A Prize Winner ; Home-Schooler Tops Neh Essay Awards
The Washington Times › November 01, 2004
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Summary
A home-schooled 16-year-old from Colorado has won a $5,000 federal grand prize for writing the best essay from America's schoolchildren about the importance of Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg Address.
Rachel Shafer of Longmont, Colo., wrote that even President Lincoln sat down after his two-minute speech to consecrate the Gettysburg, Pa., battlefield cemetery, calling it "a flat failure" after featured speaker Edward Everett had worn out the crowd with a two-hour oration.See the full content of this document
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A Prize Winner ; Home-Schooler Tops Neh Essay Awards
But she wrote, "The Gettysburg Address may be the most successful failure in the history of public speaking. ... Its brevity lends weight to every word, and it is not only brief, but simple, with a succession of ideas as powerful and inevitable as the cannon blasts that had echoed through Gettysburg four months before."
She also wrote, "Today, the Gettysburg Address continues to fill our hearts with a desire 'to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us' " - using Lincoln's words on Nov. 19, 1863.Rachel said in an i...See the full content of this document
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