World's Shortest Final Exam

( cited recently in The New Yorker)


Subject: Six-word memoir


In the brevity-is-the-soul-of-wit camp sits a new book, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.



A few samples:


After Harvard, had baby with crackhead.- Robin Templeton


70 years, few tears, hairy ears.- Bill Querengesser


Watching quietly from every door frame.- Nicole Resseguie


Savior complex makes for many disappointments.- Alanna Schubach



Boiling down one's life is an interesting exercise: Would you focus on a plot twist that shaped you, on a theme that's surfaced again and again across diverse circumstances, or on the defining aspects of your character? Getting yourself "right" in six words is probably much harder than penning a 61-pound memoir like Anonymous (Had many lovers. Wrote about them.)


How about getting a rhetorician right in six words? Here is your challenge: Choose one of the rhetoricians we have studied and write a six word version of her or his rhetoric. No duplications of rhetoricians, so post yours on the blog to claim it. I claim Quintilian:


Teach men: be good, speak well. -Quintilian


What's yours? You may claim your rhetorician on the blog before you are ready to post your six words.
Vicki TB