A More Serious Writer
I wish I was a more serious writer. Or at least more consistent. Or wrote in a way that people could see it more and more often.
Graduate school ruined my writing or made it really excellent to be filed away, never to be read. I think I was at my best writing when I was an undergraduate. I took a job at the campus newspaper, The Battalion, which in those days of the mid 1990s was our equivalent of scrolling on your phone during class. If the lecture was boring, you always had the Batt to read as long as you folded it up inconspicuously. This sounds challenging, but in a lecture hall with 400 other people it really isn’t that challenging.
I wrote opinion columns on politics and popular culture, and I think my writing isn’t that different than what I put up on this newsletter/blog. Side note: I really like the word blog and don’t really think newsletter is a very attractive term for this kind of writing. Can it be a blog if I email it to you and have it posted up on the internet for randos to see?
The kind of writing I was doing for the Batt was about 900 to 1000 words a week, for the campus community, on whatever I wanted or thought was a valuable controversial issue. The editor would take a pitch every weekend of three different columns and then tell you which one it was that they wanted you to write. The columns had to be researched and supported, they had to make sense – they had to address what at the time I was just starting to learn: The universal audience. This doesn’t mean that it had to appeal to everyone or be objectively true. What the universal audience means is that you argue with your finger on the pulse of the contemporary audience. You write in a way to where you are pretty sure that anyone walking around right now would read it and have to deal with it. They can’t dismiss it as insanity; they can’t call it nonsense and walk away. They have to consider it. In the words of Perelman & Olbrects-Tyteca, the creators of the theory, they have to find the argument convincing. Whether they believe it or not, or change because of it – well, that’s a different story. But the convincing part is key. That means they have to deal with it in some way.
I thought this was how I was supposed to write, but I didn’t express it this way. I wanted people to think about it, consider it, and take it in. I wanted them to talk to others about it. This was a pretty big audience, perhaps my biggest ever. The Batt had a circulation in the days before mobile phones and laptops of about 35,000 undergraduate students. This doesn’t count faculty, staff, or graduate students, so a few thousand more there. But I think I was a good writer because I had that audience in mind. These pieces would read horribly today, to you and to me. They would be interesting to look at to see what sorts of arguments and evidence worked for that time and place, but wouldn’t really do much more than that.
Recovering a good writing ability or “style” – which is a problematic word due to its rhetorical theorized history as well as its inability to capture for the reader anything more than a sense of aesthetic technical moves, like an accent wall in a paragraph – is tough when you also want or have a need to publish in places where only 4 or 5 people will read what you are writing. It also won’t really be for or even try to reach others. Academic writing has value in terms of making you think very precisely about what you are going to put down and how you are going to support it. But reading the older stuff in the rhetoric journals and communication research papers makes me think that the older, looser, more “argumentative” style, the stuff aimed at a universal audience rather than a correct sense of scholarship just hits so much different and better than what we are doing today. Perhaps that’s why when I seek out syllabi for courses on rhetorical theory and criticism I find that the reading list is overwhelmingly populated by pieces at least 30 years old. A return to the older sense of academic publishing would really do some good for the communication field. What is now taken care of by a very detailed and grueling process conducted by 3 maybe 4 reviewers/editors is bleaching out the elements that really make a piece interesting and inspire others to write their own either in response or adjacent to what gets out. Having a sanitized piece next to a number of other sanitized pieces that are “correct” is the death of what makes for a scholarly community or field. Instead, you want to have the gaps where things can grow, the cracks that can harbor who knows what. We can question it, talk about it, and produce something better, i.e. with cracks in different spots.
Trying to recover this sense of writing is my overarching summer project for 2024. I hope I can get back to 1994 in some way, with some sediment on the words from there and what’s happened sense. And most of all I hope that it is something people find engaging and worth the read.