Ruskin and other sages who present themselves as masters of visual and other experience also offer their own intense experiences of reality as a standard for their audiences and teach them the correct way to see, think, and feel. The sage teaches, in other words, how to approach reality correctly. Of course, in testing relevant experience upon his own pulse, as it were, the sage obviously presents himself as the one in charge, as the single source of knowledge and wisdom. This manner of proceeding has several possible effects. First, it can thus simply offer readers some information they cannot otherwise obtain, but it can also emphasize that only the sage can provide it at all. Furthermore, the sage's self-presentation as master of experience can, like his particularly aggressive acts of definition, make clear that the audience has fallen away from the truth and desperately needs him to help them return. Thus, although this stance also serves to create credibility for the writer, it may have as well the far more polemical effect of attacking his opponents, audience, or both.

These emphases upon authentic experience and the writer's superior ability to obtain it point to the romantic roots of the genre. In the first place, unlike the wisdom statements of Joseph Addison or Samuel Johnson, such work not only avoids generalization, but also takes as its most obvious program the communication of specific facts. Second, not only does it side with romantic specificity in opposition to neoclassical generalization, but it also obviously takes the romantic position that truths of physical and mental experience, rather than the ideas we may generalize from them, are the proper way into understanding whatever subject may be under investigation.

G. Robert Stange is almost certainly correct when he argues that such attempts to communicate the feeling of a particular experience in nonfictional prose first appeared in nineteenth-century art criticism. According to him, whereas eighteenth-century prose had been primarily "cognitive, by the middle of the nineteenth century it had become expressionist," and in the work of what he terms "conscious prose stylists" from Lamb to Pater "logical organization and a conceptual framework are more and more often abandoned in favor of emotive effects and a perceptual scheme." In particular, as Stange points out, the writer "tends to avoid the abstract in favor of the immediate: he will try to imitate a speaking voice, or express the rhythm of the mind as it responds to or perceives concrete experience. Special value is attached to image sequences, to discrete data of precise observation," and to representing "particular aesthetic as well as emotional experiences."