This man is Charles Dickens and the
relevance of this will become clearer a bit later on.
I recently read an article on Language
Log about the use of “nerdview” in a British article covering the
recent murder of a young man. The Language Log article talks about
the British article's use of the term “bladed items” over the use
of the layman's term of “knife”. The article goes on to give more
context on the usage of the term, citing it as a use of “nerdview”,
when the language reflects the way an expert views something, that
is, technical language used in a context where the audience is
composed of people who are not necessarily experts on the subject. So
“bladed items” was not simply an elitist use of the English
language.
This got me thinking though, about the
fine art of BSing. Why? Well because saying something like “bladed
item” reminds me of the good ol' high school days when word length
or number of pages was crucial to a paper I had to write for a class
and I would use any combination of pretentious phrases that would
make my work longer and sound “smarter” (not that I would ever
do that for a college paper, of course!).
BS is
something that everyone is surely familiar with and really you could
break it down into two different categories. The first, there is the
stylistic BS, as I have previously mentioned, when you use
pretentious or unnecessarily lengthy phrases to up the word count.
The second is the informational BS, where you make up, or make your
best educated guess, about information relevant to the assignment
that you are writing.
I
won't deny it, I've sometimes done it, and I'm sure others of you
have as well. If you've put off a paper until the very last night,
you might not necessarily have the time to worry about the accuracy
of the details you put into the assignment, especially when there is
a minimum number of pages that you have to reach. And while you can
brag about this oft practiced skill (I'm sure I have on occasion),
and it certainly does have its uses in a pinch, ultimately, it is the
quality of your writing skills that suffers.
When
we hone our abilities to write random crap in an essay simply to make
the deadline and the grade, and write down as much of it as we
possibly can, we lose the ability to write succinctly. We lose the
power of clarity because while there may exist a way to clearly
phrase our thoughts, we often choose the wordier version. Certainly
being wordy has its uses (for example, Charles Dickens was famous for
being very wordy, though in his case, his stories were serialized and
he was pretty much paid by the word), it is not always the best way
to express our ideas. So perhaps the answer to this loss of clarity
of language is to stop procrastinating, because if you have the time
to invest in your essays, you may be less tempted to BS it and
attempt clarity of language and writing and well researched details
instead of polishing off those BS skills.
Image from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Charles_Dickens_-_Project_Gutenberg_eText_13103.jpg
Oh wow, I think we all have. Even some of my professors do (especially in the hour and fifteen minute courses that require them to fill a large time frame). Not always because we lack passion for the topic or can't think of something to write we just reach that point of "mental fatigue" where you just can't go any further whether it be writing papers, speaking, or in class discussions. We spend literally hours (especially students pursing B.A. degrees) writing, speaking, an just mentally thinking through everything and piecing ideas together. I get to the point where I can't even update my facebook status or tweet, LOL. Looking at other cultures that don't put as high values on a college education, and even non-college goers in the U.S., they can often communicate verbally better than students that go on to pursue fancy degrees. You can write really well and have a PhD in English or CAS, but if you have nothing good to say, you just have really well put together BS. I have a friend that goes to a technical/trade school and she has some really insightful perspectives on socio-cultural type things. She's really good with people and even though she kind of needs to meet spell checker (LOL), her ideology is much deeper than some people I've met with PhD's that are, well... gifted in clearly articulating, but have nothing worthwhile to say.
ReplyDeleteSo yeah, I definitely think we sometimes "over fry" our brains since they weren't designed to do this much language-based stuff in a day. Even when we are ready to write, there's a big difference between content and the way it is displayed. Personally, I'd take the deep ideology buried in 5th-grade-level grammar over the fancy BS, any day. :-)
Oh my gosh, I definitely have gone through essays and used bombastic terms just to fulfill a word requirement. I think it also brings up a good point of whether or not word requirements hurt students's writing. I've somewhat been under the impression that most things can be summed up in a few sentences. When teachers give me required lengths, I struggle with clarity because I'm more focused on trying to get to that 200 words.
ReplyDeleteVera, I would love to forward this article to my the teachers in the English department at my old high school. One of the teachers that I had actually made rules and regulations for writing papers, such as not using adverbs and forms of be, along with limiting adjectives to force students to be concise and pragmatic. The teacher that everyone in the "advanced track" got the next year was completely the opposite. He would legitimately spend the first months of school "un-teaching" us what the previous one had! It seems so pompous sometimes when people use ridiculous words to try and make a point, mostly because the main idea becomes lost on the reader.
ReplyDelete