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As Merrill Skaggs has put it, “She is neurotically controlling and self-conscious about her work, but she knows at all points what she is doing. Above all else, she is self-conscious.” Without question, Cather was a control freak.
––Judith Fetterley, “Willa Cather and the
Question of Sympathy: The Unofficial Story”
the rule of thumb
First make your point in the language of a professional field, and then make it again in everyday language—a great trick for underscoring a point.
From this racial, ideological, cultural, and biological cross-pollinization, an “alien” consciousness is presently in the making––a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer.
––Gloria Anzaldúa,
Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza
In Black America, the oral tradition has served as a fundamental vehicle for gittin ovuh. That tradition preserves the Afro-American heritage and reflects the collective spirit of the race.
Blacks are quick to ridicule “educated fools,” people who done gone to school and read all dem books and still don’t know nothin!
. . . it is a socially approved verbal strategy for black rappers to talk about how bad they is.
––Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America
cf. “eccentricity”
The loopiness once associated with Los Angeles has come full blown to Colorado Springs—the strange, creative energy that crops up where the future’s consciously being made, where people walk the fine line separating a visionary from a total nutcase.
––Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation
Academic Writing Doesn’t Always Mean Setting Aside Your Own Voice
cf. “a lunatic”
Caution
Myth
- This is not to suggest that any language you use among friends has a place in academic writing.
- Nor is it to suggest that you may fall back on colloquial usage as an excuse for not learning more rigorous forms of expression.
- Writing well in college means setting aside the kind of language you use in everyday conversation.
- To impress your instructors you need to use big words, long sentences, and complex sentence structures.
mix academic and colloquial styles
“multiple-personality disorder”
“student-centered”
“process-based”
“arbitrary and context-bound”
“mellow”
“the Bad Old Days”
“folks”
Truth
- Academic writing can—and should—be relaxed, easy to follow, and even a little bit fun.
- Although you shouldn’t avoid using sophisticated, academic terms in your writing, you definitely could draw upon the kinds of expressions and turns of phrase that you use every day when texting or conversing with family and friends.
- Relaxed, colloquial language can often enliven academic writing and even enhance its rigor and precision.
- Such informal language also helps you connect with readers in a personal as well as an intellectual way.
Here’s the rub:
“but don’t get me wrong”:
The Art of Metacommentary
- How do you know when it is better to play things straight and stick to standard English, and when to be more adventuresome and mix things up?
- When should you write “failed to notice” and when is it okay (or more effective) to write “flew under the radar”?
- Is it always appropriate to mix styles?
- When you do so, how do you know when enough is enough?
“what does it mean when it’s meta?”
- It may help to think of metacommentary as being like the chorus in a Greek play that stands to the side of the drama unfolding on the stage and explains its meaning to the audience—or like a voice-over narrator who comments on and explains the action in a television show or movie.
- Think of metacommentary as a sort of second text that stands alongside your main text and explains what it means.
workshop
rule of thumb
That we can be injured, that others can be injured, that we are subject to death at the whim of another, are all reasons for both fear and grief. What is less certain, however, is whether the experiences of vulnerability and loss have to lead straightaway to military violence and retribution. There are other passages. If we are interested in arresting cycles of violence to produce less violent outcomes, it is no doubt important to ask what, politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war.
––Judith Butler, Precarious Life
For sure, we are scared because we can get hurt and killed when someone wants to do it to us. But we can’t be so sure in saying that the best way to cope with our fear and make us less vulnerable is to send our army and fight back. There must be other things that we can do. If we want to stop this vicious cycle of violence and bring peace, we must look for a better way to respond to our fear and grief than waging wars.
- In all situations, think carefully about your audience and purpose.
- To succeed as a writer in college, then, you need not always limit your language to the strictly formal.
We have always been haunted by the frightening and grievous possibilities that individuals are subject to violence and death in the face of autocracy.
- Study your body section 2 to see whether you’ve used any of your own everyday expressions, any words or structures that are not “academic.”
- If by chance you don’t find any, see if there’s a place or two where shifting into more casual or unexpected language would help you make a point, get your reader’s attention, or just add liveliness to your text.
- Be sure to keep your audience and purpose in mind, and use language that will be appropriate to both.
- Read the following passage and dress it down, rewriting it in informal colloquial language.
- Then rewrite the same paragraph again by dressing it up, making it much more formal.
- Then rewrite the paragraph one more time in a way that blends the two styles.
- Share your paragraphs with a classmate, and discuss which versions are most effective and why.
“Why do you need metacommentary to tell readers what you mean and guide them through your text?”
“Can’t you just clearly say what you mean up front?”
Workshop
No matter how clear and precise your writing is, readers can still fail to understand it in any number of ways.
Even the best writers can provoke reactions in readers that they didn’t intend, and even good readers can get lost in a complicated argument or fail to see how one point connects with another.
Readers may also fail to see what follows from your argument, or they may follow your reasoning and examples yet fail to see the larger conclusion you draw from them.
They may fail to see your argument’s overall significance, or mistake what you are saying for a related argument that they have heard before but that you want to distance yourself from.
- Read your partner’s work to indicate the different ways s/he uses metacommentary. Use the templates on the handout as your guide.
- For example, you may want to circle transitional phrases and write “trans” in the margins, or to put brackets around sentences that elaborate on earlier sentences and mark them “elab.”
- How does s/he use metacommentary? Does s/he follow any of the templates provided in this handout word for word? Did you find any forms of metacommentary that we didn’t cover? If so, can you identify them, name them, and perhaps devise templates based on them for use in your own writing?
- And finally, how do you think his/her use of metacommentary enhances (or harms) his/her writing?
It is my intention in this book to show that a great . . . shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense. With this in view, my task in the chapters ahead is straightforward. I must, first, demonstrate how, under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now—generally coherent, serious and rational; and then how, under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd. But to avoid the possibility that my analysis will be interpreted as standard-brand academic whimpering, a kind of elitist complaint against “junk” on television, I must first explain that . . . I appreciate junk as much as the next fellow, and I know full well that the printing press has generated enough of it to fill the Grand Canyon to overflowing. Television is not old enough to have matched printing’s output of junk.
––Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Another reason to master metacommentary is that it will help you develop your ideas and
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