WILLIAM HAZLITT’S ESSAYS ON WRITING AND STYLE AS A SOURCE FOR

ACADEMIC WRITING

Assoc. Prof. Dr. O. Anossova1, 2

1
Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Russia
2
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia

ABSTRACT
Among W. Hazlitt’s essays a teacher of Academic English can find a lot of essays about remote and present
authors, their books, their texts, their works and the style properly discussed in his essays. In addition, literary
criticism, writing and style are the subjects repeatedly occurring in W. Hazlitt’s works. William Hazlitt himself
was a writer whose exquisite, elegant and ‘familiar’ style made and make reading of his essays attractive and
pleasant. His essays can serve two purposes, they present logical and gradual instructions investigating the
writing process and, at the same time, they can be taken as an ideal illustration of the style to achieve. In
conclusion, the English Romantic essay being comparatively short and thematically consistent does not only
build students’ academic vocabulary, enrich their writing skills with syntactic structures and useful phrases but
also they contribute to broadening students’ horizons, laying their cultural background and facilitating further
intercultural or even transcultural communication implicitly promoting a teaching process as well as improving
students’ skills in English.
Keywords: Romanticism prose, academic writing, style, genres, journalism