“The word ‘night’ is quite commonly associated with the idea of darkness.”

I suppose if the university this student attends were in Alaska, or if she lived in Siberia, she might legitimately take time to inform her reader about the association between “night” and darkness.

We are, however, in Connecticut, where her family also resides. So I’m afraid this is another example of the reaching-for-an-opening-profundity syndrome that afflicts many student writers, especially first-years.

She was planning to go on to distinguish between ideas associated with the darkness of night: fear, wonder, romance, rest. So a reader who did NOT have a blog might have given her a pass on this sentence as a set-up for those that were to follow.

Me, I quietly and supportively wrote “unneeded” in the margin and during office hours suggested other ways she might establish her basic thought. But I also copied the original statement in the back of my grade book, vol. 40 of the Book of Horrors.

I do associate words other than “night” with the idea of darkness, and ideas other than darkness with the word “night.” I’m sure everyone does. I toyed with making a couple of lists here, but that might be an enjoyable parlor game for readers so I will not indulge myself at your expense.

As “today” moves into “this evening” and then “tonight,” though, I encourage you to contemplate the idea of darkness—absent, approaching, and then very much here…at least until “dawn” and “tomorrow.”

“…the governments would revert to equality…”

My prolonged lack of new posts is the result of several newsletters, a stage production, and a mountain of student papers and exams coming into extravagant collision.

Today’s post is, thank goodness, NOT so much typical as cumulative. That is, this student managed, in his meanderings and maunderings, to sum up so much of what drives us paper-readers to despair. I leave it to you to decide if he actually thinks he’s saying something or merely trying to  free-associate his way to filling up the required number of pages. (The topic, by the way, was of his own choosing!)

I take comfort in my hopeful belief that he is not majoring in economics, political science, history, sociology, or logic. Or, of course, writing.

Herewith:

“Greed prevents governments that are harmful to society like that of communism and socialism. Greed makes it so that there is a division between social classes, this division helps to separate the classes and stop the spread of communism. If greed did not exist the world would indeed be a better place but the governments would revert to equality among the classes and the sharing of wealth, which in the long run would deplete the economies.”

“The mayor doesn’t want to see the bondage between the townspeople stop…”

The full quotation isn’t any closer to what my student actually meant than the opening is:

“The mayor doesn’t want to see the bondage between the townspeople stop. That’s why he is giving them a place outside the city so that people can keep their bondage.”

At first glance, the passage seems to be referring to a slave-holding society, bondage galore. The second sentence may refer to a new city policy outlawing such bondage, and a mayoral inspiration to establish an area outside the city boundaries for those who wish to continue the slave/master relationship. Such people can keep their bondage.

What in the world? Where in the world?

If you know the case the student is writing about, all becomes clear. Some years ago a neighborhood group petitioned the state to permit them to develop a co-op farm on a strip of land acquired through eminent domain for a not-yet-built highway. Permission was renewed annually for thirteen years, and then the state agency faced the fact that the road was never going to be built, and turned the land over to the city. With one eye on its tax base and the other on jobs and housing, the city decided to use the strip for commercial and residential development; the farm would have to be discontinued. My students were asked to argue in favor of one of four options: keep the farm (which occupied only a small, but central, part of the land) and forgo development; keep the farm and build a smaller version of the development around it; go ahead with the development and acquire land elsewhere for the farm; go ahead with the development and get rid of the farm. All of these options had been raised in the actual town hearings.

My student was trying to describe option #3.

The members of the farm co-op had argued that their enterprise had yielded more than vegetables: it had become a field-trip destination for inner-city kids, a weapon against juvenile delinquency, an exercise opportunity for the elderly, and a vehicle for community spirit and understanding. The co-op members had developed close personal—wait for it!—bonds.

There’s a lot to be said for maintaining bonds within a community (even though in the actual case the city went with option #4), and my student was trying to say this. But I guess “bond” didn’t look like a word that could express a state of being. Hence: bondage.

This was not a second-language student inexpertly navigating a dictionary; it was a native speaker who didn’t really know her language, couldn’t discriminate between “bond” (or even “bonding”) and “bondage.”

Do you suppose she would think Of Human Bondage is a novel about healthy community relations? Would she feel that bondage was good for slaves?

No, no. What she meant was simply that the mayor, trying not to destroy the spirit of community, considered relocating the medium of their bond. But what she said inevitably evokes visions of slave-holding enclaves beyond the reach of a circumscribed government.

What a difference a suffix makes.

“There are millions of McDonald’s, Taco Bells, and Wendy’s that are continually being caught…”

Alert! We are again in the wonderful world of freshman comp, where inanimate objects are agents. But before I reveal the agent of today’s Horror, I must pause to pick two nits:

Writing instructors at the middle- and high-school levels deploy several nonce-rules that students clutch permanently to their bosoms: for example, “Never start a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘But’”; “NEVER start a sentence with ‘Because’”; “Never say ‘I’”…. Persuading students that these were temporary rules meant to break habits rather than three of the Ten Commandments of Writing is nearly impossible.

On the other hand, MY nonce-rules, announced as such, don’t stick at all. One of them is “When writing for my class, do NOT begin a sentence with ‘There is’ or ‘There are.’” I have a brief demo where I first lay out the non-content quality of “there” and the static nature of “is,” writing two sentences on the board that say basically the same thing: for example, There is a murderer behind the curtain and A murderer is hiding behind the curtain. Students tend to agree that the second version gets the important information out in front. Then I talk briefly about the most common structure in English: Subject, verb, object. John hit the ball. And I point out that the first two words carry the main action and the main energy of the sentence in this structure. Then I go to the door of the classroom, exit, and come back in backward, saying “There was a ball that was hit by John.” And then I ask them if they really want their sentences to back into the room, blowing all the energy on a pronoun and a verb of being. And then I say again, “PLEASE do not begin any sentences with ‘There is’ or ‘There are’ while writing for my class!”

But then the next set of papers comes in, and quite often the very first sentence of half the papers begins with “There is…” Ah well.

I also have a problem with “every day person.” For that word cluster to function as an adjective, it should be either fused or hyphenated. But in this case it still wouldn’t serve—”everyday” and “ordinary” may be in the same realm of meaning, but they aren’t straight synonyms that can be plugged with equal ease into any old sentence.

And now let’s move on, with those two nits lying dead on the sink edge, little feet in the air.

Well, the sentence for today began an essay on fast-food restaurants and obesity in America. My student’s point was that NOT going into a fast-food restaurant is very hard.

So here’s the whole sentence:

“There are millions of McDonald’s, Taco Bells, and Wendy’s that are continually being caught by the eye of an every day person.”

A sudden vision of an eye being used as a fishing lure suddenly crosses my mind. Enough to kill my appetite! I don’t know who the “every day person” who uses such a disgusting method of catching things might be, but I certainly don’t want to meet him or her.

But do you see what I mean about agency? Here, the eye is the active agent, busily out there catching millions of restaurants. And here the muckamucks of the fast-food managements thought the garish paint jobs on their buildings and signs would catch people’s eyes, and those people would follow their eyes directly into the eatery. But my student seems to think that the paint jobs, signage, play spaces, unfunny clowns, plastic toys, and easy parking all just sit there…until that eye is cast their way and catches them, continually, perhaps to bring them home to the every day person.

It’s not the eaters being hooked by those Whoppers; the Whopper-providers are being hooked by the eaters, wily anglers with very strange bait on their hooks.

“He went to Amsterdam, in the Neverlands.”

I post this in celebration of my dear friend David Chacko (also a fine writer, by the way! check him out on Amazon.com…), who last week took up residence in Amsterdam.

But unlike Peter Pan, David did not wind up in the Neverlands.

My student wasn’t thinking of Peter Pan either; she was writing about someone who had left the U.S. to avoid the Vietnam draft. He went, actually, to the Netherlands. But if your knowledge of European countries is scantier than your knowledge of children’s fiction, and if you’re unfamiliar with the adjective “nether,” meaning “below”—or “low,” as in the Lowlands, as the Netherlands is referred to in folk songs—you might hear “Netherlands” but think you hear “Neverlands.” Of course to think that a person could avoid the draft by hanging out with Peter Pan, who flew to Neverland on fairy dust rather than by airplane, takes a certain stretch of the imagination…

I hope David doesn’t meet up with any pirate captains, although he might enjoy making the acquaintance of an Indian princess or a mermaid.

Meanwhile, I invite you to check your maps. From Newport, RI, where he was living up until last week, David could get pretty close to Amsterdam by traveling “straight on till morning.” Well, more or less.

“There is a lot of relativity to that simple sentence.”

The simple sentence in question is not e=mc².

Nor is my student attempting to say a particular sentence has the quality or state of being relative (pertinent to something; not absolute or independent; expressed as a ratio of a quantity to the whole) or is defined by its relation to something else. (Thank you O Webster’s.)

Nor does he mean the value of the sentence depends on the individual reading or writing it.

Nor is the sentence stuffed with kin.

Judging from the context in which the sentence about the simple sentence appeared, my student didn’t actually mean “relativity” at all; he mean “relatability.”

This rather clumsy term means that one idea, situation, person, or word can be related to—or associated or connected with—a second idea, situation, person, or word.  One thing may be “relatable” to another in this sense.

But of course he didn’t mean the simple sentence was relatable to another sentence, idea, situation, etc.

He meant he could relate to the sentence. Or, rather, that the sentence had the ability to be related to by something-or-other.

Gad how I hate that usage! It sits there modestly enough in a sentence, or in a student’s mouth, pretending to be making its contribution to the utterance of a thought. But under that modest exterior lurks a seductive sloven: she (we’ll say, although it’s not fair to women to call “relatable” a female) sends a languid wink of easy pleasure to the struggling writer or speaker and whispers “use me, use me; lie down beside me and let the world go by.”

Students tell me Shakespeare is “relatable”; Beowulf is “relatable”; Sappho is “relatable”; Little Women is “relatable”; Gerard Manley Hopkins is NOT “relatable.” What the hell do they mean? The thing is, they don’t really mean much of anything, or else they might mean just about anything. Shakespeare says some things they feel are true; Beowulf is cool; they “get” Sappho; Little Women made them cry; Hopkins is hard to understand.

Yes, I admit it, at one point my generation became fond of saying “I can relate to that,” a phrase almost as meaningless—but at least it did express a specific attachment between two things (I and that). “That’s relatable” doesn’t even admit that the speaker is part of the relationship; the sentence merely assures us that someone or something might be part of a relationship with that.

The problem with fad words is that, like invasive species of plants or birds or fish, they gradually drive out all the native species, and the variety and beauty and specificity of life is lost. Their progress is insidious, opportunistic, and relentless. One minute you know all the various terms for “offered information,” for instance: comment, response, question, suggestion, idea, proposal, objection, elaboration, evidence…. The next minute you open your mouth and out comes “input.” “Send me your input,” you say. What people will send is anybody’s guess—probably whatever they consider “input.”

When I ask students to elaborate on how something-or-other is “relatable,” they look at me as if I’d asked them to elaborate on what a “pencil” is. You know, the “Well, duh” expression. Or else they ask me what I mean by “elaborate.”

My student was writing about a social activist’s statement that poverty was very hard on children in Central America. My student had done a service project in Central America, and he had seen poverty and its effects in the small village where he had worked. He was commenting that the activist’s simple sentence was expressing something he had also been moved and distressed by, something he too had observed in its complexity and actuality. But of course he didn’t say that; he just said the sentence had “a lot of relativity.” And he thought he had said something. He had earlier told me that he found the topic relatable.

What a tragedy that when he tries to express the passion and compassion he feels, what comes out is four or five syllables of nothing at all.

 

“They tried to force the ‘savages’ to convert to Christianity by…”

My student is writing about the missionaries that tried to take what they considered the Word of God to Native American tribes. He’s using the term “savages” because that’s the term frequently used in the Christian literature, especially the Puritan literature, that discusses the indigenous peoples of New England. In American Literature I, we have read a lot of this literature, and also some of the eloquent testimony and commentary of Indian leaders. My favorite is the reply of Red Jacket, an orator and negotiator of the Seneca people, to the Massachusetts missionary Joseph Cram in 1805: “BROTHER: We do not wish to destroy your religion, or take it from you. We only want to enjoy our own.” If only people in the 21st century could think like that!

It is perhaps unfair to take a sentence from a midterm exam for discussion here, but what interests me is not the relatively minor writing error, which should probably be excused on a test; it is the shining evidence of a tin ear (or a blind mind’s-eye), the kind that afflicts people writing under pressure.

Here’s the full sentence, the completion of what I’ve teased you with above:

“They tried to force the ‘savages’ to convert to Christianity by throwing the Christian bible in their face.”

We’re not talking friendly persuasion!

The actual error is the number disagreement between “savages”/”their” and “face.” Attending to the plural might have made my writer pause and rethink his cliché. But he did not notice the mistake, and so he gave me a moment of hilarity in the midst of my midterm tears.

“Don’t throw that in my face,” we say, when someone we’re arguing with refers to a past gaffe or stupidity and thereby scores a point. I think that’s the principal usage for this phrase, isn’t it? If so, it’s not the cliché my student should have chosen (as long as he was determined to choose a cliché at all). Still, any reader knows he wasn’t speaking literally: we have no record of someone actually throwing Bibles at Indians, nor would my student have tried to claim anyone actually did. He just meant, I’m sure, that missionaries and others pushed the Christian message again and again, unremittingly, brooking no protest and engaging in no debate—for the “savages’” own good, assuredly, the missionaries must have believed.

Still, I did laugh at the ridiculous image, the cartoon that flitted across my mind’s eye, Chingachgook throwing up his hands to protect himself from the barrage of airborne Bibles being flung by the hot-eyed, high-collared holy.

Well, we would all have been better off if the only ammunition had been Bibles. Still a spiritual assault, true, but causing much less bodily harm, and less permanent harm, than the bullets from the muskets of settlers and the rifles of soldiers.

“With the research of the history I will know about the other countries and how they were before I got there.”

This is another student who believes that most of what we know of life began more or less with his birth. Fortunately, he is aware that “the other countries” do have SOME history that he can do “the research” on, just to sketch in that primitive past. Does he hope to find out what they were like, or the means by which they existed, one wonders…

Beyond pointing this out, words fail me.

I will leave you to enjoy the resonances of this sentence, and I hope you find them as amazing as I do.

“There are many images in the poem that depict strong and easy images to visualize…”

I love an image that depicts an image, especially an image that depicts a strong image. This poem, I am told, has many of those.

Most often when we use the term “image” we’re referring to something that is visual. Literature depends for much of its impact on the skillful deployment of images; the reader’s emotional and intellectual experience is created by the pictures evoked in the mind that create or give depth to the events and emotions presented by the writer. The image affects the “mind’s eye,” or sometimes the mind’s ear or nose or fingers. So it’s fortunate that the poem my student is describing has a lot of images—or, rather, that it has a lot of images that depict strong images—and that they’re easy to visualize: that is, they are clear and accessible to the reader.

(She does say the images are “strong and easy,” where she actually meant “strong images that are easy to visualize,” but we will assume her intentions rather than her sentence structure and say Yes, good, lots of strong images that are easy to visualize, glad you commented on that!)

Here’s the whole sentence, though:

“There are many images in the poem that depict strong and easy images to visualize, such as ‘you walk by faith in the darkness.’”

She is being conscientious here, following her general statement with a clarifying example.

Except that the example does not offer clarification, beyond the clarification that she’s really not sure what an image is, or what visualizing involves. “Faith” isn’t an image, although I guess if it had been capitalized the reader might imagine “you” walking alongside a friend named Faith… but the word “faith” is an abstract term for a whole range of ideas and absolutely no pictures.

And I guess I can visualize darkness—actually, visualizing darkness is a component of a get-to-sleep exercise I sometimes engage in—but most writers would try to present an actual image to help the reader imagine the quality or character of that darkness, not merely say “darkness,”: I don’t know, “black as the pit from pole to pole” springs to mind, thanks to William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus,” memorized back in the eighth grade. See, now, that’s and image, and largely for that reason the line lingers in the mind.

Student writers often try to pump up an idea or a reading beyond what it deserves or can bear. Such was the case here, where my student had chosen for her analysis essay a poem by a sincere beginner, a poem that was a poem by virtue of its short lines, not the experience offered to the reader, and the poet a beginner who had not yet learned that poetry is much more about showing than telling. This poem spoke throughout in terms like “generosity,” “courage,” “sacrifice,” “love”… the only actual image in the whole poem was “trembling hand,” and that was meant literally. But the assignment asked that the analysis include a discussion of the poem’s use of imagery, and so my student did her best to engage in such a discussion, rather than comment that this poem actually lacked imagery instead leaving the reader to give substance to a list of abstractions through his or her own experience or insight.

So I, as the reader of her essay, am left with this image, a picture of someone walking by faith in the darkness:

“The two are on their respected balconies at the same time.”

Who respects these balconies, one must ask, and what does a balcony do to gain such respect? Are there perhaps some disreputable balconies in the neighborhood, not respected by anyone? The judgmental qualities of architecture are well known, as James Joyce demonstrates in a respected short story, “Araby”: “The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.” The personification is appropriate and effective in the Joyce story, but I’m not sure my student is trying to achieve this in her own sentence—since, as I said, we don’t know who respects the balconies. It might be other balconies, or the buildings that face the balconies; or it might be passersby, or architects, or the residents of the flats so graced.

What would a respected balcony have to do to maintain its standing in the community? Always be tidy, perhaps sport well-watered plants, and certainly not host any loitering riff-raff of the human or pigeon species, I would imagine.

I know my student meant “respective” balconies. Students love that word, and they scrupulously use it to avoid any possible confusion, as in Adam and Eve wrote their respective names in the hotel register; Lois and Clark donned their respective swimsuits in their respective cabañas….  Okay, I made those two up. But not by much. The reader can’t be trusted, I guess, to understand that Adam didn’t sign the register “Eve,” and Clark didn’t don Lois’s swimsuit—in either cabaña. Nor can the reader be trusted to understand that the two girls in the story my student was summarizing, forbidden by their parents to play together, were standing each on her own balcony, not huddled on one or using each other’s as a joke on the folks.

What charms me is the things they feel they must be this scrupulous about, and the other things that they feel comfortable expressing any which way. What are the criteria for the choice?