(taken by ilovememphis)

Within the last few months there have been at least five people who have accused me of intentionally inflating my speech, vocabulary, diction, writing, whatever in an effort, they say, to sound impressive or smart or important &tc. I do a lot of stupid and immature things, but deceiving people with pompous language isn’t one of them. Suggesting someone simplify their sentences for clarity or for aesthetic reasons is one thing; assuming and saying that their complex speech patterns are consciously crafted hypocrisies is quite another.

The way I communicate is in fact pretty much the way I think. Most people are okay with it. An annoying few are not. Well, I’m hardly constructing what I’m typing here right now; I do think in semicolons. This for me is genuine and authentic communication. Because I recognize that many people construe the way I communicate as pretentious, I have tried in little social settings to screen everything I say before I say it in order to render my sentences more informal — to earn a better score on the allegedly important scale of how well you’ve conformed to the conventions of normalcy and tradition and small talk. During those experiments I sounded completely devoid of affect because, guess what, I wasn’t being sincere.

I am not well-informed about the rules of charade which govern much social interaction, rules that apparently tell you how not to rock any boats. So I go about sincerely communicating in the way that’s most natural to me, and people time and again criticize it for not being colloquial enough. I had a professor once tell me that lyrical or odd prose is immoral, whereas plain prose is moral because it supposedly doesn’t talk down to readers. This is the “Style is Morality” crowd. What the hell? You’re an ethicist and you don’t have other problems to worry about?

If you’re like those five people I mentioned earlier, probably you’re thinking: Gee, why did he use the strange word ‘affect’ above? Because I don’t know what it means. That’s why he’s so pretentious! Instead of thinking that, you should try using a dictionary. It’s not that hard. C’mon. You can do it. Really.

This has all been so frustrating to me for a very long time. Look, you get a verbose person when he comes from a background of:

• Studying Latin & Greek instead of European languages; my vocabulary became less Anglo-Saxon gutsy and more Latinate baroque. Whoop-tee-do, deal with it, get a dictionary.

• Spending enormous quantities of time alone reading instead of socializing. I’m not saying this makes me superior. In fact much of it was probably a gigantic waste of time; I should have sought out more friends.

I could go on, much further, but aside from smacking of LiveJournal whining (stereotype alert), such a bullet-point list would be bad for biz, it might get me in trouble with people, and we all understand just how important biz is, right, because it’s more important to produce goods/services than it is to be honest, sincere?

For me this rant is closely related, emotionally, to my disgust with many science fiction & fantasy readers’ refusal to empathize with protagonists who are anything other than Freytag-problem-solving reliable narrators. I’m not sure what the connection is. But that’s for another post.

Henry Helping

If you’re a writer and reading this, already you know that writing can get your brain in a tangle. Writing isn’t hard at all in the way, say, manual labor is. But it can sure give you, or at least give me, guilt. I’ll work six hours straight trying to figure out some plot boggle, then lie awake worrying over it, too — my head will feel like it has a knot inside that won’t shut up. I’ll be moody a whole day =( because I can’t figure something out. The next day, answers come to me, and all’s swell =). Obviously I need to chill on the workaholic thing, but I haven’t yet figured out how.

Read This

Apparently, a lot of life is like this: you know that you should, or people suggest that you should, do or not do a certain thing — visualize better in your mind’s eye, interrupt less, read faster … not allow the day-to-day success or failure of your work to swing your mood around. The thing is, people rarely tell you specific steps to take in pursuit of oddball goals. Or if they do it’s at $zillion per self-help package. Some books are exceptions, of course, and relatively inexpensive, such as Sparks of Genius. (Caveat: I’ve only read parts of it.) Mostly I think we’re left to figure things out ourselves, mostly on our own. Maybe not.

Because good teachers are so helpful — life-changing. As I read through my teaching textbooks I’m pleasantly surprised at how little is taken for granted. For example, a specific sequential formula for writing critique, which one of my textbooks credits to Nina Zaragoza: “TAG”:

• Tell what you like.
• Ask questions.
• Give suggestions.

People aren’t just born knowing a good way to critique, and the first procedure that pops into their minds isn’t necessarily the best one. So when someone wise gives you a specific way to go about something, you at least can get started well, you can start developing a better way, too. Modeling after someone else sounds really simple and elementary but the cool thing is, you can apply it to anything. Especially if you find people curious enough to reflect on how their mind operates while they’re succeeding at a task — often the most skilled people don’t know, they just take their standard operating procedure for granted, but if you formulate the questions well, you can get great answers out of them about how they do what they do …

Especially if we take seriously the diversity of our personalities, our ways of processing experience, I’m convinced we can chart out specific steps to change the most nebulous things about ourselves.