Clarity, Purity, and Other Such Nonsense

Clarity, Purity, and Other Such Nonsense

Yesterday while my brother, father, and myself were driving to Costco, my brother and I got into an argument, like we are bound to do. He’s currently teaching a UF class about the current state of Amercian health care to true freshman who are majoring mostly in Health Sciences. Common assignments are reading responses and single-page essays, as per the UF program’s expectations. They don’t like to write, and he doesn’t like to grade their writing, because he has no idea what he’s supposed to be grading on.

I told him that grading young writers doesn’t mean you’re evaluating whether or not you agree or disagree with their ideas, you’re reading to see how clear and effectively developed those ideas are. He told me he’s only ever been harshly graded at the whimsy of opinionated teachers who marked him down because the idea he expresssed did not match their own. I rolled my eyes and told him that couldn’t have possibly been the case. He insisted it was, and that writing was simply a guessing game where you tried to guess what whoever was grading you wanted to read, and then wrote that. I told him to give me an example.

He said, “Two students have an idea about what water is supposed to symbolize. One says it symbolizes clarity, and the other says it symbolizes purity. They both write a paper on why and turn it in. If the teacher thinks that water symbolizes purity, even just a little bit more than clairty, and even if they think so privately, to themselves, and if they never tell the class their opinion because they think they it will influence what they write about, they will still give a better grade to the student who wrote about purity. They can’t not do it.”

I rolled my eyes even harder. To me, the only thing more asinine about the scenario he described is that he actually believes it’s a reality. I guess to him it is. I asked, “What if the student who wrote about clarity was so compelling that the teacher changed their mind?” He said no, that couldn’t happen. English teachers would never entertain the idea that one of their students is a better writer than they are, he explained.

I wanted to bang my head against the window.

What happened to my poor, dear brother? Did his high school writing education, the very extent of his tutelage on rhetoric, fail him that badly? Or did his own stubborn aversion to the field as a whole lead him to his own hyperbolized conslusions about how it always has been, and always will be, inaccessible? I told him he better tell his students what all his opinions are on American health care are and encourage them to structure their papers around those perspectives if they plan to get a good grade in his class.

He told me to stop being a smartass. I said, “You first.”

Bartholomae’s ideas about the pressure to create effective discourse that the academic forum places on writers can warp their prose to unrecognizably complex, and at times hilarious, lengths really shed a light on what it was my brother and I were arguing about. My mouth got dry as I read the student piece about modeling a clay globe, it was gaping so wide. What could ever possess a human person to insist that use of the word ‘cranium’ is preferable to ‘head’? Jesus, the poor thing. As if I don’t know.

Students emulate commonplaces of what they think is ‘university writing’ like kook surfers buy foam boards from Costco and try to brag about how radical it was when they smacked the lip of that barrel, bro. You get called a kook because you don’t know what you’re doing, saying, or look like, and the answer to each is silly, You just look damned silly, you poor thing.

That said, I get the haughty nature of Bartholomae’s prose, but truthfully, I don’t see too much problem with it. I think the only reason we are able to agree or disagree with his idea is because he has articulated it effectively; that’s the whole point, isn’t it? In fact, the line that held the most meaning to me was “The act of constructing a sentence becomes something like an act of transcription, where the voice on tape unexpectedly fades away and suddenly becomes inaudible.” Your internal idea is the tape, and your fingers are its conduit. The stress to sound smart is what breaks down the connection, and it takes away from the fidelity of the idea. Any idea has value. Blood has value. But if I can’t take your blood type, it’s only going to exist in you. If I can’t understand your idea, well, ditto.

My brother is of the viewpoint where the fidelity of the idea is not as important as the identity of the idea. In his world, wah-wah sound effects from the Charlie Brown cartoons could comprise an entire essay as long as the world “purity” appeared in there somewhere. English teachers are merely a bunch of Lord Palpatines concerned only that their gaggle of impressionable Anakins continue to express interest in the Dark Side. No, Princess Amidala won’t die in childbirth, write your little papers, now.

Grace and elegance can’t be measured in a piece of writing any more than they can be measured in a person. Are concepts necessary to give writing value in certain contexts, though? They certainly are in people. Even if I’m not the best at keeping it perfectly within my lipline, I still apply lipstick when I go to a wedding, job interview, or formal party. I’ll get better at applying it the more occassions call for it, but in the meantime, who’s going to be there to scrutinize my face?

I guess I hope anyone with a keen enough eye to notice would just smile politely and pretend I looked fine.