidence for your thesis statement.
There are also various essay structures , such as the compare and contrast structure, chronological structure, problem method solution structure, and signposting structure that you can follow to create an organized and impactful essay.
An impactful, well-structured essay comes down to three important parts: the introduction, body, and conclusion.
1. The introduction sets the stage for your essay and is typically a paragraph long. It should grab the reader’s attention and give them a clear idea of what your essay will be about.
2. The body is where you dive deeper into your topic and present your arguments and evidence. It usually consists of two paragraphs, but this can vary depending on the type of essay you’re writing.
3. The conclusion brings your essay to a close and is typically one paragraph long. It should summarize the main points of the essay and leave the reader with something to think about.
The length of your paragraphs can vary depending on the type of essay you’re writing. So, make sure you take the time to plan out your essay structure so each section flows smoothly into the next.
When it comes to writing an essay, the introduction is a critical component that sets the tone for the entire piece. A well-crafted introduction not only grabs the reader’s attention but also provides them with a clear understanding of what the essay is all about. An essay editor can help you achieve this, but it’s best to know the brief yourself!
Let’s take a look at how to write an attractive and informative introductory paragraph.
1. Construct an attractive hook
To grab the reader’s attention, an opening statement or hook is crucial. This can be achieved by incorporating a surprising statistic, a shocking fact, or an interesting anecdote into the beginning of your piece.
For example, if you’re writing an essay about water conservation you can begin your essay with, “Clean drinking water, a fundamental human need, remains out of reach for more than one billion people worldwide. It deprives them of a basic human right and jeopardizes their health and wellbeing.”
2. Provide sufficient context or background information
An effective introduction should begin with a brief description or background of your topic. This will help provide context and set the stage for your discussion.
For example, if you’re writing an essay about climate change, you start by describing the current state of the planet and the impact that human activity is having on it.
3. Construct a well-rounded and comprehensive thesis statement
A good introduction should also include the main message or thesis statement of your essay. This is the central argument that you’ll be making throughout the piece. It should be clear, concise, and ideally placed toward the end of the introduction.
By including these elements in your introduction, you’ll be setting yourself up for success in the rest of your essay.
Let’s take a look at an example.
The Wright Brothers’ invention of the airplane in 1903 revolutionized the way humans travel and explore the world. Prior to this invention, transportation relied on trains, boats, and cars, which limited the distance and speed of travel. However, the airplane made air travel a reality, allowing people to reach far-off destinations in mere hours. This breakthrough paved the way for modern-day air travel, transforming the world into a smaller, more connected place. In this essay, we will explore the impact of the Wright Brothers’ invention on modern-day travel, including the growth of the aviation industry, increased accessibility of air travel to the general public, and the economic and cultural benefits of air travel.
You can persuade your readers and make your thesis statement compelling by providing evidence, examples, and logical reasoning. To write a fool-proof and authoritative essay, you need to provide multiple well-structured, substantial arguments.
Let’s take a look at how this can be done:
1. Write a topic sentence for each paragraph
The beginning of each of your body paragraphs should contain the main arguments that you’d like to address. They should provide ground for your thesis statement and make it well-rounded. You can arrange these arguments in several formats depending on the type of essay you’re writing.
2. Provide the supporting information
The next point of your body paragraph should provide supporting information to back up your main argument. Depending on the type of essay, you can elaborate on your main argument with the help of relevant statistics, key information, examples, or even personal anecdotes.
3. Analyze the supporting information
After providing relevant details and supporting information, it is important to analyze it and link it back to your main argument.
End one body paragraph with a smooth transition to the next. There are many ways in which this can be done, but the most common way is to give a gist of your main argument along with the supporting information with transitory words such as “however” “in addition to” “therefore”.
Here’s an example of a body paragraph.
The Wright Brothers’ invention of the airplane revolutionized air travel. They achieved the first-ever successful powered flight with the Wright Flyer in 1903, after years of conducting experiments and studying flight principles. Despite their first flight lasting only 12 seconds, it was a significant milestone that paved the way for modern aviation. The Wright Brothers’ success can be attributed to their systematic approach to problem-solving, which included numerous experiments with gliders, the development of a wind tunnel to test their designs, and meticulous analysis and recording of their results. Their dedication and ingenuity forever changed the way we travel, making modern aviation possible.
A powerful concluding statement separates a good essay from a brilliant one. To create a powerful conclusion, you need to start with a strong foundation.
Let’s take a look at how to construct an impactful concluding statement.
1. Restructure your thesis statement
To conclude your essay effectively, don’t just restate your thesis statement. Instead, use what you’ve learned throughout your essay and modify your thesis statement accordingly. This will help you create a conclusion that ties together all of the arguments you’ve presented.
2. Summarize the main points of your essay
The next point of your conclusion consists of a summary of the main arguments of your essay. It is crucial to effectively summarize the gist of your essay into one, well-structured paragraph.
3. Create a lasting impression with your concluding statement
Conclude your essay by including a key takeaway, or a powerful statement that creates a lasting impression on the reader. This can include the broader implications or consequences of your essay topic.
Here’s an example of a concluding paragraph.
The Wright Brothers’ invention of the airplane forever changed history by paving the way for modern aviation and countless aerospace advancements. Their persistence, innovation, and dedication to problem-solving led to the first successful powered flight in 1903, sparking a revolution in transportation that transformed the world. Today, air travel remains an integral part of our globalized society, highlighting the undeniable impact of the Wright Brothers’ contribution to human civilization.
Most essays are derived from the combination or variation of these four main types of essays . let’s take a closer look at these types.
1. Narrative essay
A narrative essay is a type of writing that involves telling a story, often based on personal experiences. It is a form of creative nonfiction that allows you to use storytelling techniques to convey a message or a theme.
2. Descriptive essay
A descriptive essay aims to provide an immersive experience for the reader by using sensory descriptors. Unlike a narrative essay, which tells a story, a descriptive essay has a narrower scope and focuses on one particular aspect of a story.
3. Argumentative essays
An argumentative essay is a type of essay that aims to persuade the reader to adopt a particular stance based on factual evidence and is one of the most common forms of college essays.
4. Expository essays
An expository essay is a common format used in school and college exams to assess your understanding of a specific topic. The purpose of an expository essay is to present and explore a topic thoroughly without taking any particular stance or expressing personal opinions.
While this article demonstrates what is an essay and describes its types, you may also have other doubts. As experts who provide essay editing and proofreading services , we’re here to help.
Our team has created a list of resources to clarify any doubts about writing essays. Keep reading to write engaging and well-organized essays!
What is the difference between an argumentative and an expository essay, what is the difference between a narrative and a descriptive essay, what is an essay format, what is the meaning of essay, what is the purpose of writing an essay.
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Essays are brief, non-fiction compositions that describe, clarify, argue, or analyze a subject. Students might encounter essay assignments in any school subject and at any level of school, from a personal experience "vacation" essay in middle school to a complex analysis of a scientific process in graduate school. Components of an essay include an introduction , thesis statement , body, and conclusion.
The beginning of an essay can seem daunting. Sometimes, writers can start their essay in the middle or at the end, rather than at the beginning, and work backward. The process depends on each individual and takes practice to figure out what works best for them. Regardless of where students start, it is recommended that the introduction begins with an attention grabber or an example that hooks the reader in within the very first sentence.
The introduction should accomplish a few written sentences that leads the reader into the main point or argument of the essay, also known as a thesis statement. Typically, the thesis statement is the very last sentence of an introduction, but this is not a rule set in stone, despite it wrapping things up nicely. Before moving on from the introduction, readers should have a good idea of what is to follow in the essay, and they should not be confused as to what the essay is about. Finally, the length of an introduction varies and can be anywhere from one to several paragraphs depending on the size of the essay as a whole.
A thesis statement is a sentence that states the main idea of the essay. The function of a thesis statement is to help manage the ideas within the essay. Different from a mere topic, the thesis statement is an argument, option, or judgment that the author of the essay makes about the topic of the essay.
A good thesis statement combines several ideas into just one or two sentences. It also includes the topic of the essay and makes clear what the author's position is in regard to the topic. Typically found at the beginning of a paper, the thesis statement is often placed in the introduction, toward the end of the first paragraph or so.
Developing a thesis statement means deciding on the point of view within the topic, and stating this argument clearly becomes part of the sentence which forms it. Writing a strong thesis statement should summarize the topic and bring clarity to the reader.
For informative essays, an informative thesis should be declared. In an argumentative or narrative essay, a persuasive thesis, or opinion, should be determined. For instance, the difference looks like this:
The body paragraphs of an essay include a group of sentences that relate to a specific topic or idea around the main point of the essay. It is important to write and organize two to three full body paragraphs to properly develop it.
Before writing, authors may choose to outline the two to three main arguments that will support their thesis statement. For each of those main ideas, there will be supporting points to drive them home. Elaborating on the ideas and supporting specific points will develop a full body paragraph. A good paragraph describes the main point, is full of meaning, and has crystal clear sentences that avoid universal statements.
A conclusion is an end or finish of an essay. Often, the conclusion includes a judgment or decision that is reached through the reasoning described throughout the essay. The conclusion is an opportunity to wrap up the essay by reviewing the main points discussed that drives home the point or argument stated in the thesis statement.
The conclusion may also include a takeaway for the reader, such as a question or thought to take with them after reading. A good conclusion may also invoke a vivid image, include a quotation, or have a call to action for readers.
Other forms: essays; essayed; essaying
A composition that is usually short and has a literary theme is called an essay . You should probably start writing your essay on "To Kill a Mockingbird" sometime before the bus ride to school the day it is due.
As a noun, an essay is also an attempt, especially a tentative initial one. Your essay to make friends at your new school would probably work better if you actually spoke to other students. As a verb, to essay is to make an attempt. If you essay to run for student council, you might lose to the girl who promises more recess, longer lunches, and less homework.
Before you can answer a question on the PARCC English Language Arts/Literacy section, you first need to know what the question is asking. Learn this list of 45 words that we extracted from a PARCC practice test's directions, question stems, and answer options.
A thorough survey of various textbooks, assignments, content area standards, and examinations yields the following list of words compiled by Jim Burke . You cannot expect to succeed on assignments if you do not understand the directions.
To improve your fluency in English Language Arts and Reading (ELAR), learn this academic vocabulary list that includes words selected from the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) state standards.
Whether you’re a teacher or a learner, vocabulary.com can put you or your class on the path to systematic vocabulary improvement..
What is an essay.
An essay is a focused piece of writing that explains, argues, describes, or narrates.
In high school, you may have to write many different types of essays to develop your writing skills.
Academic essays at college level are usually argumentative : you develop a clear thesis about your topic and make a case for your position using evidence, analysis and interpretation.
For a stronger conclusion paragraph, avoid including:
Your conclusion should leave the reader with a strong, decisive impression of your work.
Your essay’s conclusion should contain:
The conclusion may also reflect on the broader implications of your argument, showing how your ideas could applied to other contexts or debates.
The conclusion paragraph of an essay is usually shorter than the introduction . As a rule, it shouldn’t take up more than 10–15% of the text.
The “hook” is the first sentence of your essay introduction . It should lead the reader into your essay, giving a sense of why it’s interesting.
To write a good hook, avoid overly broad statements or long, dense sentences. Try to start with something clear, concise and catchy that will spark your reader’s curiosity.
Your essay introduction should include three main things, in this order:
The length of each part depends on the length and complexity of your essay .
Let’s say you’re writing a five-paragraph essay about the environmental impacts of dietary choices. Here are three examples of topic sentences you could use for each of the three body paragraphs :
Each of these sentences expresses one main idea – by listing them in order, we can see the overall structure of the essay at a glance. Each paragraph will expand on the topic sentence with relevant detail, evidence, and arguments.
The topic sentence usually comes at the very start of the paragraph .
However, sometimes you might start with a transition sentence to summarize what was discussed in previous paragraphs, followed by the topic sentence that expresses the focus of the current paragraph.
Topic sentences help keep your writing focused and guide the reader through your argument.
In an essay or paper , each paragraph should focus on a single idea. By stating the main idea in the topic sentence, you clarify what the paragraph is about for both yourself and your reader.
A topic sentence is a sentence that expresses the main point of a paragraph . Everything else in the paragraph should relate to the topic sentence.
The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:
Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say.
The thesis statement should be placed at the end of your essay introduction .
Follow these four steps to come up with a thesis statement :
A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.
An essay isn’t just a loose collection of facts and ideas. Instead, it should be centered on an overarching argument (summarized in your thesis statement ) that every part of the essay relates to.
The way you structure your essay is crucial to presenting your argument coherently. A well-structured essay helps your reader follow the logic of your ideas and understand your overall point.
The structure of an essay is divided into an introduction that presents your topic and thesis statement , a body containing your in-depth analysis and arguments, and a conclusion wrapping up your ideas.
The structure of the body is flexible, but you should always spend some time thinking about how you can organize your essay to best serve your ideas.
The vast majority of essays written at university are some sort of argumentative essay . Almost all academic writing involves building up an argument, though other types of essay might be assigned in composition classes.
Essays can present arguments about all kinds of different topics. For example:
At high school and in composition classes at university, you’ll often be told to write a specific type of essay , but you might also just be given prompts.
Look for keywords in these prompts that suggest a certain approach: The word “explain” suggests you should write an expository essay , while the word “describe” implies a descriptive essay . An argumentative essay might be prompted with the word “assess” or “argue.”
In rhetorical analysis , a claim is something the author wants the audience to believe. A support is the evidence or appeal they use to convince the reader to believe the claim. A warrant is the (often implicit) assumption that links the support with the claim.
Logos appeals to the audience’s reason, building up logical arguments . Ethos appeals to the speaker’s status or authority, making the audience more likely to trust them. Pathos appeals to the emotions, trying to make the audience feel angry or sympathetic, for example.
Collectively, these three appeals are sometimes called the rhetorical triangle . They are central to rhetorical analysis , though a piece of rhetoric might not necessarily use all of them.
The term “text” in a rhetorical analysis essay refers to whatever object you’re analyzing. It’s frequently a piece of writing or a speech, but it doesn’t have to be. For example, you could also treat an advertisement or political cartoon as a text.
The goal of a rhetorical analysis is to explain the effect a piece of writing or oratory has on its audience, how successful it is, and the devices and appeals it uses to achieve its goals.
Unlike a standard argumentative essay , it’s less about taking a position on the arguments presented, and more about exploring how they are constructed.
You should try to follow your outline as you write your essay . However, if your ideas change or it becomes clear that your structure could be better, it’s okay to depart from your essay outline . Just make sure you know why you’re doing so.
If you have to hand in your essay outline , you may be given specific guidelines stating whether you have to use full sentences. If you’re not sure, ask your supervisor.
When writing an essay outline for yourself, the choice is yours. Some students find it helpful to write out their ideas in full sentences, while others prefer to summarize them in short phrases.
You will sometimes be asked to hand in an essay outline before you start writing your essay . Your supervisor wants to see that you have a clear idea of your structure so that writing will go smoothly.
Even when you do not have to hand it in, writing an essay outline is an important part of the writing process . It’s a good idea to write one (as informally as you like) to clarify your structure for yourself whenever you are working on an essay.
Comparisons in essays are generally structured in one of two ways:
It’s also possible to combine both methods, for example by writing a full paragraph on each of your topics and then a final paragraph contrasting the two according to a specific metric.
Your subjects might be very different or quite similar, but it’s important that there be meaningful grounds for comparison . You can probably describe many differences between a cat and a bicycle, but there isn’t really any connection between them to justify the comparison.
You’ll have to write a thesis statement explaining the central point you want to make in your essay , so be sure to know in advance what connects your subjects and makes them worth comparing.
Some essay prompts include the keywords “compare” and/or “contrast.” In these cases, an essay structured around comparing and contrasting is the appropriate response.
Comparing and contrasting is also a useful approach in all kinds of academic writing : You might compare different studies in a literature review , weigh up different arguments in an argumentative essay , or consider different theoretical approaches in a theoretical framework .
The key difference is that a narrative essay is designed to tell a complete story, while a descriptive essay is meant to convey an intense description of a particular place, object, or concept.
Narrative and descriptive essays both allow you to write more personally and creatively than other kinds of essays , and similar writing skills can apply to both.
If you’re not given a specific prompt for your descriptive essay , think about places and objects you know well, that you can think of interesting ways to describe, or that have strong personal significance for you.
The best kind of object for a descriptive essay is one specific enough that you can describe its particular features in detail—don’t choose something too vague or general.
If you’re not given much guidance on what your narrative essay should be about, consider the context and scope of the assignment. What kind of story is relevant, interesting, and possible to tell within the word count?
The best kind of story for a narrative essay is one you can use to reflect on a particular theme or lesson, or that takes a surprising turn somewhere along the way.
Don’t worry too much if your topic seems unoriginal. The point of a narrative essay is how you tell the story and the point you make with it, not the subject of the story itself.
Narrative essays are usually assigned as writing exercises at high school or in university composition classes. They may also form part of a university application.
When you are prompted to tell a story about your own life or experiences, a narrative essay is usually the right response.
The majority of the essays written at university are some sort of argumentative essay . Unless otherwise specified, you can assume that the goal of any essay you’re asked to write is argumentative: To convince the reader of your position using evidence and reasoning.
In composition classes you might be given assignments that specifically test your ability to write an argumentative essay. Look out for prompts including instructions like “argue,” “assess,” or “discuss” to see if this is the goal.
At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).
Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.
The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .
An argumentative essay tends to be a longer essay involving independent research, and aims to make an original argument about a topic. Its thesis statement makes a contentious claim that must be supported in an objective, evidence-based way.
An expository essay also aims to be objective, but it doesn’t have to make an original argument. Rather, it aims to explain something (e.g., a process or idea) in a clear, concise way. Expository essays are often shorter assignments and rely less on research.
An expository essay is a common assignment in high-school and university composition classes. It might be assigned as coursework, in class, or as part of an exam.
Sometimes you might not be told explicitly to write an expository essay. Look out for prompts containing keywords like “explain” and “define.” An expository essay is usually the right response to these prompts.
An expository essay is a broad form that varies in length according to the scope of the assignment.
Expository essays are often assigned as a writing exercise or as part of an exam, in which case a five-paragraph essay of around 800 words may be appropriate.
You’ll usually be given guidelines regarding length; if you’re not sure, ask.
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Definition of essay noun from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
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Published on: Oct 9, 2020
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Interesting Definition Essay Topics for Students
Definition Essay Outline - Format & Guide
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Many students struggle with writing definition essays due to a lack of clarity and precision in their explanations.
This obstructs them from effectively conveying the essence of the terms or concepts they are tasked with defining. Consequently, the essays may lack coherence, leaving readers confused and preventing them from grasping the intended meaning.
But don’t worry!
In this guide, we will delve into effective techniques and step-by-step approaches to help students craft an engaging definition essay.
Continue reading to learn the correct formation of a definition essay.
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Just as the name suggests, a definition essay defines and explains a term or a concept. Unlike a narrative essay, the purpose of writing this essay is only to inform the readers.
Writing this essay type can be deceivingly tricky. Some terms, concepts, and objects have concrete definitions when explained. In contrast others are solely based on the writerâs understanding and point of view.
A definition essay requires a writer to use different approaches when discussing a term. These approaches are the following:
A single or combination of approaches can be used in the essay.
There are several types of definition essays that you may be asked to write, depending on the purpose and scope of the assignment.
In this section, we will discuss some of the most common types of definition essays.
This type of essay provides a detailed description of a term or concept, emphasizing its key features and characteristics.
The goal of a descriptive definition essay is to help readers understand the term or concept in a more profound way.
In a stipulative definition essay, the writer provides a unique definition of a term or concept. This type of essay is often used in academic settings to define a term in a particular field of study.
The goal of a stipulative definition essay is to provide a precise and clear definition that is specific to the context of the essay.
This compare and contrast essay type involves analyzing a term or concept in-depth. Breaking it down into its component parts, and examining how they relate to each other.
The goal of an analytical definition essay is to provide a more nuanced and detailed understanding of the term or concept being discussed.
A persuasive definition essay is an argumentative essay that aims to persuade readers to accept a particular definition of a term or concept.
The writer presents their argument for the definition and uses evidence and examples to support their position.
An explanatory definition essay is a type of expository essay . It aims to explain a complex term or concept in a way that is easy to understand for the reader.
The writer breaks down the term or concept into simpler parts and provides examples and analogies to help readers understand it better.
An extended definition essay goes beyond the definition of a word or concept and provides a more in-depth analysis and explanation.
The goal of an extended definition essay is to provide a comprehensive understanding of a term, concept, or idea. This includes its history, origins, and cultural significance.
Writing a definition essay is simple if you know the correct procedure. This essay, like all the other formal pieces of documents, requires substantial planning and effective execution.
The following are the steps involved in writing a definition essay effectively:
Instead of choosing a term that has a concrete definition available, choose a word that is complicated . Complex expressions have abstract concepts that require a writer to explore deeper. Moreover, make sure that different people perceive the term selected differently.
Once you have a word to draft your definition essay for, read the dictionary. These academic definitions are important as you can use them to compare your understanding with the official concept.
Drafting a definition essay is about stating the dictionary meaning and your explanation of the concept. So the writer needs to have some information about the term.
In addition to this, when exploring the term, make sure to check the termâs origin. The history of the word can make you discuss it in a better way.
Coming up with an exciting title for your essay is important. The essay topic will be the first thing that your readers will witness, so it should be catchy.
Creatively draft an essay topic that reflects meaning. In addition to this, the usage of the term in the title should be correctly done. The readers should get an idea of what the essay is about and what to expect from the document.
Now that you have a topic in hand, it is time to gather some relevant information. A definition essay is more than a mere explanation of the term. It represents the writerâs perception of the chosen term and the topic.
So having only personal opinions will not be enough to defend your point. Deeply research and gather information by consulting credible sources.
The gathered information needs to be organized to be understandable. The raw data needs to be arranged to give a structure to the content.
Here's a generic outline for a definition essay:
Provide an that grabs the reader's attention and introduces the term or concept you will be defining. that clearly defines the term or concept and previews the main points of the essay. , , or that will help the reader better understand the term or concept. to clarify the scope of your definition. or of the term or concept you are defining in detail. to illustrate your points. by differentiating your term or concept from similar terms or concepts. to illustrate the differences. of the term or concept. between the types, using examples and anecdotes to illustrate your points. , or to support your points. VII. Conclusion you have defined. that leaves a lasting impression on the reader. |
Are you searching for an in-depth guide on crafting a well-structured definition essay?Check out this definition essay outline blog!
6. Write the First Draft
Drafting each section correctly is a daunting task. Understanding what or what not to include in these sections requires a writer to choose wisely.
The start of your essay matters a lot. If it is on point and attractive, the readers will want to read the text. As the first part of the essay is the introduction , it is considered the first impression of your essay.
To write your definition essay introduction effectively, include the following information:
After briefly introducing the topic, fully explain the concept in the body section . Provide all the details and evidence that will support the thesis statement. To draft this section professionally, add the following information:
Once all the details are shared, give closure to your discussion. The last paragraph of the definition essay is the conclusion . The writer provides insight into the topic as a conclusion.
The concluding paragraphs include the following material:
7. Proofread and Edit
Although the writing process ends with the concluding paragraph, there is an additional step. It is important to proofread the essay once you are done writing. Proofread and revise your document a couple of times to make sure everything is perfect.
Before submitting your assignment, make edits, and fix all mistakes and errors.
If you want to learn more about how to write a definition essay, here is a video guide for you!
The structure of a definition essay is similar to that of any other academic essay. It should consist of an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.
However, the focus of a definition essay is on defining and explaining a particular term or concept.
In this section, we will discuss the structure of a definition essay in detail.
Get the idea of writing an introduction for a definition essay with this example:
"Have you ever wondered what it truly means to be a hero?" |
Here is an example of how to craft your definition essay body paragraph:
Heroes are individuals who demonstrate courage, selflessness, and a commitment to helping others. They often risk their own safety to protect others or achieve a noble goal. |
If applicable, the writer may want to include a section that discusses the different types or categories of the term or concept being defined.
This section should explain the similarities and differences between the types, using examples and anecdotes to illustrate the points.
This section could explore the different categories of heroes, such as those who are recognized for their bravery in the face of danger, those who inspire others through their deeds, or those who make a difference in their communities through volunteering. |
The writer should also include real-life examples of the term or concept being defined in action.
This will help the reader better understand the term or concept in context and how it is used in everyday life.
This could include stories of individuals who risked their lives to save others, such as firefighters who rushed into the Twin Towers on 9/11 or civilians who pulled people from a burning car. |
This example will help you writing a conclusion fo you essay:
Heroes are defined by their courage, selflessness, and commitment to helping others. There are many different types of heroes, but they all share these key features. |
It is important to go through some examples and samples before writing an essay. This is to understand the writing process and structure of the assigned task well.
Following are some examples of definition essays to give our students a better idea of the concept.
Understanding the Definition Essay
Definition Essay Example
Definition Essay About Friendship
Definition Essay About Love
Family Definition Essay
Success Definition Essay
Beauty Definition Essay
Selecting the right topic is challenging for other essay types. However, picking a suitable theme for a definition essay is equally tricky yet important. Pick an interesting subject to ensure maximum readership.
If you are facing writerâs block, here is a list of some great definition essay topics for your help. Choose from the list below and draft a compelling essay.
Here are some more extended definition essay topics:
Need more topics? Check out this definition essay topics blog!
Knowing the correct writing procedure is not enough if you are not aware of the essayâs small technicalities. To help students write a definition essay effortlessly, expert writers of CollegeEssay.org have gathered some simple tips.
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A definition essay can be deceivingly difficult to write. This type of paper requires you to write a personal yet academic definition of one specific word. The definition must be thorough and lengthy. It is essential that you choose a word that will give you plenty to write about, and there are a few standard tactics you can use to elaborate on the term. Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind when writing a definition essay.
1: choose an abstract word with a complex meaning. [1].
A simple word that refers to a concrete word will not give you much to write about, but a complex word that refers to an abstract concept provides more material to explore.
Aside from being complex, the word should also refer to something that can mean different things to different people.
Dictionary definitions can only tell you so much. Since you need to elaborate on the word you choose to define, you will need to have your own base of knowledge or experience with the concept you choose.
While you will not be relying completely on the dictionary definition for your essay, familiarizing yourself with the official definition will allow you to compare your own understanding of the concept with the simplest, most academic explanation of it.
Look up your chosen word in the Oxford English Dictionary or in another etymology dictionary. [3]
1: write an analysis. [4].
Separate a word into various parts. Analyze and define each part in its own paragraph.
Specify what classes and parts of speech a word belongs to according to a standard dictionary definition.
An unfamiliar or uncommon concept can be explained using concepts that are more accessible to the average person.
Explain any physical characteristics or traditional thoughts used to describe your term of choice.
People often relate to stories and vivid images, so using a fitting story or image that relates to the term can be used in clarifying an abstract, formless concept.
If a term is often misused or misunderstood, mentioning what it is not is an effective way to bring the concept into focus.
This is when your research about the etymology of a word will come in handy. Explain where the term originated and how it came to mean what it currently means.
1: introduce the standard definition..
You need to clearly state what your word is along with its traditional or dictionary definition in your introductory paragraph.
Your actual thesis statement should define the term in your own words.
Each tactic or method used to define your term should be explored in a separate paragraph.
Briefly summarize your main points around the start of your concluding paragraph.
If the term you define plays a part in your own life and experiences, your final concluding remarks are a good place to briefly mention the role it plays.
Personal perspective: finding resilience in the ebbs and flows of life..
Posted September 4, 2024 | Reviewed by Davia Sills
There’s a beautiful red maple tree in our yard. It stands vibrantly and serenely about 30 feet high—now. But it wasn’t always that way.
My mom and dad gifted the maple to us as a small young tree about 25 years ago. Nobody would have predicted that this modest, crimson sapling would survive the challenges it has faced in its many years, for it was planted in its burlap bag so that its roots grew tightly wrapped around its trunk. Yet it has survived.
Not only has it survived, but it has flourished, bringing resilience , beauty, shade, wisdom , and love into our lives. Like my mom, who survived numerous challenges in her life, the tree has survived the many odds stacked against it.
While the remarkable tree still stands, after her long life, my mom has passed away. Yet even in her final days, like the maple tree, my mom shared profound lessons in resilience, beauty, wisdom, and love. Mom was still getting up and walking until just a few weeks before she died, when, for the first time, she fell down and just couldn’t get back up.
Until those moments, I believe my mom lived the definition of resilience, the ability to respond well to life’s adversities (American Psychological Association, 2014). Throughout her long and meaningful life, she found a way to get back up each time life pushed her down.
It’s been very hard to say goodbye. Grief and emotional responses to loss are not easy. It feels like a connection has been broken and a barrier of protection has fallen.
Each time I look at that red maple tree, I think of my mom. The stately tree with its roots wrapped around its trunk threatening its very existence reminds me that nothing lives forever. That life is so confoundingly impermanent.
These past few years, as my mom’s well-being has declined, have offered frequent reminders of life’s impermanence and the resilience that we can bring to the vicissitudes of our lives—sorrows and joys, happiness and tears, tragedies and transcendent gifts. And reminders that in most situations, we have choices about our attitude toward whatever life throws at us (Frankl, 1959).
Although I’m trying to find meaning in the experience of love and loss, like many of us, I wish that life were different and that I could have things the way I want them. But alas, that is not how life happens. Yet I am reminded that even in the face of impermanence and loss, we do have choices about how we respond. Grieving is a normal response to the loss of someone or something important to us (Kessler, 2019). On the importance of grieving, David Kessler and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross write, “Grief is an emotional, spiritual , and psychological journey to healing” (Kessler & Kubler-Ross, 2005).
At times, grief can feel quite prominent and sad. At other times, it can sneak up on us by surprise. We may notice that our responses can shift quickly and frequently. These observations seem to require emotional agility, paying attention to our inner experience, and perceiving greater flexibility to choose a response (David, 2016).
Amidst the ebb and flow of grief, many spiritual traditions teach the core concept of love: to regard all other humans with lovingkindness and compassion. Perhaps the greatest continuity is love—love and self-compassion for ourselves and our own suffering, love for those in our personal spheres and communities, and the possibility of extending lovingkindness to those throughout this beautiful and broken world.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. No content is a substitute for consulting with a qualified mental health or healthcare professional.
© 2024 Ilene Berns-Zare, LLC, All Rights Reserved
American Psychological Association (2014). The road to resilience . Washington DC. https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/road-resilience
David, S. (2016). Emotional agility: Get unstuck to embrace challenges and thrive in work and life. New York, NY: Avery.
Frankl, V. (1959). Man’s search for meaning . New York, NY: Washington Square Press.
Kessler, D. (2019). Finding meaning: The sixth stage of grief . New York, NY: Scribner.
Kessler, D. & Kubler-Ross, E. (2005). On grief and grieving: Finding the meaning of grief through the five stages of loss . New York, NY: Scribner.
Ilene Berns-Zare, PsyD, is a life and leadership coach. She writes about navigating personal and professional life with resilience, meaning, mindfulness, and well-being.
It’s increasingly common for someone to be diagnosed with a condition such as ADHD or autism as an adult. A diagnosis often brings relief, but it can also come with as many questions as answers.
In the wistful inner ear, one imagines a soft transcontinental buzz, the sound of 13,000 consciences alert and intricately working. “Well,” says each troubled voice, “I’d like to strike. I think we have plenty of reason to strike—wages, hours, job strain. But I signed an oath when I took the job. It would be dishonorable to strike. We have to find some other way.”
Just hearing things, of course—like listening for waves in a sea shell. It did not occur to the air-traffic controllers to deliver that sort of archaic soliloquy, haunted by scruples. Most of them judged, briskly enough, that their desire for a 32-hour week and a minimum of $30,462 per year superseded the oath to which they once put their signatures.
For a moment the issue of the violated oath did not come clear. It was deflected a little by a legal question: Don’t all workers have a right to strike? Yes, said the American Civil Liberties Union. Not if they are government employees, said a 1947 law and the Reagan Administration. The strikers chose the A.C.L.U.’s view of things.
But beyond transient legalities, the strike opened the door upon a more primitive question: What is the worth (moral, financial, mystical) of a person’s oath? What do we mean when we promise, when we vow, when we pledge our word? Whatever their union’s legal case may be, the controllers did take an oath; was that not a binding deed? Many Americans found themselves distantly disturbed that what was once a matter of some human solemnity should be brushed aside as if it were merely a technical detail. The social edifice shuddered slightly; down in the basement, a dusty little taboo fell off a shelf and shattered.
All societies are held together by an immensely intricate webbing of mutual obligation (and perhaps by an equal and opposite network of betrayal). The system starts with nods and smiles and wordless understandings; it elaborates itself interminably through certain assumptions, casual promises, oral agreements, laborious plans, written contracts and formal vows, and ends finally in that thunderous atavism, the solemn oath: the promise with a jolt of the sacred in it, the upraised hand, the divinity standing by to witness.
With such access to the absolute, the oath has always been promiscuously and even dangerously overemployed. It works efficiently enough as a device to keep court witnesses and public officials moderately honest; there, the sworn word is directly connected to deeds and penalties (perjury charges or impeachment). Ronald Reagan had no trouble making such a connection for the air-traffic controllers. But the dictatorial and the insecure have always been fond of the oath as a way to enforce orthodoxy, to lay down a prior restraint upon people’s opinions. During the 1950s the loyalty oath turned into a destructively pervasive American genre, with a legion of earnest patriots afoot, like the ghost in Hamlet, crying, “Swear!”
In the first torchlight of the primeval, oaths worked by the magic of the words themselves; later, they glowed with the power of the gods, who were invented to officiate at melodramas. Oaths should be sparingly used and specifically targeted. Their imposing solemnity can shade without warning into the preposterous, into peeled grapes on pledge night, a witch doctoring oogly-boogly like the oath that Tom Sawyer’s gang swore in the cave.
One reason why oathing gets overdone is that it is so inherently dramatic, even a form of fanaticism, a way of connecting (spuriously sometimes) to the Absolute. Knights, crusaders, saints and opera singers are forever swearing: it is a lovely plot device. Ahab swears his vengeance on the whale. In Don Giovanni, Ottavio vows to avenge the Commendatore by raising his fruity tenor to Donna Anna: “Lo giuro, lo giuro/ lo giuro agli occhi tuoi/ lo giuro al nostro amor” (I swear it, I swear it/ I swear it by your eyes/ I swear it by our love). Was there ever a prettier oath? It is a form of hero’s brag. That may explain why politicians are so reckless with hyperbolic promise. (Douglas MacArthur: “I shall return,” a wonderful item of mythic public relations.) Like the ancient kings of Mexico, they like to swear that they will cause the sun to rise, the rain to fall, the crops to grow. Spiro Agnew once told the American people: “I have often been accused of putting my foot in my mouth, but I will never put my hand in your pockets.” Jimmy Carter kept fixing America with his china-blue eyes and swearing: “I will never lie to you”—a daredevil approach to his profession.
Oaths have their sinister uses. They can turn into weapons to coerce and restrict. The solemn oath, of course, is not a bad way to lie. The Mafia enforces silence with an oath, and the blood oath over the centuries has killed more people than a medieval plague. But, in a free society, the oath has a crucial ceremonial function. The Hippocratic Oath reminds new doctors of their obligation, of the human context of their calling. An immigrant knows that the oath of citizenship is spiritually, almost physically, nourishing. His oath is a symbolic drama of community.
But the oath is not faring very well now. Americans, a mobile and litigious people, nimble through the loopholes, do not like to be mired down in too many promises. Getting stuck in an old promise looks more and more like a sucker’s game: both morals and interest rates change too fast. Baseball players renegotiate their contracts all the time.
The idea that morality is merely subjective has been subversive. Americans claim exemption under what might be called the Doctrine of Discontinuous Selves: if people are forever “growing” and “going through changes,” then the man who swore the oath, say, three years ago, is not the same one now called upon to live up to it. This discontinuous series of new selves, emotionally different selves, scatters the mind. It makes for a short moral attention span.
An anti-institutional bias has also been hard on oaths. So has that low-grade chronic ache (inflation, partly, and the erosion of dreams) that tells Americans so often that their society has not fulfilled its end of the social contract. Americans do not find themselves harmonizing much on Robert Frost’s lonely, manly lines: “But I have promises to keep/ And miles to go before I sleep/ And miles to go before I sleep.”
But promises, contracts and oaths are the acts of will and intelligence and anticipation that make a society coherent, that hold it together. If they cannot be trusted, then the whole structure begins to wobble. If the air-traffic controllers do not care to recite Frost, they might consider William Murray, Britain’s Solicitor General in the 18th century: “No country can subsist a twelvemonth where an oath is not thought binding, for the want of it must necessarily dissolve society.” —By Lance Morrow
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In 1953, Roald Dahl published “ The Great Automatic Grammatizator ,” a short story about an electrical engineer who secretly desires to be a writer. One day, after completing construction of the world’s fastest calculating machine, the engineer realizes that “English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness.” He constructs a fiction-writing machine that can produce a five-thousand-word short story in thirty seconds; a novel takes fifteen minutes and requires the operator to manipulate handles and foot pedals, as if he were driving a car or playing an organ, to regulate the levels of humor and pathos. The resulting novels are so popular that, within a year, half the fiction published in English is a product of the engineer’s invention.
Is there anything about art that makes us think it can’t be created by pushing a button, as in Dahl’s imagination? Right now, the fiction generated by large language models like ChatGPT is terrible, but one can imagine that such programs might improve in the future. How good could they get? Could they get better than humans at writing fiction—or making paintings or movies—in the same way that calculators are better at addition and subtraction?
Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.
If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art.
I think the same underlying principle applies to visual art, although it’s harder to quantify the choices that a painter might make. Real paintings bear the mark of an enormous number of decisions. By comparison, a person using a text-to-image program like DALL-E enters a prompt such as “A knight in a suit of armor fights a fire-breathing dragon,” and lets the program do the rest. (The newest version of DALL-E accepts prompts of up to four thousand characters—hundreds of words, but not enough to describe every detail of a scene.) Most of the choices in the resulting image have to be borrowed from similar paintings found online; the image might be exquisitely rendered, but the person entering the prompt can’t claim credit for that.
Some commentators imagine that image generators will affect visual culture as much as the advent of photography once did. Although this might seem superficially plausible, the idea that photography is similar to generative A.I. deserves closer examination. When photography was first developed, I suspect it didn’t seem like an artistic medium because it wasn’t apparent that there were a lot of choices to be made; you just set up the camera and start the exposure. But over time people realized that there were a vast number of things you could do with cameras, and the artistry lies in the many choices that a photographer makes. It might not always be easy to articulate what the choices are, but when you compare an amateur’s photos to a professional’s, you can see the difference. So then the question becomes: Is there a similar opportunity to make a vast number of choices using a text-to-image generator? I think the answer is no. An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process of making a painting than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words.
We can imagine a text-to-image generator that, over the course of many sessions, lets you enter tens of thousands of words into its text box to enable extremely fine-grained control over the image you’re producing; this would be something analogous to Photoshop with a purely textual interface. I’d say that a person could use such a program and still deserve to be called an artist. The film director Bennett Miller has used DALL-E 2 to generate some very striking images that have been exhibited at the Gagosian gallery; to create them, he crafted detailed text prompts and then instructed DALL-E to revise and manipulate the generated images again and again. He generated more than a hundred thousand images to arrive at the twenty images in the exhibit. But he has said that he hasn’t been able to obtain comparable results on later releases of DALL-E . I suspect this might be because Miller was using DALL-E for something it’s not intended to do; it’s as if he hacked Microsoft Paint to make it behave like Photoshop, but as soon as a new version of Paint was released, his hacks stopped working. OpenAI probably isn’t trying to build a product to serve users like Miller, because a product that requires a user to work for months to create an image isn’t appealing to a wide audience. The company wants to offer a product that generates images with little effort.
It’s harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order for it to generate an entirely different hundred thousand words that make up the novel you’re envisioning. It’s not clear to me what such a program would look like. Theoretically, if such a program existed, the user could perhaps deserve to be called the author. But, again, I don’t think companies like OpenAI want to create versions of ChatGPT that require just as much effort from users as writing a novel from scratch. The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.
The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.
Believing that inspiration outweighs everything else is, I suspect, a sign that someone is unfamiliar with the medium. I contend that this is true even if one’s goal is to create entertainment rather than high art. People often underestimate the effort required to entertain; a thriller novel may not live up to Kafka’s ideal of a book—an “axe for the frozen sea within us”—but it can still be as finely crafted as a Swiss watch. And an effective thriller is more than its premise or its plot. I doubt you could replace every sentence in a thriller with one that is semantically equivalent and have the resulting novel be as entertaining. This means that its sentences—and the small-scale choices they represent—help to determine the thriller’s effectiveness.
Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.
Of course, most pieces of writing, whether articles or reports or e-mails, do not come with the expectation that they embody thousands of choices. In such cases, is there any harm in automating the task? Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it. The type of attention you pay when reading a personal e-mail is different from the type you pay when reading a business report, but in both cases it is only warranted when the writer put some thought into it.
Recently, Google aired a commercial during the Paris Olympics for Gemini, its competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4 . The ad shows a father using Gemini to compose a fan letter, which his daughter will send to an Olympic athlete who inspires her. Google pulled the commercial after widespread backlash from viewers; a media professor called it “one of the most disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen.” It’s notable that people reacted this way, even though artistic creativity wasn’t the attribute being supplanted. No one expects a child’s fan letter to an athlete to be extraordinary; if the young girl had written the letter herself, it would likely have been indistinguishable from countless others. The significance of a child’s fan letter—both to the child who writes it and to the athlete who receives it—comes from its being heartfelt rather than from its being eloquent.
Many of us have sent store-bought greeting cards, knowing that it will be clear to the recipient that we didn’t compose the words ourselves. We don’t copy the words from a Hallmark card in our own handwriting, because that would feel dishonest. The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying.
Some have claimed that large language models are not laundering the texts they’re trained on but, rather, learning from them, in the same way that human writers learn from the books they’ve read. But a large language model is not a writer; it’s not even a user of language. Language is, by definition, a system of communication, and it requires an intention to communicate. Your phone’s auto-complete may offer good suggestions or bad ones, but in neither case is it trying to say anything to you or the person you’re texting. The fact that ChatGPT can generate coherent sentences invites us to imagine that it understands language in a way that your phone’s auto-complete does not, but it has no more intention to communicate.
It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.
Because language comes so easily to us, it’s easy to forget that it lies on top of these other experiences of subjective feeling and of wanting to communicate that feeling. We’re tempted to project those experiences onto a large language model when it emits coherent sentences, but to do so is to fall prey to mimicry; it’s the same phenomenon as when butterflies evolve large dark spots on their wings that can fool birds into thinking they’re predators with big eyes. There is a context in which the dark spots are sufficient; birds are less likely to eat a butterfly that has them, and the butterfly doesn’t really care why it’s not being eaten, as long as it gets to live. But there is a big difference between a butterfly and a predator that poses a threat to a bird.
A person using generative A.I. to help them write might claim that they are drawing inspiration from the texts the model was trained on, but I would again argue that this differs from what we usually mean when we say one writer draws inspiration from another. Consider a college student who turns in a paper that consists solely of a five-page quotation from a book, stating that this quotation conveys exactly what she wanted to say, better than she could say it herself. Even if the student is completely candid with the instructor about what she’s done, it’s not accurate to say that she is drawing inspiration from the book she’s citing. The fact that a large language model can reword the quotation enough that the source is unidentifiable doesn’t change the fundamental nature of what’s going on.
As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.
Not all writing needs to be creative, or heartfelt, or even particularly good; sometimes it simply needs to exist. Such writing might support other goals, such as attracting views for advertising or satisfying bureaucratic requirements. When people are required to produce such text, we can hardly blame them for using whatever tools are available to accelerate the process. But is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them? It would be unrealistic to claim that if we refuse to use large language models, then the requirements to create low-quality text will disappear. However, I think it is inevitable that the more we use large language models to fulfill those requirements, the greater those requirements will eventually become. We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?
It’s not impossible that one day we will have computer programs that can do anything a human being can do, but, contrary to the claims of the companies promoting A.I., that is not something we’ll see in the next few years. Even in domains that have absolutely nothing to do with creativity, current A.I. programs have profound limitations that give us legitimate reasons to question whether they deserve to be called intelligent at all.
The computer scientist François Chollet has proposed the following distinction: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills. I think this reflects our intuitions about human beings pretty well. Most people can learn a new skill given sufficient practice, but the faster the person picks up the skill, the more intelligent we think the person is. What’s interesting about this definition is that—unlike I.Q. tests—it’s also applicable to nonhuman entities; when a dog learns a new trick quickly, we consider that a sign of intelligence.
In 2019, researchers conducted an experiment in which they taught rats how to drive. They put the rats in little plastic containers with three copper-wire bars; when the mice put their paws on one of these bars, the container would either go forward, or turn left or turn right. The rats could see a plate of food on the other side of the room and tried to get their vehicles to go toward it. The researchers trained the rats for five minutes at a time, and after twenty-four practice sessions, the rats had become proficient at driving. Twenty-four trials were enough to master a task that no rat had likely ever encountered before in the evolutionary history of the species. I think that’s a good demonstration of intelligence.
Now consider the current A.I. programs that are widely acclaimed for their performance. AlphaZero, a program developed by Google’s DeepMind, plays chess better than any human player, but during its training it played forty-four million games, far more than any human can play in a lifetime. For it to master a new game, it will have to undergo a similarly enormous amount of training. By Chollet’s definition, programs like AlphaZero are highly skilled, but they aren’t particularly intelligent, because they aren’t efficient at gaining new skills. It is currently impossible to write a computer program capable of learning even a simple task in only twenty-four trials, if the programmer is not given information about the task beforehand.
Self-driving cars trained on millions of miles of driving can still crash into an overturned trailer truck, because such things are not commonly found in their training data, whereas humans taking their first driving class will know to stop. More than our ability to solve algebraic equations, our ability to cope with unfamiliar situations is a fundamental part of why we consider humans intelligent. Computers will not be able to replace humans until they acquire that type of competence, and that is still a long way off; for the time being, we’re just looking for jobs that can be done with turbocharged auto-complete.
Despite years of hype, the ability of generative A.I. to dramatically increase economic productivity remains theoretical. (Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs released a report titled “Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”) The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.
Some individuals have defended large language models by saying that most of what human beings say or write isn’t particularly original. That is true, but it’s also irrelevant. When someone says “I’m sorry” to you, it doesn’t matter that other people have said sorry in the past; it doesn’t matter that “I’m sorry” is a string of text that is statistically unremarkable. If someone is being sincere, their apology is valuable and meaningful, even though apologies have previously been uttered. Likewise, when you tell someone that you’re happy to see them, you are saying something meaningful, even if it lacks novelty.
Something similar holds true for art. Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. ♦
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JERUSALEM — Three hundred and thirty-two days after Hersh Goldberg-Polin danced in the courtyard next to his Jerusalem synagogue on the holiday of Simchat Torah, more than a thousand people gathered there in grief and prayer to mourn his murder by Hamas terrorists in Gaza.
During the Sunday night vigil, the courtyard railings were lined with oversized yellow ribbons to symbolize advocacy for the hostages, Hapoel Jerusalem soccer flags — the 23-year-old’s favorite team — and posters that read, “We love you, stay strong, survive,” a mantra coined by his mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin.
Just hours earlier, one of the posters had been hanging over the balcony of the home of Shira Ben-Sasson, a leader of Hakhel, the Goldberg-Polins’ egalitarian congregation in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem.
“We were sure we would take it down when he came home,” Ben-Sasson said.
The community wanted to unite while respecting the Goldberg-Polins’ desire for privacy, she said, prompting them to organize the prayer gathering.
“But it’s like a Band-Aid or giving first aid, it’s what you do in an emergency. I don’t know how we go on after this,” she said.
A covered courtyard at the Hakhel congregation was filled with mourners the day after Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose family are prominent members, was found to have been killed in Gaza. Hundreds of other people crowded outside the gates, Sept. 1, 2024. (Deborah Danan)
She added that the community, which has a large contingent of English-speaking immigrants, was not prepared for the High Holidays, which begin in about a month. She said, “Seeing his empty seat is hard.”
For Ben-Sasson, who wore a T-shirt bearing the Talmudic dictum “There is no greater mitzvah than the redeeming of captives,” the tragedy is especially painful because, she said, it could have been avoided with a ceasefire agreement that freed hostages.
“Hersh was alive 48 hours ago. We think a deal could have saved him. There is no military solution to this,” she said.
That feeling of bereavement, often mixed with betrayal, pervaded gatherings across Israel on Sunday, as the country struggled with the news that six hostages who may have been freed in an agreement were now dead as negotiations continue to stall. Speakers at protests in Tel Aviv blamed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who himself apologized for not getting the hostages out alive but blamed Hamas for obstructing a deal. The country’s labor union, the Histadrut, has called a national strike on Monday to demand a deal.
A rare early September rain lashed parts of Israel on Sunday, leading to a widespread interpretation: God, too, was weeping.
Some at the Jerusalem gathering, including the relative of another former hostage, said Netanyahu had chosen defeating Hamas over freeing the captives.
Josef Avi Yair Engel’s grandson Ofir was released from Hamas captivity in November. He paid tribute to Hersh Goldberg-Polin, murdered in captivity, in Jerusalem, Sept. 1, 2024. (Deborah Danan)
Josef Avi Yair Engel, whose grandson Ofir, 18, was released from Hamas captivity in November during that month’s ceasefire deal, expressed shock over Hersh’s murder but said he was not surprised, given the wartime policies of Netanyahu’s government.
“We knew months ago this was going to happen. Bibi’s formula, to dismantle Hamas and return the hostages, wasn’t logical. It’s an either/or situation,” Engel said, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname. “He’s tearing the country apart. I’m afraid that in the coming months there won’t be a state at all.”
Engel said he felt a close bond with Hersh’s father Jon Polin, not only because of their joint activism in the hostage families’ tent outside the Prime Minister’s Residence, but also because of their shared identity as Jerusalemites.
“There aren’t many of us in the hostage circle,” he said. “We’re like family.”
Sarah Mann, who did not know the family personally, said the weekend’s tragedy reminded her of Oct. 7.
“This day has sparks of the seventh, which created numbness and an inability to talk. Just complete shock,” she said.
Mourners left notes at a gathering at Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s family synagogue in Jerusalem. Many of the messages used the Hebrew word for “sorry.” (Deborah Danan)
Part of the reason for that, Mann said, was Rachel, who she described as a “force of faith.” Goldberg-Polin’s mother emerged as the most prominent advocate for the hostages globally and became a symbol in her own right as she crisscrossed the world calling for her son’s freedom.
“Millions of people around the world held onto her. Once that was cut, people’s ability to hold onto faith was knocked out today. But even though this has shattered us, we need to keep holding onto God,” Mann said.
For Susi Döring Preston, the day called to mind was not Oct. 7 but Yom Kippur, and its communal solemnity.
She said she usually steers clear of similar war-related events because they are too overwhelming for her.
“Before I avoided stuff like this because I guess I still had hope. But now is the time to just give in to needing to be around people because you can’t hold your own self up any more,” she said, tears rolling down her face. “You need to feel the humanity and hang onto that.”
Like so many others, Döring Preston paid tribute to the Goldberg-Polins’ tireless activism. “They needed everyone else’s strength but we drew so much strength from them and their efforts, “she said. “You felt it could change the outcome. But war is more evil than good. I think that’s the crushing thing. You can do everything right, but the outcome is still devastating.”
Guy Gordon, with his daughter Maya, added a broken heart to the piece of tape he has worn daily to mark the number of days since the hostage crisis began, Sept. 1, 2024. (Deborah Danan)
Guy Gordon, a member of Hakhel who moved to Israel from Dublin, Ireland, in the mid-1990s, said the efforts towards ensuring Hersh’s safe return have been an anchor for the community during the war. The community knew him as the family described him in its announcement of his funeral on Tuesday, as “a child of light, love and peace” who enjoyed exploring the world and coming home to his family, including his parents and younger sisters, Leebie and Orly.
“It gave us something to hope for, and pray for and to demonstrate for,” he said. “We had no choice but to be unreasonably optimistic. Tragically it transpired that he survived until the very end.”
Gordon, like many others in the crowd, wore a piece of duct tape marked with the number of days since Oct. 7 — a gesture initiated by Goldberg-Polin’s mother. Unlike on previous days, though, his tape also featured a broken red heart beside the number.
Nadia Levene, a family friend, also reflected on the improbability of Hersh’s survival.
“He did exactly what his parents begged him to do. He was strong. He did survive. And look what happened,” Levene said.
She hailed Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s “unwavering strength and belief in God,” adding, “There were times I lost faith. I suppose I was angry with God. But she just kept inspiring us all to pray, pray, pray.”
Leah Silver of Jerusalem examined stickers showing Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s mantra for her son Hersh, who was murdered in captivity in Gaza, at a gathering after Hersh’s death, Sept. 1, 2024. (Deborah Danan)
Jerusalem resident Leah Silver rejected politicizing the hostages’ deaths.
“Everything turns political so quickly. I came here because I felt that before all the protests, we need to just mourn for a moment and to pray. And show respect for each other,” she said. “We’ve become confused about who the enemy is. It’s very sad.”
But not everyone at the gathering joined in to sing Israel’s national anthem at the closing of the prayer gathering.
“I’m sorry, I can’t sing ‘Hatikvah,'” Reza Green, a Baka resident who did not know the Goldberg-Polins personally, said. “I’m too angry. We shouldn’t be here.”
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Critic’s Notebook
One of the biggest threats to America’s politics might be the country’s founding document.
Credit... Photo illustration by Ben Denzer
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By Jennifer Szalai
The United States Constitution is in trouble. After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he called for the “ termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” Outraged critics denounced him for threatening a document that is supposed to be “sacrosanct.” By announcing his desire to throw off constitutional constraints in order to satisfy his personal ambitions, Trump was making his authoritarian inclinations abundantly clear.
It’s no surprise, then, that liberals charge Trump with being a menace to the Constitution . But his presidency and the prospect of his re-election have also generated another, very different, argument: that Trump owes his political ascent to the Constitution, making him a beneficiary of a document that is essentially antidemocratic and, in this day and age, increasingly dysfunctional.
After all, Trump became president in 2016 after losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College (Article II). He appointed three justices to the Supreme Court (Article III), two of whom were confirmed by senators representing just 44 percent of the population (Article I). Those three justices helped overturn Roe v. Wade, a reversal with which most Americans disagreed . The eminent legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, worried about opinion polls showing “a dramatic loss of faith in democracy,” writes in his new book, “No Democracy Lasts Forever”: “It is important for Americans to see that these failures stem from the Constitution itself.”
Back in 2018, Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley’s law school, still seemed to place considerable faith in the Constitution, pleading with fellow progressives in his book “We the People” “not to turn their back on the Constitution and the courts.” By contrast, “No Democracy Lasts Forever” is markedly pessimistic. Asserting that the Constitution, which is famously difficult to amend , has put the country “in grave danger,” Chemerinsky lays out what would need to happen for a new constitutional convention — and, in the book’s more somber moments, he entertains the possibility of secession . West Coast states might form a nation called “Pacifica.” Red states might form their own country. He hopes that any divorce, if it comes, will be peaceful.
The prospect of secession sounds extreme, but in suggesting that the Constitution could hasten the end of American democracy, Chemerinsky is far from alone. The argument that what ails the country’s politics isn’t simply the president, or Congress, or the Supreme Court, but the founding document that presides over all three, has been gaining traction, especially among liberals. Books and op-eds critiquing the Constitution have proliferated. Scholars are arguing that the Constitution has incentivized what Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call a “Tyranny of the Minority.”
The anguish is, in some sense, a flip side of veneration. Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us; a growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.
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In a blow for anti-abortion advocates, the Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a challenge to the abortion pill mifepristone , meaning the commonly used drug can remain widely available.
The court found unanimously that the group of anti-abortion doctors who questioned the Food and Drug Administration’s decisions making it easier to access the pill did not have legal standing to sue.
President Joe Biden said in a statement that while the ruling means the pill can remain easily accessible, “the fight for reproductive freedom continues” in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling two years ago that overturned abortion rights landmark Roe v. Wade.
“It does not change the fact that the right for a woman to get the treatment she needs is imperiled if not impossible in many states,” he added.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the court, wrote that while plaintiffs have “sincere legal, moral, ideological, and policy objections to elective abortion and to FDA’s relaxed regulation of mifepristone,” that does not mean they have a federal case.
The plaintiffs failed to show they had suffered any injury, meaning that “the federal courts are the wrong forum for addressing the plaintiffs’ concerns about FDA’s actions,” he added.
“The plaintiffs may present their concerns and objections to the president and FDA in the regulatory process or to Congress and the president in the legislative process,” Kavanaugh wrote. “And they may also express their views about abortion and mifepristone to fellow citizens, including in the political and electoral processes.”
The legal challenge was brought by doctors and other medical professionals represented by the conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom.
“We are disappointed that the Supreme Court did not reach the merits of the FDA’s lawless removal of commonsense safety standards for abortion drugs,” said Erin Hawley, one of the group’s lawyers. She told reporters she is hopeful the underlying lawsuit can continue because three states — Idaho, Missouri and Kansas — have brought their own claims and have different arguments for standing.
By throwing out the case on such grounds, the court avoided reaching a decision on the legal merits of whether the FDA acted lawfully in lifting various restrictions, including one making the drug obtainable via mail, meaning the same issues could yet return to the court in another case.
Another regulatory decision left in place means women can still obtain the pill within 10 weeks of gestation instead of seven.
Likewise a decision to allow health care providers other than physicians to dispense the pill will remain in effect.
The court’s decision to roll back abortion rights two years ago led to a wave of new abortion restrictions in conservative states.
Then, the court suggested it was removing itself from the political debate over abortion, but with litigation continuing to rage over abortion access, the justices are continuing to play a pivotal role.
Abortion rights supporters welcomed the ruling, with Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, saying she was relieved at the outcome but angered about the case lingering in the court system so long.
“Thank goodness the Supreme Court rejected this unwarranted attempt to curtail access to medication abortion, but the fact remains that this meritless case should never have gotten this far,” she said in a statement.
Danco Laboratories, manufacturer of Mifeprex, the brand version of mifepristone, praised the ruling too, saying it was good for the drug approval process writ large.
In rejecting the challenge, the court “maintained the stability of the FDA drug approval process, which is based on the agency’s expertise and on which patients, health care providers and the U.S. pharmaceutical industry rely,” company spokeswoman Abigail Long said.
Anti-abortion groups expressed disappointment, saying that the ruling highlighted the importance of this year’s election in which Democrat Biden, who has pledged to defend abortion rights, faces off against Republican Donald Trump, who has the strong backing of conservatives who oppose abortion.
“Joe Biden and the Democrats are hell-bent on forcing abortion on demand any time for any reason, including DIY mail-order abortions, on every state in the country,” Marjorie Dannenfeiser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, said.
If Trump were to win the election, his appointees to the FDA would be a position to impose new restrictions on mifepristone. Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez-Rodriguez, alluded to the possibility in a call with reporters after the ruling. Calling the case “one tactic in a broader, relentless strategy” by anti-abortion activists, Chavez-Rodriguez said if Trump is elected, his advisers and allies would try to ban abortion nationwide “without the help of Congress or the court,” and also restrict access to contraception — a threat, she said, to blue as well as red states.
The mifepristone dispute is not the only abortion case currently before the court. It is also due to decide whether Idaho’s strict abortion ban prevents doctors in emergency rooms from performing abortions when a pregnant woman is facing dangerous complications.
Mifepristone is used as part of a two-drug FDA-approved regimen that is now the most common form of abortion in the United States.
Abortion is effectively banned altogether in 14 states, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that backs abortion rights.
The FDA had the backing of the pharmaceutical industry, which has warned that any second-guessing of the approval process by untrained federal judges could cause chaos and deter innovation.
Last year, Texas-based U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk issued a sweeping ruling that completely invalidated the FDA’s approval of the pill, leading to panic among abortion-rights activists that it would be banned nationwide.
The Supreme Court last April put that ruling on hold, meaning the pill remained widely available while litigation continued.
The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in August then narrowed Kacsmaryk’s decision but left in place his conclusion that the FDA’s move to lift restrictions starting in 2016 was unlawful.
Both sides appealed to the Supreme Court. The court in December took up the Biden administration’s appeal in defense of the later FDA decisions, but it opted against hearing the challenge to the original approval of mifepristone in 2000.
The Supreme Court focused solely on the later FDA action, including the initial 2021 decision that made the drug available by mail, which was finalized last year.
This article first appeared on NBCNews.com .
Lawrence Hurley covers the Supreme Court for NBC News Digital.
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