Follow the Rules Until You’re Famous Enough to Break Them (or, “My Professors Always Told Me to Keep Titles Short”)
When I was growing up, the evolution of my essay writing largely involved lessons in the importance of structure. Paragraphs need a topic sentence, supporting details, and a concluding sentence that restates the topic sentence. This eventually turned into You need an opening paragraph followed by supporting paragraphs with a conclusion at the end. At some point the notion of a “counter-point” was added without much explanation. Beyond basic structure, though, my pre-college lessons didn’t extend very far.
Then, the “big things” in college were Keep your argument in mind. Who is your audience? Focus on your argument. Remember who the paper is for! Restate your argument. What will your audience think of this? Bring everything back to the argument. See a pattern? Argument and audience.
Argument, I got. It was, in my mind, a fancy way of labeling the “topic sentence” that I had known before college and giving it a more definitive spin toward having a point to make. The one that I never have fully understood is audience. Yes, I get the basic idea: who is reading your paper? Or more importantly, who do you want to read your paper?
Again, I got it for the most part. What I didn’t quite realize initially was that “Who do you want to read your paper?” and “Who do you want to view your paper as good?” are two completely separate issues. In the back of my mind, one-hundred percent of the time, my answer is that I want to be the one who enjoys my paper. I want to look back on what I’ve written with pride and tell myself the product is the best possible product I could have produced. But I’ve learned that this isn’t always the most conducive to writing a paper for my audience – whoever they may be.
Before I get ahead of myself, however, I should mention that I first came to view my audience through two different lenses during my freshman writing course. I took a paper into office hours for some basic feedback. I’ll be honest, much of what I heard was good – it was a very personal paper and being part of the “narrative” assignment, it was pretty free-form. However, talking with my instructor, I began to realize that underneath the idea of an hypothetical “audience” was the idea of the actual audience: my professor, the grader.
And again, in this particular instance – being the new-to-college-writing freshman that I was – the advice I received for both audiences was actually very helpful. It wasn’t until the next semester during my English 225 course – Academic Argumentation – that I really encountered my first dissonance between actual audience, hypothetical audience, and my own interests. Our assignment was to write an interview-based essay. Simple enough, but I made the mistake of picking my essay based on someone I knew in a position of relative power – though “power” is a term I use lightly.
Why was this a mistake? Well, the person I chose to interview was a youth leader at a friend’s church. He had been involved in expanding the church and planning some of the Sunday masses. The problem was that I didn’t exactly have much else going in the way of personal involvement. I’d attended this church a couple times but it was mostly to see friends, and I wasn’t exactly a “religious” person. But I decided to stick with something “easy” and interview the youth leader anyway.
And build an entire paper around it.
To make a long story shorter, I ended up with a paper whose argument I didn’t actually support or believe in and it pains me physically to even think about the paper now. I had an audience in mind for which I wrote and I catered much of my writing to my instructor’s advice, but my personal alignment with the paper was off and it made for what is now my least-favorite piece of college writing. Okay, definitely no more writing something you don’t have a vested interest in.
So I continued to write, and it mostly went well enough that I was happy with my work. Rarely ecstatic, but definitely above the level of that paper-which-must-not-be-named. There were a few papers here and there which I rushed at the last minute or wrote without much thought, but, by and large, I wasn’t really shaken by any of my writing until my first English 325 piece.
Now, something you should realize about my narrative writing: it’s not always happy. Narrative essays are by far my favorite, but I tend to lean towards the dark, dramatic, or depressing. So for my first 325 piece, I decided to do the opposite. I – me, personally – wanted to write a paper that showed myself and my hypothetical readers that I didn’t always write one type of essay.
So I wrote an essay that fell within the bounds of what the prompt had asked of me – specifically, any essay about a recent (i.e., within a month or so) moment in my life. Yes, that was it. No other strict requirements, just a basic timeframe to keep in mind before writing whatever I wanted. The supposed goal, to examine one’s own dialogue from a third-person perspective to hopefully gain some insight on the nature of conversation. Or something like that. In my particular essay, I included dialogue spoken between myself and my girlfriend. Sure, there were some less-than-cheery moments in the paper, but I wanted to try to shift it toward the positive by the end… and I did!
It should be noted that the essay had a very specific word count to which I was to adhere. For this reason, I used “he said, she said” remarks sparingly. After all, it was a conversation between two people. I figured new paragraphs would be enough to differentiate speakers. For example:
“Yeah, they’re going up north to the UP. I figured we couldn’t go though, with your work and my class.”
“Well, I mean, I can request time off.”
“But it wouldn’t be worth it to just go for a day or two… you’d have to get a couple days off…”
“So? I would have just needed to request them off. It would have been fine.”
“Yeah, but last year was such a hassle, and I know you don’t always like being around my family…”
“What do you mean?”
“I just didn’t think you had a lot of fun last summer. My mom got upset and I know you don’t like to be around that so…” I trailed off.
Now, I recognize that there is one specific mention of a speaker. My goal in this, however, was to emphasize the rapid back-and-forth exhibited between the two of us. The last line is the only one with a speaker because, at that point, the conversation trails off and gets a moment of reprieve. I, personally, felt that adding “I said” or “she said” after each line would take away from the nature of the conversation. More importantly, I simply couldn’t fit those clarifications in the essay within the confines of the word count.
My instructor, however, found this confusing. It was a rookie mistake to not include speakers! Never mind the word count. It’s also a rookie mistake to not know the best places to cut extra meat from your paper. When I asked about what to cut (after I’d received my less-than-stellar, “good… but not great” grade) I recall a lack of any distinct answer as to where he would have cut. Some vague advice, I did receive. The most specific advice, however, was to just include speakers in future essays, no matter how few people were speaking in a scene or how distinct each person’s dialogue was to him/her as a character.
During this conversation, I got a sense that, beneath it all, he really just wanted more drama out of the paper; that he wasn’t happy with the direction I took this essay. It was a sense I’d gotten on more than one occasion during class – that he had a very distinct idea of what our papers could be (regardless of their actual story) if we just wrote it with his words instead of our own. Maybe it wasn’t the first time, but it was definitely the most dramatic example I can think of where an instructor’s opinion definitively affected my grade, despite strict adherence to the assignment instructions. It was a pretty low moment for me. I finally set out to try something different, and it hurt because of someone else’s preference for drama and conflicting rules about word count.
On a completely unrelated note, around the time I wrote this essay – for a class which was built around emulation of published texts – I began reading Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road. This novel, in similar style to McCarthy’s other novels, is devoid of any quotation marks, which he feels "blot the page up with weird little marks." It also features quite a few instances of back-and-forth dialogue between a father and a son (both nameless), which often times only consists of one-or-two-word sentences. Needless to say, it can get confusing keeping track of who is saying what and when someone is even speaking out loud.
McCarthy won a Pulitzer Prize for this novel.
One final example of writing disparity in academia is that which I’ve found to exist between students, professors, and graduate student instructors (GSIs). Take, for example, a recent essay submitted just last month wherein I was to compare two images and discuss different aspects of each. Before turning in my final draft, I went to my professor’s office hours to discuss the essay and make notes of where I could improve. One line from the essay stuck out during these office hours, “In the picture, there is no separation from between the two of them – there is literally no way to tell quite where the tree ends and where the girl begins.” My professor remarked that this was a good line and that it was demonstrative of the point I was trying to emphasize.
Little did I know, the essay was not going to be graded by my professor, it was going to be graded by the GSI. When I received my graded paper, that same exact line was pointed out, except this time, the feedback wasn’t quite so positive: “The strength of that language encourages your reader to disagree.” Yes, the same line for which I had been praised by the professor had also cost me part of my grade thanks to the GSI. Now, there are a number of factors that went into this particular dichotomy of opinions, but the result is still the same: a lower grade, thanks entirely to a differing opinion held by the grader.
In all my time at the University, I’ve found one essay to work exactly as I had hoped it to. Following the 325 “incident” (or, what feels like an incident to me…), I wrote a much different essay. This time though, I was okay with adding some drama. In fact, this second paper is, unquestionably, my favorite piece of college writing. It fit my hypothetical audience, my actual audience, and it was about something I had a serious take in, not only in general, but especially so at the time of writing. I’d found the magic combination.
But that’s really what it is now, “magic.” I have a hard time – especially with narrative writing – creating an essay that hits all targets. My instinct tells me to write for myself; my experience tells me to write for my audience. And while I’ve gotten better at bending my essays towards one target or another, I’m not entirely convinced it’s possible without a bit of luck. The writing process comes down to a lot more than writing and I still don’t know if that’s for the better or for the worse.
There is, perhaps, one other instance in which I’ve written something that did not strike me as failing to achieve what I set out to achieve. This particular piece was not something written for a class, or for a grade, or really, even for an audience. Way back in the year 2014 A.D., a website formerly known as “WoW Insider” used to publish articles related to the online game, World of Warcraft (or, “WoW”) – a game which I played frequently and in whose community I was pretty involved. This website regularly published “Community Blog Topics” in which readers were called upon to submit blog posts related to a particular topic. One particular week, the publishers asked for readers to design a hypothetical holiday in World of Warcraft. (WoW has a number of in-game holidays that reflect real-world holidays.)
So, I wrote. No one was grading my response; any feedback I’d receive would be from like-minded individuals who would, at most, be considered my peers. The final product was meant as an open forum for discussion and the writing itself was done for nothing more than fun and as a way of engaging with something to which I had a connection. Moreover, I never once felt crunched for time. It was hard to let myself down when everything I wrote could be edited later, elaborated upon, discussed, or simply ignored if I was not happy with the end result.
This was, of course, an entirely different kind of writing. It was done for fun. The “magic” of successful academic writing melted away in the face of an assignment-less assignment. But does this make successful academic writing a nearly hopeless prospect? In its current iteration, the answer is a resounding maybe. Perhaps the fact that instructors often expect students to meet certain goals (“write a paper with a clear argument”; “write a paper focused dialogue”; “write a paper about a fictional experience”) but grade us on standards that expand beyond said goals creates this disparity. I can write an essay that focuses on dialogue and meets a word count; I can’t write the same sort of essay and hope to meet all the criteria held hidden in my instructor’s mind, unconsciously or otherwise.
That’s not to say “unsuccessful” – in some mind or another – writing can’t be useful. I have still learned how to develop an argument, I’ve still learned the importance of writing on topics that actually interest me, and, yes, I’ve still learned how to tailor writing to a specific audience’s interest. All of these characteristics have improved over my years of being a student writer – the World of Warcraft piece I wrote certainly utilized some of these aspects and was arguably better for it! In their own right, they certainly have value and can contribute to the betterment of a piece. But making them all work together, and then some, is more difficult.
Without magic, or the alignment of stars, or some sort of blessing from [your god of choice], the best writing I’ve done, for myself and for my audience, is that which meets all the explicit goals and leaves all other elaborations to the writer. No judgments, no worries, just pure writing on a topic for the sake of writing on a topic.