Back in my MFA days (not so long ago, but starting to creep into the memories stage), one of my beloved instructors used to clown a fresh-from-undergraduate colleague about calling our stories “texts.”
“It’s a book,” he’d say. “You mean the story?” he’d ask.
It became a bit of a running joke in workshop, but the gist of his message was that academic-speak was not welcome in the discussion. I tended to agree, and not just to be a brown-noser.
Academic language may strive for specificity in its multisyllabic, complexified phrasing. All it ends up doing in a creative environment is separating us from the experience of a) creating and b) immersing in the creation.
I’m thinking about this as a result of reading Copyblogger’s article on the the subject of writing like a college student. Many people are bookmarking it on social bookmarking sites, so it’s a topic that resonates. The post’s focus is on copywriting, marketing, and blogging, but I think it holds true for all styles of writing. The article’s title claims “Writing Like a College Student Will Kill You Online.” Not just online. With the exception of the ivory towers, It’ll kill you everywhere.
Why obfuscate and put so much value on what I like to call $3-words, when simple, clear language transcends boundaries and gets your message to as many people as possible? The only answer I can come up with is that the writer of said precious words actually wants to erect boundaries, and only communicate to a select population.
I guess that’s cool for academics. I don’t want the way I write to keep people from being able to understand what I’m trying to say. That makes little sense to me. Guess it’s also reminds me why I never went for that PhD.
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Comments 7
I’m with you on this Gordon. The freshmen that I teach will often try to incorporate so-called $3 words, but without grounding, it just sounds like they’re trying hard to “sound academic”.
Real trouble happens when they don’t understand the words they are using. For example, (and I don’t know why this happened this year, but it seems to be a trend) I had a number of students misuse “the media portrays” this Fall. They kept combining “portrays” and “of”
I kept getting sentences like:
“The media often portrays of women like Paris Hilton and Britney Speers (sp?)”
In fact, it happened so often that it was starting to drive me nuts.
My students are sophisticated enough to know that the word media often goes with verb “portrays” but can’t seem to understand that portrays is a verb and doesn’t need “of”. Furthermore, they don’t really understand the difference between shows, displays and and displays, so that portrays becomes a fancy substitute for the word show. I assume they tack on the word “of” because they they are confusing it with “portrayal of”
anyway, nice to see you posting again ! Hope all is well down New York way.
Armand
Posted 14 Dec 2007 at 1:19 pm ¶Sorry to be a downer, but it looks like your instructors didn’t cover the difference between “it’s” and “its” in your MFA program.
Posted 15 Dec 2007 at 3:15 pm ¶Har har. Everyone’s a comedic copyeditor. DJ, you should stay tuned for my next article on anonymous Internet snark, aka, digital herpes.
Thanks for your comments, as always, Armand.
Posted 15 Dec 2007 at 5:17 pm ¶Part of me fears writing posts and comments about grammar for the specific reason that those types of posts invite automatic scrutiny like the time that New Yorker’s Louis Menand did his best to rip Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots and Leaves) a new a-hole.
Anyway, there’s a difference between knowing a rule and making mistakes (which is something I will do every day of my life) and mixing and matching the rules of grammar in a haphazard attempt to sound smart.
Long ago, I made peace with the fact that Id never be a copy editor.
or some might say-
I never portray of a copy editor.
I don’t expect my students to be flawless. I expect them to develop awareness of the writing process and demonstrate improvement in certain skill sets.
cheers-
Armand
Posted 16 Dec 2007 at 12:16 am ¶The quickest cure is one I use with my 8th grader son when he’s struggling over getting the words right in a writing assignment. I tell him to just say it to me out loud in very simple words, then to write that down and we can always jazz it up later. We rarely see the need to jazz it up at all. Simple, clear writing works, no matter the age, grade, or assignment.
Posted 21 Dec 2007 at 2:45 am ¶Literary theory, cultural theory, philosophy: they all have a lingo of their own. I enjoyed reading them and learning how to talk and write that way. For me, it wasn’t about obfuscation, it was about developing different ways of thinking–similar to learning a foreign language and discovering nuances of meaning that your own language doesn’t quite get at.
Stories and poems don’t use the same language as literary theory (although there are some who think that less accessible poetry “obfuscates” when in fact it’s attempting to create new meanings). I do agree that in general, poetry and stories are speaking to a different (and wider) audience than literary theory. I think that’s part of why I was drawn away from academic writing and into creative writing (although there are certainly people who do both creative writing and academic writing). And once I did, I really enjoyed creating with simpler words. It’s certainly not less difficult. It’s just different.
In the most recent Poets & Writers, poet Reginald Shepherd writes a litle bit about how as a poet he also values literary theory. He uses some of that heavy theoretical language when writing about identity, and he also uses quite common vernacular in the article. In a way, he’s bilingual!
Posted 22 Dec 2007 at 1:02 am ¶PS: I do agree that in a creative writing workshop, using the word “text” instead of “book” or “story” is like using French in a Spanish classroom.
Posted 22 Dec 2007 at 1:04 am ¶Speak Your Mind