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.

Naiveté and Greatness

Yes, another post about myself.  Remember, "to be, or to be believed to be, a Genus, you must adopt an objective viewpoint of the world...and a rather subjective viewpoint of yourself."

I am exceedingly naive.  Especially when it comes to reading and understanding books--whether philosophy, literary theory, or pure fiction.  I often love or hate a book, phrase, thought, or image without any knowledge whatsoever about the author.  Sometimes this gets me into trouble.

For example: I am an unabashed fan of Martin Heidegger.  I decided to bring in a comment about Heidegger and "Being" during a conversation (admittedly sophomoric) about sub-strains of generic existentialism in modern Christianity.  I was consequently shunned from the rest of the conversation for sympathizing with a Nazi.

Please remember that I qualified the discussion as sophomoric, so you can't really give much credit to the crowd or the conversation that ensued, but it is an example of my common way of thinking.  Another time, in a Graduate class on Shakespeare's Tragedies, while discussing the "Rape of Lucrece", I brought up something about the Neo-Platonic imagery in the poem and was immediately shot down, as that seems to be an observation that has been made about 30 trillion times in the great land of Academia.

Well, I don't care.  I would prefer to be somewhat naive about the things I read (not knowing that Emerson was a Transcendentalist, Marquez and Rushdie Magical Realists, etc.) than know about it going into the story.  I don't like carrying prejudices into my reading.  If I do, I will judge the material based on what I know going in and not on its own merit.  I guess this goes against more mainstream literary criticism, but even if I were to critique a work of literature or poem, I would rather not know the history.  I don't want to know that Ginsberg was a homosexual before I read "Howl".  Not because I will judge it more positively or negatively on that basis, but because I will begin to read things into it even in the first line.  It is extremely difficult to break myself of knowledge if I do have it.

People of Refinement and an Old-School Blonde Joke.

People of refinement have a disinclination to colours.  This may be owing partly to a weakness of sight, partly to the uncertainty of taste, which readily takes refuge in absolute negation.  Women now appear almost universally in white and men in black.

The female sex in youth is attached to rose-colour and sea-green, in age to violet and dark-green.  The fair-haired prefer violet, as opposed to light yellow, the brunettes, blue, as opposed to yellow-red, and all on good grounds.

Theory of Colours - Goethe, #841 & 840

Satire's Bleak Outlook

At first blush, it may seem that Bleak House is a satire.  Let us see.  If a satire is of little aesthetic value, it does not attain its object, however worthy that object may be.  On the other hand, if a satire is permeated by artistic genius, then its object is of little importance and vanishes with its times while the dazzling satire remains, for all time, as a work of art.  So why speak of satire at all?

The study of the sociological or political impact of literature has to be devised mainly for those who are by temperament or education immune to the aesthetic vibrancy of authentic literature.

--Vladimir Nabokov on Bleak House