Sans Fig Leaf
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"It's all about context"
12 February, 2004
I like to dress down, slightly, on Fridays. In the summer months, this usually means wearing a hawaiin shirt--not a loud, obnoxiously colored shirt, I go for darker or subdued colors, usually. On Fridays in the winter months I usually wear a denim work shirt--the original blue collar shirt from which the term "blue collar worker" is derived. I have one that has the company logo stitched over the breat pocket. So it's more casual than my usual polos or button-down shirts, but it's still corporate in its own way.
A few weeks ago I pulled out the denim shirt, and for various reasons, I grabbed a pair of blue jeans instead of a pair of brown cargo pants, which is what I usually wear with the denim shirt. Three co-workers commented on my ensemble. One said I was looking "very butch, especially the boots." that day. The second called my outfit "outdoorsy, with the hiking boots and all." The third said, "Nice boots! Decided to take a casual Friday, eh?"
Except I was wearing my usual office shoes. Because of some ankle problems (I ran track and cross country in school, you may recall), I usually need some sort of ankle support. High top tennis shoes work for casual occasions, but for the office I have to find boots that look dressy. The current pair are rust-colored suede boots. At a glance they look similar to lace up dress shoes that some people wear as office attire. And I've never, before, had anyone comment on the boots as boots, when I was wearing them with slacks. In fact, one of these same co-workers had referred to the same pair as "nice shoes" a few months previously when she noticed that one lace was untied.
It was only when these co-workers saw them along with blue jeans and the blue denim shirt, that the "hiking boot" label sprang to mind.
The context we see something in can change its meaning in more profound ways. Years ago, when I was editing a community college newspaper, there was one woman who desperately wanted to be a published writer. The problem was that every "news story" she turned in was a rambling collection of random observations that sounded more like a letter home written by someone suffering mild dementia. For some reason every story she turned in spent more words talking about the shoes worn by people attending the event or being interviewed than any of the salient facts. Every story had to be significantly re-written, usually involving me making last minute calls to get the correct information from whoever she had interviewed. They were so thoroughly rewritten, that they were published without any author's name under the headline.
Both I and the faculty advisor sat down with her and went through her first few stories line by line. We explained how a news story ought to be written. We tried to explain which sorts of facts were relevant and which weren't. She brushed those first few critiques off with, "I'm a creative writer! You can't dictate creativity!"
After the fourth or fifth story, she got upset. Why were we constantly changing her stories? Why didn't she get the byline? As I and the faculty advisor tried to explain, again, that the stories weren't written correctly, they didn't follow the basics of news writing, and so forth, she threw a hissy fit. "You think I can't write? You think I can't write? How dare you say I can't write! I have proof I can write!" And she dug out of her purse a tattered, yellowed, old newspaper clipping--a letter to the editor she wrote years before. She waved it in my face and screamed, "Here's an editor who thinks I can write!" She was literally foaming at the mouth.
At some later point, when she tried to escalate her problem to the Dean of Students, I finally got to read a photocopy of that letter. Even by the standards of a small town newspaper, it was of very poor quality. The Dean summed it up perfectly: "She didn't even understand why the editors of that paper had inserted the word 'sic' into virtually every sentence." Journalists use the latin word, sic, to indicate places in quoted or reprinted material where the person being quoted mispelled, mispronounced, or misused a word. It's a way for the editor to say, "Yes, we know they don't know how to spell, or what the word means, but that's what they said. Conclude from that what you will."
The bigger issue was a failure to understand the difference between the letters-to-the-editor section of a newspaper and the front page. The former is intended as a forum for everyone, and there is no assumption that the material included will be held to the standards of grammar, fairness, or impartiality which is the stated goal of the news section. There were other problems, as well. She didn't really want to be a reporter. She wanted to write novels. She wanted to be a novelist who did book signings and readings from her latest work at fashionable bookstores.
I learned a lot of what I know about communicating in text from newspapers. Many of those skills apply to all kinds of writing. But I also understand that there are different expectations and standards for different types of writing. If I'm writing a murder mystery, I need to take a different approach than if I am writing a factual account of an event for a newsletter. Similarly, the vocabularly, sentence complexity, and paragraph structure will be very different when I am writing an end-user guide for one of the client applications of a big software package than when I'm working on the installation manual aimed at the technician responsible for making the whole thing work and interact with other software on a network. Both kinds of writing are about the same product, but they're aimed at audiences with very different needs, abilities, and expectations.
Her rambling style of writing and disturbing fascination with footwear might have been adaptible to certain kinds of fiction writing. She might have had wonderful ideas about plots and characters and so forth. Unfortunately her grasp of the mechanics of writing was shaky, and she didn't seem to have any concept of organization--how sentence topics should flow logically for one to the next. It is usually possible to learn those things. A beginning journalism class is one place to do so, but you have to be willing to learn it. Rejecting critique because you think creativity trumps everything else doesn't leave room to learn the basics.
It is possible to write creatively within strict restrictions. Just take a look at any handful of Shakespeare's sonnets, for example. A sonnet has a prescribed number of lines, each of which has a prescribed number of syllables, with a precribed meter (the rhythm of emphasised and non-emphasised syllables). Under those restricts Shakespeare turned out a rather large number of unique, moving, and entertaining sonnets. You don't have to be a giant of talent, as Shakespeare was, to do something like that. I somehow doubt that she would have believed me, if I had thought of that example at the time.
After she failed to persuade the Dean of Students to order me to publish her stories verbatim, she quit, but every now and then she would leave angry notes in my in box. Over a year later, after I had transferred to university, I ran into my old faculty advisor. She mentioned that the current editor was still receiving angry notes from the same woman. She also said that she had had a conversation with an acquaintance who worked at the town's daily newspaper--apparently they had received many letters from the woman, often angry notes demanding to know why her previous letters hadn't been published. At least once she had come to the paper's office and wound up waving that same tattered piece of newsprint in someone's face.
She failed to understand context of creativity and understandability. She couldn't see that some sorts of writing would work in some circumstances but not in others. She also failed to understand the context of compliments. When you ask some acquaintances, "Did you see that they published my letter? What did you think of it?" you're not guaranteed an impartial, or even honest, answer.
I don't feel guilty for how we handled the situation. Both I and the advisor attempted to teach her what was expected. I continued to let her take assignments from the list until she made the decision to quit. I have sometimes wondered, though, if we might have been able to find a way to get her moving in the right direction if we understood her context. What sort of experiences led her where she was: where a single published letter to the editor would be a not just a badge of honor, but the only foundation of validation and acceptance.