Genre-colored glasses |
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Thoughts on genre, language, grammar, and other
rhetorical and linguistic norms |
 J'ACCUSE! Garry Willmore, flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) This week, I am accusing myself and setting myself straight. In last week’s blog post, I fell into the same trap I have pointed out to others—assuming that I know the “real” meaning of a word rather than listening for what it means to the people who use it; In the past, I have complained about people trying to make words mean other than what the users say they mean—words like “truth” “fact” “alt-“ and all kinds of “sexual assault.” My word was “essay.” The original post started out innocently enough. I wondered why we don’t seem to have a word for all those pieces of scholarly writing we academics do that look a lot alike even when they’re published in different places. Here was my question from last week: What do we call all those scholarly pieces of writing we do that appear in different forums? I write scholarly articles (published in scholarly journals), and my university's official credentials repository says that scholarly articles have to be separated from book chapters. But my book chapters appear in scholarly edited collections, and they look a lot like my scholarly articles published in scholarly journals. To me, my scholarly articles and scholarly chapters are the same kind of writing. But that start maybe was not so innocent. I was probably wrong about the need for a name to combine scholarly articles and book chapters since they are, indeed, different kinds of writing, different genres. Articles undergo a different kind of peer review (judging whether they are worthy to be published); they expect a different audience; they are accessible through different means; the academic hierarchy values them differently; they exist in different material form; even if, to me, the exigencies (reasons for writing them) seem pretty similar and the quality and qualities of the products seem the same. So I fell into a trap from the start, and also one that I’ve pointed out to others: defining genres by their superficial similarity of features rather than distinguishing different social actions. They are indeed two different ways of doing things in the world, those scholarly articles and chapters in edited collections. J’accuse, Amy! And then I fell into a second trap—ignoring what the people who use the genre call the genre. The reason I’d gotten to thinking about the topic last week was because my co-editor and I were finishing up a project that was an edited collection of previously published . . . uh . . . pieces. One of the reasons I'm thinking about this now is that I'm working on an edited collection, and the previously published pieces in it are referred to as "essays." I was struggling to figure out what to call those pieces because I had become so aware of and self-conscious about genre labels. How can somebody like me who studies and preaches genres use genre labels without being deliberate about them? That’s what I ask others to do! Then I went way off the tracks: Now, I'm in English, and one of my colleagues used to be an expert on "the essay," and you can be sure this guy was not thinking about non-literary writing. "The Essay" used to be said with rarefied tones and a turned-up nose. But scholarly "pieces" often get called scholarly "essays." Not in the Montaigne sense of essay or any of those 18th-century essayists like Addison and Steele that I used to study and love or the contemporary literary essayists who do nature writing or travel essays. Harumph. Since when do I or “this guy” get to say who gets to use a word and for what? It’s true Aristotle didn’t write essays, as my co-editor said. But once his “piece” (see, I still don’t know what to call them) was re-published in our edited collection, it became one of our collected essays. Because that’s what the people who edit, read, and publish these books call them—collected essays. Our whole book series even includes “essays” in its title. So like it or not, those suckers are essays. My co-editor outed herself in the comment section of last week’s blog post and added her usual smart and helpful remarks. After describing why she thinks of her own scholarly pieces usually as “essays,” genuine “thought-pieces” in the original meaning of “essay,” she offers the key fact: In spite of all that, it seems to be customary to call books that collect pieces by different authors “collected essays.” You would never describe a book like that as “collected chapters,” would you? Nope, I wouldn’t. It’s “customary.” Just as people get to say how their last names are pronounced, no matter what we might think is sensible, the people who use a genre get to call it what they want to. And nobody has any business telling them they’re wrong. A critic might want to use a different term or a term differently for the critic’s own purposes, but for the purposes of popular use of words, the users know best. Now some critics of all stripes can work themselves into quite a lot of bother by trying to distinguish words precisely. Another of my readers shared with me this gem from the prestigious Columbia Law Review, which has different submission links depending on whether you’re submitting an “article” or an “essay”: Articles I suppose those paragraphs might mean the people who read and write the Columbia Law Review might actually use these words this way and those distinctions have become “customary.” Somehow, my guess is that the editors are trying to make a distinction that doesn’t exist among their larger community. That’s why they need to explain it. My clues in those definitions are phrases like “similar to” but “tend to differ” in that they “often” with “some choosing to” while others choose instead to and the final clincher of “although they need not be.” Well, that clears it up. Of course, some uses do need words to be defined very precisely, and law is one of those. Maybe they just get into the habit of defining legal terms so precisely that they can’t stop themselves when it’s really not necessary. I can see the difference between the two types of submissions that they’re describing. In practice, their readers and writers probably do, too. It’s just that it’s much harder to define two kinds of writing than it is to use two kinds of writing. But I began this post accusing myself, not others, and to that I return. I made two big mistakes in last week’s post:
I guess that’s actually four mistakes, since each point includes two mistaken actions, but hey, I don’t need to beat myself over the head with it for it to get through to me. Or at least I hope not. I’m sure I’ve made mistakes in this post, too, but I hope they’re more ones of oversimplifying than ignoring my own principles! It’s tough, staying aware of words and genres and how they can influence us without our noticing; and still letting ourselves use those words and genres in customary ways, even after we notice. Language is shared and social. Genres are shared and social. We don’t have to accept every word or genre as is. Words and genres can and do change, and we can try to influence those changes. But we also live in the world—social worlds with conventional shared meanings that also help to define us as a community and help make us meaningful. Even lawyers, and even academics. Thanks to each of you who wrote me about or commented on last week’s post. Each of you helps to keep me honest and helps my thinking. And each of you makes my blog meaningful. Thank you.  Namaste, Kate Ware, flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
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 Image from Words Matter, Calvary on 8th Students, vimeo, CC license Alt-left, alt-right, and words creating false equivalency The eclipse could distract us only so long from the terrible violence and divisions in the world. The eclipse made many of us see our position in the universe more clearly—an experience of our smallness and our commonality that, for a brief moment, brought some sense of shared humanity. And this past weekend we in the US had another reminder—the devastating Hurricane Harvey and the disastrous flooding of Houston and one-quarter of the people in Texas that continues still. But even those singular experiences fade faster than the repeated violence, terrorism, and hatred around the world. The meanings of those repeated experiences are shaped by the people who comment on them, who tell us what those experiences mean. And those meanings become cemented through repetition, especially through the repetition of words. “Alt-right,” not white supremacists “Alt-left,” not counter-protestors In the face of this effort to create false equivalency between neo-Nazis and those who oppose racism, I feel the need to return to a point I’ve written about several times in several ways. The words we use matter If you have time, I’d ask you to reread a few of my earlier posts, to build the many ways the importance of the words we use plays out (there are more posts on words and meanings, but here are the most relevant today): How Words Reflect and Shape Us Alternative Words What does Alt-right really mean (though I would come down harder on the term today) As I wrote before: The words we use come from who we are, as individuals, a society, and a culture. Words reflect our values and beliefs, our ways of viewing the world. And they reflect our history, who we have been. And words may then shape our views of the world, too, influencing what we see and how we see. Or even whether we call a car wreck an “accident”: Instead of “accident,” highway patrols and safety agencies are using the words “crash” and “wreck.” According to Mark Rosekind, director of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Or, from a more recent post, think about the ways our words present cancer as a battle. Maybe new ways of treating cancer will shift patients from “survivors” of a war to cohabiters or roommates, people “living with” cancer long-term. Words will always shape our perspective, like it or not. But, as journalists and other truth-tellers recognized in the early days of the current US presidency, “alternative facts” don’t become factual just because Kellyanne Conway says they are. They’re still falsehoods at the least, lies at the most. The danger lies in letting the words pass, as I argued before: If we come to accept statements contrary to documented facts as “alternatives” rather than wrong, then there’s nothing keeping anyone from asserting anything. In fact, [then press secretary Sean] Spicer argued that Trump can keep claiming with no substantiated evidence that millions of illegal votes were cast in the election, causing him to lose the popular vote, because it is his “long-standing belief.” The fact that there’s no evidence to support that claim—in fact, there is evidence to the contrary—matters not at all if “alternative facts” are justified by “belief.” We are indeed in a post-truth world. BUT We have the power to resist. My comments on sexual assault being dismissed as “locker room talk” have become relevant again: “The power of naming is that it’s not individual, but collective. One person can insist on framing it as “locker room talk,” but the framing succeeds only if others accept it. That’s the difference between naming and “spin.” Any publicist can attempt to spin a story, to reframe what happened in a different light. But naming comes from the culture that’s there, the beliefs and attitudes emerging from who we are and who we want to be, a framing already present among us. We still have the power to resist the renaming before it becomes so insidious that we stop noticing it. We are not yet in Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. (Adding to a bit of an earlier post again:) When resisters are chided for being “alt-left” because they are an alternative to hatred, beware. When pronouns define a “we” that excludes large numbers of people* and a “them” that now seems to include you, beware. When well-established scientific evidence becomes part of a “debate” with “two sides,” beware. When the powers-that-be use the word “Islam” repeatedly and only in the label “radical Islamic terrorists,” beware. Now is the time, as it is happening and we can still recognize it. Don’t let powerful individuals usurp the power of naming. Assert our collective power to resist. Insist that our collective culture is not post-truth but knows the difference between fact and belief. Insist that we all, without excluding anyone, must watch what we say. Because we know these alternative truths-- Resistance is not futile.  geralt, pixabay, CC0 Public Domain  Image courtesy of pixabay.com Today I want to sketch another topic I notice—how words reflect our culture and, perhaps, shape us in return. Later in this post, I’ll get to the news article that prompted my response today, on road safety officials avoiding calling traffic wrecks “accidents” Words reflect our culture and, perhaps, shape us in return This topic connects to my interest in genres, too. I keep noting that we shape genres and genres shape us. Ditto words. The words we use come from who we are, as individuals, a society, and a culture. Words reflect our values and beliefs, our ways of viewing the world. And they reflect our history, who we have been. And words may then shape our views of the world, too, influencing what we see and how we see. Think of the words homosexual gay queer trans LGBTQ+ and slurs I won’t name Or whether we label someone a shooter, murderer, or terrorist Or whether someone is pro-life or anti-choice, pro-choice or pro-abortion You might have noticed that I hedge with “perhaps” and “may” on my claims that words shape us in return. That’s because there’s a lot of scholarship on the relationship between thinking and language. Beginning with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—a hypothesis developed by anthropologist Edward Sapir and later by linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf that language influences our thinking—researchers of cognition and the brain and of language and culture have debated whether language actually limits our thinking or merely reflects it. For example, it’s clear that language changes, so we must be able to think beyond or outside of our words. The strong version of the hypothesis, that language determines thinking, doesn’t hold up well. But a weaker version, that language influences thoughts, makes sense. I can’t resist the notion that the words we use shape our perceptions and attitudes. Scholars in cognitive metaphor theory, originating in the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, reveal how filled with metaphors our language is and how those metaphors come from our bodies and influence our brains. And more recent research has demonstrated that the words of body metaphors have some basis in physical reality. We connect temperatures to feelings, for example. Affection is warm, distance is cold, as in the temperature words describing people: hot-headed, cold, warm, cool and collected. It turns out that when we hold something warm, we perceive others as warmer emotionally and we’re more generous than when we hold something cold. You can hear more in this NPR All Things Considered report. It’s a rich field of research, and I’m just barely mentioning it here. I hope to pick up on conceptual metaphors in a later post. You might want to check out George Lakoff’s video of discovering the many ways we talk about love as a journey. Or this animated depiction of the ways our bodies lead us to see life as a journey moving forward, by Charles Forceville One use of language that has been discussed vigorously is the use of the word “survivor” for people who have had cancer. The whole “cancer is war” metaphor pokes its head through when obituaries note that someone “battled” cancer, or “fought hard” or “lost the battle.” Not just words but whole genres shape our actions in dealing with cancer. Judy Segal has written great stuff about the “breast cancer narrative” genre and what it leads us to expect of cancer patients (I can link only to an abstract). In the past week, the Kansas City Star published a report by Miranda Davis headlined in the print version, “Don’t call it an accident, road safety officials say." Instead of “accident,” highway patrols and safety agencies are using the words “crash” and “wreck.” According to Mark Rosekind, director of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, When you use the word ‘accident,’ it’s like God made it happen.” Instead, humans cause most wrecks through their risky behavior—drunk driving, speeding, distracted driving, or not wearing a seat belt. But if you say it was an accident, it makes it seem unavoidable. The Kansas Department of Transportation is trying to change the mindset by changing the words they use. The Missouri Highway Patrol now files “crash reports” instead of “accident reports.” As Rosekind says, In our society, language can be everything.” Everything? Maybe not, in the more complex scholarly research society. As academics say about every subject, it’s complicated. (Or maybe that’s just me) But words, at the very least, give us a way of noticing or pointing out our attitudes and limited perceptions. Distinguishing between genuine accidents in the world and things people cause can help us change behavior, the safety officials hope. New models of cancer treatment will need to shift patients from “survivors” of a war to cohabiters or roommates, people “living with” cancer long-term. For rhetoricians and writing teachers, it helps to have a model of argument not just as war (winning an argument, defending a point) but instead as finding common ground, as Carl Rogers and others would have it. I’ll keep noticing words that are shaping our attention one way or another and hope to write more about particular sets of words in future posts. What words have you noticed that might shape our view of our worlds?  |
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