Satan's Child Revealed

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

Now if only our professors and business executives could figure this one out, the world might be a smarter place.

With Boldness and Italicization

I am no longer involved in extensive academic writing nor reading others' essays, however I was writing something this morning and was horrified at my lack of linguistic integrity.  I seem to have forgotten my freshman rhetoric course which emphasized the fact that words, if used correctly, speak for themselves.

Basically, I was writing something and felt like I needed to put a particular phrase in bold or italics.  WTF.  If your main emphasis in a paragraph, sentence, or 20 page essay is placed correctly and properly surrounded by appropriate language, the words will rise to the top.

Take for example my last sentence, "If your main emphasis in a paragraph, sentence, or 20 page essay is placed correctly and properly surrounded by appropriate language, the words will rise to the top."  This sentence ends in a major letdown.  I begin by highlighting the subject of the sentence, the "main emphasis".  I follow it by examples and secondary premises, leading to a crescendo after the final comma.  Then I end with a lack of precision in the word choice.  It would be more effective to end with a concise conclusion, reiterating the knowledge that the audience has already discerned.  Instead, I use a semi-metaphorical cliche that leads the reader's mind in another direction.  I could have used any number of conclusions, like "the meaning will become apparent."

However, my lack of experience in writing and continued inability to express myself concisely sometimes leads me to write like I speak.  I try to slip in commas and semi-colons, hyphens and periods when they are not needed.  I bold or italicize words and phrases that I want the audience to remember.  Of course, I refuse to fall into the horrid trap of using three exclamation points or all CAPS when making a point, but what I do is almost worse.

So how should I solve it?  First, I should use less words whenever possible.  Why expound on something without a rhetorical purpose?  Yes, sometimes it is necessary to repeat in a different form what you say in order to re-emphasize your point.  At the same time, a simple 7 word sentence in the midst of 4-line monsters can stand out perfectly.

Second, every word should be considered in all its purposes.  Does the word rise or fall phonetically?  Is it a stop, plosive, or fricative?  Do the following words complement the focus?

Third, consider all points of grammatical structure, punctuation in particular.  Is the main purpose of the sentence separated by a comma, led into by a run-on phrase, broken by hyphens, followed by a period, ended with a question mark?  How do I want the phrase to be read?

There are many other ways to emphasize a point or word, but the reality is that the audience will be ultimate receptor.  They will discern by means of their experience and faculty of logic.  How much grammatical hand-holding do they need?  Many times what I think is the "purpose" of the paper/essay/sentence will be entirely moot to the audience, but I can influence their decision.