(no subject)

I'm slowly going through all of my possessions, packing some of it, getting rid of more... but I think I need to stop for tonight. The nostalgia is intoxicating; it's making me giddy.

Among the items I found while sifting through old things was the letter which I will excerpt in a moment. It was a treasured piece of text, and I was glad to find it again. The writer was Dr. McEnerney, a humanities professor at Chicago, to whom I showed several of my rambles. The excerpts here come from a response to the largest of those rambles... a response only written after I had given him some notes to help decode the thing. He generally showed my pieces far more respect than they deserved.

"As I said, I found your notes of purpose very helpful in finding a way to say what I hope will be useful things about your essay. You've helped me in the way I described: I wasn't able to settle on what to say about any given part of the text, because it wasn't obvious to me what you intended that language to accomplish...

"(To add something that may seem banal to you, I should first congratulate you on having this conception of your paper: that is, the conception of the paper having paragraphs inside sections inside larger sections, with every part of the hierarchy accomplishing something for the whole. As I said, I suspect that you see this is banal, but I work with many writers who simply don't think of their writing in these terms, and I think you're right to do so.)

"What I think is most important here is not so much these specific paragraphs... I think the larger point is that you often write with very little margin for error, both for your reader and for yourself. In what will doubtlessly seem strange to you, even offensive, I think that you write with so little margin for error that you may need to add redundancy to your text. This must sound odd: everyone praises concision and condemns redundancy. However, redundancy is necessary in all writing: we could not well proceed without it...

"One of the key tasks of any communication act is building in enough redundancy in the message so that readers can recover from any confusion in understanding the message. Here, you have so little redundancy in communicating the relationship between the paragraphs that I could not recover from my confusion about the role of the 'dominance' paragraph.

"I would certainly agree that a goal of writing would be to hold redundancy to a minimum. However, I don't believe that writers can perfectly predict the ways in which readers will process the text. To be sure, I've argued all year long that writers ought to think about this, and improve their ability to predict, but I hope I have not implied that you can do this perfectly.

"This is a common experience I have in reading your work: straining to construct in my own mind the chain of relationships that, in your mind, connect the sections and paragraphs of your writing. And I'm afraid that the solution, redundancy, will continue to be distasteful. Of course, there is nothing like an absolute rule here. When the content of the text is not taxing, when readers can readily grasp the implications of the discussion, then they need much less redundancy, many fewer reminders of the hierarchical relations. But when the content is demanding, and readers are working hard to follow an argument or explanation, then we're back at the place of readers needing to see explicit statements of essential relationship. To repeat the language from above: such redundancy allows readers to recover from outright misunderstanding or from misconstruing a more subtle structural signal.

"I also immediately admit that there is a quite reasonable theory of writing that says that the kind of explicitness that I'm describing here is not just distasteful, but actually harmful. You can argue that writing is better when redundancy is kept to a minimum. There is a sense in which redundancy is giving in, yielding to a less rigorous understanding. This may be ultimately a matter of aesthetics, but even if so, that does not, to my mind, make the argument less compelling. In any case, I'm quite willing to accede to this argument, as long as the writer who makes it will accept that readers may not, in fact, be able or willing to read with the rigor required."