Today's post grew out of a couple of throwaway comments from my 'proper admin' notes about a post from February. As I proofread those comments, I realized there was more to it than I thought and decided to expand it out into its own post.
I'll quickly summarize the original post. It was about the 'supermoon' last November and my disappointment with it. It included the standard TOA ranting and raving about a number of loosely related topics and made a half-hearted attempt to explain why I liked sunrise more than Super Moon Rise.
In hindsight, the post was well-intended but not among my best. In fact, in some ways I consider it my worst. I've been thinking quite a bit about why this is.
It is inevitable on TOA (as it is with any collection of writing) that some posts will come out better than others. Despite my best efforts, hours of toil may produce digital litter. One time, I hit 'ctrl-p' by accident and produced actual (recyclable!) litter. That's part of the process, especially with essay writing. When I start, I rarely know how good the product will be.
But there was something different about this failure. Each revision did nothing to improve the post. I sensed the post was doomed but I could not quite pinpoint what the cause was. I only knew there was a problem.
The topic of the supermoon seemed good enough, the writing had room for improvement, and the post was possibly the wrong length. But I acknowledged that the standards around here are pretty low, concluded that my technical shortcoming were not dragging the piece down, and did not find a satisfying solution to the length question.
Eventually, like with most TOA-related neuroses, I forgot about the post soon after I scheduled it.
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At the end of February, I reread David Foster Wallace's essay collection, Consider the Lobster. In 'Authority and American Usage', Wallace makes a point about the remote or 'imperial' persona, often established by those who insist on using 'one' or 'we' in the place of the first-person.
The idea intrigued me. Using 'one' or 'we' instead of the first person- I must have missed school the day this concept was taught. But clever me, I knew what Wallace referred to. I wondered how often I used 'one/we' in the past when a simple 'I' would have improved my writing.
It seems inevitable to leave school thinking this is the best way to relate knowledge. Teachers almost always instruct students by explaining someone else's ideas, discoveries, or understandings. A teacher's original ideas become unrelated to the teacher's authority. In most classrooms, a teacher has no choice but to acknowledge the distance from the material by using the vocabulary Wallace points out ('one sees the crab rangoons fall, we know this is due to gravity, though those greasy fingers from the spring rolls did not help did they, heh heh heh...'). (1)
A quick browse through my own history on TOA unearths several
But in each case of such writing, the distancing effect is obvious. It is the common denominator of each sentence that sees 'one' or 'we' deputize for 'I'. When Wallace pointed out this style in his usage essay, I immediately understood that it applied to me. And I knew exactly which post to review first.
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One of my favorite cartoons is from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. The concept covered is 'Mount Stupid', the name given to the rush of excitement that comes when learning anything new. Atop Mount Stupid, self-appointed experts mingle with newly-minted geniuses to trade hot stock tips, identify 'Black Swan' events, and deliver uninterrupted monologues about the individual mandate.
Last week, those on this esteemed summit (perhaps on break from filling out Mensa applications) might have spotted me halfway down the other side as I reread my post about the supermoon on a borrowed laptop (I do not own any useful writing tools). Like anyone stumbling down to base camp, I realized that my initial ascent to the peak of 'Mount Stupid' was merely the starting point- for from that vantage point, I saw how much more remained to learn about distant writing.
In reviewing my supermoon post, I noted once more the detached writing. But I was surprised to find sparing use of the 'one/we' technique. Most of the post was written about what I saw, what I did, and so on.
And yet, the distance was there. Merely injecting first-person pronouns did not bring me any closer to the topic. Or to put it another way, to talk of what 'one knows' guarantees distant writing but to replace it with 'I know' does not necessarily bridge the gap. (All fruits are apples, not all apples are fruits, or something like that?)
The distance between me and the post came not from sentence construction but from my avoidance of WHY the topic was worth writing about. The post reminded me of a publisher's comment- 'writing about the weather is difficult'. It's true if the writing only describes the weather. And that's all this post did, essentially stating 1) there was a big-ass moon and 2) it wasn't all that big, though, because 3) did I mention I like sunrise?
What I should have focused on instead was why expecting this to be a Big Event was an error. The flaw in my reasoning: I was going out to see a moon despite never thinking 'you know what, I wish the moon was bigger' during any past moon viewing.
Though no money changed hands, my trip to the harbor that evening exemplified all the values of Rampaging Consumerism: bigger = better, novelty = beauty, don't miss The Big Game or the Once In A Lifetime Opportunity, etc. A post about THAT might have worked.
So, to my readers, a sincere apology. I am sorry for simply listing observations without engagement. The next time I catch myself falsifying membership in a group I am unqualified to join, I will delete the post and replace it with something heartfelt instead. Maybe I can write about that wild Maniac Magee?
Thank you for reading, though, and thank you for coming back.
Until Friday,
Tim
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. Not a Chinese food footnote (sorry)
In On Writing, Stephen King wrote about the importance of the reader understanding that the author believes in what is written. This must extend to teaching. A student who understands that the teacher believes in the lecture will respond differently than a student who suspects the teacher is parroting another's beliefs.
In college, I used to laugh with friends about professors who simply read the textbook aloud. I thought it was clever to point out that I could just read the book and get the same information.
What I would have pointed were I as clever as I thought was that these professors never made us students feel that they believed in their own lecture. The best professors did this naturally by relating the lesson to current events or applying the concepts to real-world problems.
The worst professors eroded their own authority by unleashing wave after wave of quoted textbook on us slumbering students, reading aloud from the expensive text with an air of 'well, if you happen to disagree with this proven concept, don't complain to me, I didn't come up with it, go ask the author yourself'.
