Let’s all exaggerate for the sake of significance. I do this pretty often in writing and daily
life to enhance whatever I experience alone, mostly because I like a good
story. There are tons of things that
seem significant to us that seem to lose significance when we try to
communicate it, hence the excluding saying, “you had to be there, I guess.” It sucks to have to say that, because you
know you’ve lost your audience and you’ve just wasted your breath telling a
shitty story about how you got pulled over by the sheriff. Nobody cares!
But if you put the right spin on it, you can fool people into thinking
that your story actually matters.
“I got
pulled over for the first time today, you remember your first time? Damn, I was scared. I just picked up a pound of sticky and I was
high as giraffe nuts. She didn’t even
ask for my license! She said that I ran a stop sign, and I was all, ‘Ma’am,
there was no stop sign.’ And she was
all, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, my mistake, have a nice day!’”
“Oh no way!
I remember my first time being pulled over…”
It doesn’t matter that none of that
happened. The audience got the main
point: I was pulled over. The
significance was successfully transferred as soon as I gave the audience a
relatable point, a point that allows them to reflect on their own experiences.
As Fahnestock says, referring to
science accommodators, “Their main purpose is to celebrate rather than
validate.” (279) Many of us (everyone that will read this blog) are trained to
seek out ethos and logos in every article we read. We need
validation, because we read such an insane amount of material that it
becomes necessary to rank our information according to significance.
I like the
idea of writing for the layman as “celebration” because it sets up a different
rhetorical situation for approaching the page.
Let’s be thrilled about what we’re doing so that by the time it falls
into the reader’s hands there is still some lingering sense of enthusiasm that
can be transferred. The exclusion of
some key facts about a subject really won’t matter to most people as long as
they are entertained. I don’t
necessarily condone the spread of borderline false information, but we live in
the age of TL;DR, and it’s rough out there.
Perhaps I surround myself with the wrong types of people, but from what
I observe people don’t think that anything is significant unless it directly
affects them. If self-interest is the
maxim of our generation, then we have to roll with it whether we support it or
not so that we can become significant as writers. There is something to be said about integrity
though, and many of us college folk do our best to keep the information intact. Those people are doing God’s work. For me, I keep the information intact for the
grade. But when I finally enter the
world as a writer who is writing for a majority of people who read more of
facebook than they do of factual documents, I’m going to stretch the truth as
far as I can to convey significance.
It’s immoral, it’s spreading a pandemic of the uninformed, but dammit if
it isn’t effective in getting a main point across.
In the
interest of examples, as Fahnestock’s article had so many, here is a real life
one that actually incorporates some scientific element. This is a prime example of when we really DO
need the information, and not the layman’s terms.
Brewing
beer is a pretty exact science, and while I’m not a brewer myself, I know how
delicate of a process it can be. I
picked up a bottle of “Beard Beer” by Rogue, assuming it was a novelty ‘special
strength’ brew for the mountain man. I’m
a bearded fellow, and though it was worth a shot. When I got home and read the label (after
half the bottle was gone) I realized this beer was brewed from natural
yeast—BEARD yeast. All it said on the
bottle was (word for word), “Don’t freak out, brewer’s have been using natural
yeast for years.” How am I supposed to
not freak out after finding out I’ve been sucking on some dude’s beard? Why would they be so vague with something so
potentially gross? I was compelled to do
some research to figure out how this is even FDA approved. Luckily I got an explanation that allowed me
to finish the beer. Apparently yeast is a
fungus (whether it comes from fruit or a beard) and this specific yeast was a
combination of yeast vapors that the master brewer’s beard absorbed and
cultivated as a sort of fungal petri dish.
Maybe this doesn’t make it less gross, but it at least rules out the
thought of plucking a few strays and boiling them in a cauldron to produce some
sort of alcoholic alchemy. Information
here is key. Without it, I wouldn’t have
finished their product.
Although we
may not always be able to “rely on the audience to recognize the significance
of information,” (279) there are times where displaying the facts ‘as is’
serves a greater purpose than stretching the truth. When the information concerns anything that
may affect human health (viruses etc.) or the way we live (climate change
etc.), I’m an advocate of the facts. But
when it concerns information that ultimately doesn’t affect our way of being,
celebrate it. Decorate your story with
celebratory anecdotes, and make it matter.
After all, we all just want to be read and talked about, right?
Adam~
ReplyDeleteSo, I agree with you...mostly. It does seem the "celebration" of science makes for the best pieces. An excited tone conveyed in a piece of writing does volumes for making it interesting, even if the material is mundane. So, while the science writer is an entertainer, to what sense is she also an informer? That is, there is an element of credibility that a writer can lose if they stray too far from the text. We must be cunning enough in our word play to hold the attention of the Facebooking masses which are accustomed to short snippets of knowledge, while simultaneously being faithful to the scientist. After all, scientists are the writer's asset, and a relationship to maintain. Without good working relations with professionals, it's harder for science writers to find their big stories.
I wonder then, to what extent is it acceptable to exaggerate and embellish? My thought, and I mentioned this briefly in my piece, is that we as writers also have the license to go where scientists are not "allowed" by the constraints of their faithfulness to protocol and logic. The writer has a creative bent, and works in a different genre than the researcher: English versus science. However, creativity and inventiveness are not always interchangeable, and expressing something **differently** versus expressing something **different** is an important distinction. In sum, I think we have freedom to create and make conjectures, and I also think it's important for the science writer to recognize that every article they publish affects their reputation with scientists, their main informants.
Also, "high as giraffe nuts" may be the best simile ever.
Thanks for writing,
Anjeli
You make a good point: “There are tons of things that seem significant to us that seem to lose significance when we try to communicate it.” Why is that? As enthralling and beguiling as language is, it has its limitations. The words we use are only arbitrary signs or representations of the signified, the reality that they refer to. Basically, language falls short of allowing us the full sensation of the reality which it describes; a story about owning dogs is never going to replace the experience of being an actual dog owner. So let’s presuppose that words will always fall short of the “truth” of the reality they’re intended to convey. Therefore, though we attach words to describe certain realities (i.e. “I got pulled over”), those words do not fully convey the truth of those realities. We might say that since those words are lacking full import, we “approach nearer the mark” by adding more words—embellishments, exaggeration, etc. Even though those words may not be “factually” correct—after all, they go above and beyond the word label given to the reality—they come closer to helping the reader/listener “experience” the *sensation* of the reality. In light of this perspective, I question your statement, “I’m going to stretch the truth as far as I can”; if words are just wisps of the substantial, can the truth truly be stretched? (Ironically, in this case, I’m also “stretching” our conception of truth; I think I’ve equated it with a sort of sensory “significance” that you mention in your post).
ReplyDeleteIn response to what I just wrote above, I can think of several counterarguments, but I’m too lazy to discuss them. Anyway, that was just a random thought that popped into my head while reading your post—another weird food-for-thought to add to your plate.
Adam, I think you make some good points in this post. My first response would be, “curse the self-absorbed Millenials!” followed swiftly by, “experimentation in beer has finally gone too far.”
ReplyDeleteI like your take on a student’s automatic hierarchical classification of texts. There’s so much to read that we search for validation without even thinking about it. I wonder if this is universal to varying extents. I have to think scientists do this, too. When Fahnestock is describing the two manifestations of the bee study, she states that “some accommodation has gone on even in the original piece, which, after all, is not appearing in a journal devoted to bee experts” (280). So accommodation (how is this readable, as well as relevant for me) also takes place in science journals. This might not appear as “celebration,” but nonetheless, there’s some adjustment to content.
And now for something completely different: yes, there are a lot of different yeasts you can use to ferment beer – this is a good argument for why brewers don’t need to use cultures they find on their bodies. This is a disgusting, slippery slope (though I can’t fault you for finishing the beer).
Liam