Read the essay from the New York Times and write a 250 to 300 word essay answering the questions on the bottom. If you want to write, please finish your essay before Thursday. Good luck and happy writing!
Are Manners Important?
Put your napkin on your lap. Keep your elbows off the table. Chew with your mouth closed. Society imparts all sorts of manners for us to follow at the dinner table, and elsewhere.
Are manners important? What should be their ultimate purpose?
In the New York Times Magazine essay “A Manners Manifesto,” Tamar Adler writes:
For 4,000 years, humans have implored one another to mind their manners. I am personally invested in the crusade for two reasons. First, my brother and I were raised by a man who, as a child, was sent from the table hungry if he so much as slouched. At my own table growing up, when we small savages a) failed to put our napkins in our laps; b) ate before everyone was served; c) served ourselves first; d) opened our mouths while chewing; e) moved our forks from the left to the right hand; f) ate with our hands; g) failed to say please, thank you or excuse me; h) put our elbows on the table; i) did not ask permission to stand; or j) failed to eat soup properly (a nearly impossible task, requiring always spooning away, sipping noiselessly while sitting bolt upright, obtaining any final spoonfuls by a discreet tip of the bowl), we were ordered to push back from the table and contemplate our philistinism for several monstrous minutes before we could return, rehabilitated, to try again.Second, I have always found manners books absorbing and have read all of any age that crossed my path. Like most rules, manners are written from social heights. Many decrees for how (or how not) to do things — to use snail tongs and fish knives, finger bowls and consommé cups and other formalities of fine dining — seem built to keep interlopers out, as part of what Charles William Day, in “Hints on Etiquette and the Usages of Society” (1834), calls “the barrier which society draws around itself as a protection.” Some standards change, like passwords, as soon as they’re no longer secret. Forks had to be switched from left to right hand, until everyone was doing it, and then they had to be held fast in the left one. (Europe went along with the change; the New World, in a streak of rebellion, didn’t.) Hands must be on the table . . . or must be off. Asparagus is finger food until it is fork food. Many of the guidelines are anodyne; but any populist would be justified, scanning the lot, in seeing a system for social segregation, and declaring that none of it matters — and that books on etiquette are useful only to prop up the legs of the kitchen table.And yet: Throughout history, there have also been good rules, important reminders of things we often forget. …
Students: Read the entire essay, then tell us …
— Are manners important? What should be their ultimate purpose?
— What role do manners play in your family?
— Do you have good manners? Explain.
— Have you been taught any manners you believe are unnecessary, pretentious or simply ostentatious? Are there any manners you think are essential? Describe.
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