Flipping entries

I am pleased to announce, albeit belatedly, that this True Tears cat will lead all future meh-ta entries. As such, I have affectionately nicknamed him the Meh-ta Cat. Moving on.

What I'm really here to talk about is pre-undergraduate English class, or more specifically, how it has shaped the way people write.

For the worse.

Episodic entries (aka Supply destruction)

This is not some negative expository on episodic sites. There is nothing fundamentally bad about them, although I do think that the way things are now, it's not a nice place to be. Instead of green meadows, the field of episodic content is more like the mud-filled and cratered wasteland of trench warfare, with the victors rising to the top through bloody attrition. But I digress.

No, this is a commentary on how similar many of these entries seem, and maybe it's no coincidence. I remember being assigned tasks that quite literally looked like:

1. Read Chapter X.
2. Explain the chapter in your own words.
3. What did you think of the chapter?

So you read the chapter (half-heartedly), then get on with the joyous task of writing out a summary, perhaps consulting or out right cribbing from Coles Notes. Lastly, you write an opinion in the most mechanical and constricting language/structure possible:

1. "This chapter was good (or bad)." / "I liked/disliked this chapter".
2. Three or four sentences supporting your assertion, each with a single independent clause.
3. "Therefore / in conclusion, this chapter was good (or bad)."

There must be some unspoken contract between students and teachers, with the hamburger paragraph being the consequence. Because it's regular and simple, it's easy to write, and also easy to mark. Come to think of it, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to write an automated parser that could do the marking for you.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Here's the work flow of a stereotypical episodic entry:

1. Watch Episode X.
2. Take and embed screen caps.
3. Explain the episode in your own words.
4. Write about what you thought of the episode.

There is nothing inherently bad or evil about this, but when perusing through stacks of these things, I can't help but think:

This is not English class, and I am not your English teacher

I suspect that most readers are not English teachers either. At the very least, they're not out to evaluate your ability to write hamburger paragraphs. But it's the easy way out, because it's been drilled into our minds.

For that reason, the episodic space has been thoroughly commoditized, with suppliers being forced to compete using time to market, or brand appeal, or consolidation and vertical integration. All the while, average operating margins erode because there seems to be an unending of flow of supply being brought online.

"Editorial" entries

Did you think that just because I'm one of those so-called "editorial" types, that I'd leave the area alone? As a matter of fact, I resent these things being called editorials. While perhaps technically true, it inflates the role of the site author writing it. Am I sufficiently qualified to call myself an editor? I don't think so, and I refuse to give myself other such ludicrous titles, like "CEO of transientem."

Let's call them what they really are: essays. Anecdotally, I do find that essay pieces are better written than episodic pieces, but there are some traps to look out for, and they do occasionally pop up. To understand why, we should be reacquainted with a certain structure:

1. Thesis: Hamburger paragraph containing your arguments
2. Three to four hamburger paragraphs elaborating on those arguments
3. Conclusion paragraph: Reiterate the thesis and arguments

Ladies and gentlemen, the hamburger essay. And just like real hamburgers, hamburger essays can be nausea-inducing if consumed repeatedly. But they're also easy to write and mark, and so it's not so much expected as it is demanded. Schools are clearly leading the way in creativity and encouraging independent thought.

Soul searching

I ask you, you who write this way, "Do you enjoy this?" I don't question your love for what you write about (although sometimes, maybe I ought to), but do you enjoy making hamburgers? Could you read what you've just written and not be embarrassed? Or can you hardly stand it and just hit the Publish button, the equivalent of handing your work in, spelling errors and all.

Sometimes, I wonder whether this whole painful exercise is what passes for fun these days.

Prose for pros

In either kind of entry, a good litmus test is if you could stand in front of a crowd and recite the entry in full and not look like an idiot and/or a robot. The hamburger style is one of the most unentertaining and sterile writing methods in existence. You can get away with handing it in because of the following reasons:

1. You don't want a failing grade
2. The teacher wants to help you develop organizational skills
3. It takes too much time to evaluate sophisticated writing
4. Marking potentially atrocious writing to the very end is part of the job description

I realize that there's no accepted alternative, but this is a terrible method of evaluation, demonstrating at most rudimentary ability in sentence writing and argument organization. And outside of school, none of the above apply.

I can't speak for anybody else, but I wouldn't be caught dead holding conversation using simple sentences organized into hamburger paragraphs.

Am I implying that you should write like you speak? As a first order approximation, yes. There are perfectly valid constructs and vocabulary that don't go well with speech, but a conversational flow is integral in getting anything started. Maybe one day we will all be wired into the Singularity and communicate at the binary level in short high-speed data bursts organized in frame structures.

Until then, stay prose.