Summary Of Cynthia Ozick's Essay 'On Excellence'

“On Excellence”

1. Through out Cynthia Ozick’s essay, “On Excellence,” she uses the words lavish and confined to define excellence as well as phrases like ripe generosity and condemned by my own nature. Ozick uses stories of certain things her mother did when she was growing up to explain how excellence is defined in each of their perspectives. For example, according to Ozick, she describes her mother as “endlessly leafy and flowering” (242) and herself as, “a pinched perfectionist” (242). Ozick points out that her mother and her type of excellence are completely different but each is still considered a type of excellence. She understands that her mother’s life was lived to the fullest and that it had its own form of excellence which was not paying so much attention to the small things, like her type of excellence, but to pay attention to the main thought.

2. Ozick uses the metaphor of the snail to describe her and the way she views excellence. She connects it to what the ancients believed about snails: how they work so hard that they wear themselves away until they are completely gone. Ozick does this in her writing. She states, “It is my narrow strait, this snail’s road: the track of the sentence I am writing now; and when I

In Simson L. Garfinkle’s essay, “Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth,” Garfinkle uses a subtitle stating, “ Why the online encyclopedia’s epistemology should worry those who care about traditional notions of accuracy” (244). The subtitle is usually used, as explanatory title for the work the reader will read. In this case, it’s providing the purpose of the essay, which carries the reader to think further into what the essay is really about. Similar to how teachers sometimes use warm ups in class to get the class thinking on what the class will be learning for the day. Because Garfinkle’s essay is all about how Wikipedia may be an unreliable source to use it starts off with a catchy subtitle explaining why people should be more