If I were asked (as the author here was) to put together a piece on "10 ideas for the next 10 years" as part of a series subtitled "a thinker's guide to the mos

If I were asked (as the author here was) to put together a piece on "10 ideas for the next 10 years" as part of a series subtitled "a thinker's guide to the most important trends of the new decade" - and for a national magazine to boot - I would at least try to make it tight and coherent, backed up by logical thought and good examples. In this article, the author nowhere even states the theme he is trying to develop - instead, he presents a grab-bag of under-developed ideas, many of them cliched. If you read the piece itself, I challenge you - quick now - to state its principal theme. Here is my best guess: "Young people of all political persuasions are today increasingly rejecting middle-class ideals of school and work in favor of new forms of communitarian living by which they are returning to the soil and are otherwise seeking to escape the reach of nanny-state government." This is just a guess cobbled together from fragments scattered throughout this piece. What are those fragments? Within a few paragraphs (about 1,000 words), we have a jumble of ideas that includes: 30% school drop-out rates; educational stagnation; projections of "fiscal doom;" jobless recovery; New Deal programs about to "starve;" sputtering industrial agriculture; millions of families living "off the grid;" food-distribution systems based on ancient Mayan know-how; communes and co-ops avoiding the nanny state; bourgeois rebels; exploding home schools; self-sufficient vertical farms built from scrap; an underground economy using barter/virtual currencies; libertarian "hacktivists; ever-increasing productivity levels; a surge in home jobs that will revive suburbs that are today "ghost towns;" fewer private homes and more "cohousing communities;" "gated communities" effectively seceding from their municipalities to pursue their own view of the good life; "broadband socialism;" a "new individualism on the left and the right; "freeganism;" "cage-free" families; and 23-year-olds plotting a cultural insurrection that will knock American society "off its axis." It all makes the head spin (not the ideas themselves, about which I do not comment, but the way in which they are presented). When it is all said and done, who knows what the author really intended? He makes you work really hard to figure it out and then leaves you with a sense that the effort was not really worth it. For some excellent guidelines on good essay writing (in this case, for undergraduates), see this splendid piece that got few HN upvotes when it ran (at an odd time, I think) but sets forth fine guidelines for aspiring students writing in this format: http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/02/good_writing_in_political_scie.html http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/02/good_writing_in_politic....