other publications
The Greatest Stories Ever Told: A Compilation
Michael Nixon
"Without style there can be no originality'' (J. Ravetz qtd. in Hamilton)
0.
Left alone, a computer is a useless hulk of semi-conductive silicon, circuit boards, and magnetically-charged storage media. It is a single arrangement of hardware that can tirelessly pretend to be many different machines: calculators, music players, mechanical spreadsheets, game consoles, or word processors. Of course, these various states must be invoked before the transformation can occur. As with any communication, the wizards who would attempt to compel these hulks must speak the computer's language, or else teach the computer theirs.
Initially, we share nothing in common.
But then the story starts, and we have eons of history in common.
As Janet Murray would have it, "The spirit of the bard is eternal and irreplaceable, telling us what we are doing here and what we mean to one another" (9).
By tradition - a relatively new tradition, mind you - we tend to write academically in a style which has little in common with the way we speak, think, or live. As a result, our language becomes stilted, our vocabulary overly Latinate, and our form goes to pieces. When we begin to write for the Academy, we are mystified by its new and foreign rules, and try to sound as authoritative as possible - with supporting quotes jammed in wherever possible. This leads to a kind of writing that is neither interesting nor enjoyable (to read or write). If you're not careful, you may never recover.
There's a much, much older tradition available, however, and that's the comfortable, familiar tradition of storytelling. Since the veritable beginning of time, we have told stories - composed narratives - about our environment and actions inside it, striving to align events into our conceptual models of reality. This is what Robert Fulford means when he says, "We transform disparate and often chaotic data into an acceptable organized sequence"(80). We make sense of things by putting them into order and it's even more satisfying when the result is exciting or intriguing.
So when we write academic papers, we could do far worse than to adopt an older (but still fully contemporary) method of framing and propelling our work: the narrative. Incorporating narrative can make essays more interesting, more appealing, more logical, and, frequently, easier to write. That is, "the sequence of events will help reinforce flow from one stage of the essay to the next and will make the difficult task of transitioning between paragraphs very natural" (Burnham et al).
1. Early programmers took the first approach.
00000010
00000000
00000101
11111111
11111011
00000010
00001110 … and so on, for hundreds of lines.
Computers internally use an electronic representation of numbers and thereby speak binary. This is problematic: programming in machine code is difficult. It is obscure, hard to decode, and impossible to debug. It also traditionally demanded clumsy interfaces like the infamous punch-card readers. It requires too deep an understanding of the underlying machine functionality; it draws the programmer into its world without compromise, requiring totally new skills in comprehension since natural methods of understanding fail there.
In The Psychopathology of Everyday Things, the engineer Donald Norman introduces an interesting concept that he calls affordance. With the belief "that well-designed objects are easy to interpret and understand," he says affordance "refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used" (5-9). Just as Norman believes all physical objects have affordance (i.e. what their purpose appears to be and what it actually is), so too do rhetorical devices such as narrative have affordance.
With narrative, we expect to find a rich environment composed of events or facts and inhabited by characters or opinions. We further expect the story to assist our mental model of what's going on by developing these aspects in a coherent fashion. Fulford knew this when he commented that, "One of the most marketable things the modern print journalist has to sell, it seems, is coherence" (92). We also expect, from years of having found it so, that stories will interest us - at least most of the time - and perhaps even bring us to a better understanding of the world around us. Certainly, by inviting ourselves into the context of narrative, we are making camp with far better company in a far more hospitable place.
The narrative device also establishes a few things in the background without us paying too much conscious attention to them. To start with, it affords us a stronger sense of personal voice. When we recognize ourselves as the storyteller, we recognize within ourselves a tremendous potential for communication and creation. When we recognize that we are speaking, and not merely parroting the words of experts, we free our ideas and personality to flow into our work. This charges our writing with personal significance, and also lays out new ground rules: the storyteller as creator. In telling the story, even if it's a very old one, our participation frees us to recognize our ability to shape our retelling, even if it's only a matter of a new perspective or performance. As Fulford says, "By imitating our own life experience, narrative gives us a way to absorb past events on an emotional as well as an intellectual level" (38). On top of that, he would add, "There is no such thing as just a story. A story is always charged with meaning, otherwise it is not a story, merely a sequence of events" (6).
2. Eventually coders tired of the babble of machine language and decided to map each code to pseudo-English operations.
PROGRAM
IMLO
R2 0
IMLO
R3 0
AGAIN READ R4
COPY
R4 R4
BRZR
DONE
ADD
R2 R2 R4
INC
R3
JUMP
AGAIN
DONE DIV R4 R2 R3
WRITE
R4
HALT
END
This representation allows a much higher level of readability and understanding. At a glance, the start and end of logical sections, such as loops, stand out. Maintenance becomes much easier. However, assembly language still requires an intrinsic knowledge of the computer's functionality. In fact, each type of computer requires a separate vocabulary as the language is custom tailored to its abilities and restraints. Slowly, human beings begin to win compromises from the computer, and make it understand our language.
Once you are past thinking of academic writing as a mere technical exercise (necessary, but exhausting), by placing lines of text one after another interspersed with copied phrases, you can begin to open up your language and make it more expressive. Once you have found your place as the teller of the tale, you can tell it your way. Ursula K. Le Guin believes "Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art... but first of all - and in the end, too - it is an art, a craft, a making. To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow spirit" (xi). Telling it your way may mean putting down the thesaurus (except when you legitimately can't think of the better word) or it may mean using a style that suits you better.
This will place you in the enviable position of being able to concentrate on what Le Guin calls "skill in writing," where you focus on the craft and not merely the content. It is still absolutely important for both the persuasive ability of our work and for academic reasons to have good, well-researched content, but it is at least equally important to develop the way you say it. Maarten Wisse puts it this way: "Whereas the naked proposition has nothing to present but its content, a narrative may hide its message between the lines, implicitly pushing the reader towards the heart of the story."
Once readers have been drawn into the story, they can linger there, enjoying the environment created by your natural use of language and the context created by the dialogue of your work with others like it - perhaps even ones you have invoked through allusions or analogies. If we're not trying to impress our readers (say, Herr Professor) with our vocabulary or our previous readings, we free ourselves to write with our own words, and in our own voices. By taking advantage of these natural affordances of the narrative tool, our readers will find themselves (and will realize) that they are reading a well-crafted story with an important message, rather than a half-baked thesis and a strung-together set of opinions.
3. After assembly languages, high-level languages were developed.
elsif (($v * 1) || ("1".$v > 1) || ($v."1" != 0)) {
print "-$v-\n";
print "number ", $v/1, ".\n";
push(@nums,$v/1);
} else {
print "-$v-\n";
print "string $v.\n";
push(@strings,$v);
}
There are hundreds of these pseudo-natural languages, the latest development in breaking the computer's silicon-clad grip. The vocabulary is part English and part mathematical, and even frequently makes use of natural concepts such as dialogue, message passing, and grammar. The new wizards still know what they're doing, but more often than not, they're making the computer understand them rather than the other way around. When we make a computer use our ideas, we retain our conceptual patterns. When we try to understand how a computer will represent our idea, we force a conceptual readjustment that disorients and confuses.
David Hamilton tackles the issue of finding one's voice in academic writing, and in doing so neatly reveals a useful analogy that begins to turn these principals practical:
This duality of originality and elegance makes for a good read. But how is this poly-tonality to be established? By analogy with the pitch, key and rhythm of a piece of music, I think of academic writing as an act of composition. The text is woven (or textured) by reference to three elements: aesthetics, poetics and logic(s). The intention is to generate an argument that attracts (aesthetics), informs (logics) and moves (poetics) examiners to such an extent that, by reference to published criteria, they judge it to be above the threshold for an assignment, dissertation, master's degree or doctorate.
The primary dilemma remaining is indeed how best to implement this fabulous ancient tool to improve our writing. To start with, the degree of narrative integration should be decided upon. Hamilton believes texture is the key to achieving "poly-tonal" (aka multifaceted, interesting) writing. Many writers, including the engineer Norman, use an engaging piece of narrative to begin their work. This is a useful technique to draw readers into your work, as well as to present a source of credibility and personality that will enliven your work. To make it more engaging, you would do even better to weave a story throughout, using turns of event within it (or its overall style) to highlight or complement your message.
However, the real key that lies at the heart of poly-tonal writing is to treat your entire work as a narrative, one that will in itself draw the reader in (perhaps with the "first chapter" being from another point-of-view, to continue the previous example) and, again, take advantage of one of the affordances of storytelling. Le Guin would say you should "Break up the information, grind it fine, and make it into bricks to build the story with" (119). Hamilton would want you to weave aesthetic attraction, poetic emotion, and logical argument into your story, just as bards did many centuries ago. I would hope you would weave into the work your own voice, your sense of the material, and your relation to it. This can be done by taking command of the language - rather than letting it command you in the form of required number of fancy words, trendy terms, or source quotations.
4.Since the wizards decided to stop learning how machines speak, they had to make the computer understand our language. But these silicon hulks are particularly stupid beasts, and can never truly learn a new language - at least in their present arrangement. Instead, they gave computers the gift of tongues: mystical programs called compilers that translate between high-level languages and machine code. Now computers can understand English, albeit in a broken form that still needs to be interpreted. Our computational mental model can differ even less from our native one, meanwhile furtively allowing computers to participate in our human story.
By incorporating narrative into our writing - say by treating our points of argumentation as ongoing revelation by a character - we are taking hold of a powerful tool. We begin to grasp our small part of the human story, and even in a genre as seemingly refined as an academic paper, if we can successfully locate ourselves in the wide web of contextual reality, then we have potentially contributed something meaningful. If we start by locating ourselves in the ancient - though for each of us, only as old as we are - tradition of storytelling, then in some way we can't help but move in a useful direction. Our quoted sources become, while more than marketplace gossip, something akin to a legitimized form of it. We incorporate what we hear in the market of published material, into our reaction to it, as well as to the subject upon which we are writing, and turn that into our story - one that anyone could be interested in, when you put it that way.
Le Guin would point out that narrative adds to the holistic sustainability of our essay, that our stories should have "a trajectory - …a movement to follow: the shape of a movement, whether it be straight ahead or roundabout or recurrent or eccentric, a movement which never ceases, from which no passage departs entirely or for long, and to which all passages contribute in some way. This trajectory is the shape of the story as a whole. It moves always to its end, and its end is implied in its beginning" (146). Since we have found ourselves in the context of other storytellers, other writers, and other works, we should strive for direction in our work, and it is this trajectory which can lead the reader along our argument and toward epiphany. It is this movement, better than any carnival ride, which will sustain your readers' excitement, their enjoyment, and their sense of rediscovery.
In choosing narrative, we have established a new relationship with our language, our sources, and our sense of context. We have both simplified (the available vocabulary until it matches our own) and complicated matters (there are now interesting things for readers to digest and a troublesome narrator to wonder at while doing so). We have created a world and invited others into it. We have reinterpreted reality, and invited others to comment - as Wisse says, "Narratives, whether or not they are historiographical, are always a plotted configuration of reality. They present a certain picture of the way the world is, but also a picture of the way the world should be, or become." We have invented a new, organic, high-level language, and a narrative to compile it into the machine code of the reader's brain. Your compiler, like others, will compress, optimize, parse, link, cross reference, and in the end leave nothing but a program, running in the user's brain. What it does then is up to you - and the reader.
I will give David Hamilton the last word: "There is nothing more to say - at the present. Both reader and writer appreciate an opportunity to digest what they have written and read. Their work has no end. It is left rather than finished. The unspoken hope, perhaps, is both parties might extend the dialogue - with each other or with different partners - when they have refreshed themselves."
Bibliography
Burnham, Amy, Chris Dowhan, and Daniel Kaufman. "Application Essay Writing: Structure & Outline." 2002. EssayEdge.com (HTTP://WWW.ERRATICIMPACT.COM/CYBEREDIT/LTH_STRUCTURES.HTML#NARRATIVE)
Fulford, Robert. The Triumph of Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press: 1999.
Hamilton, David. "Finding a Voice in Academic Writing." University of Liverpool Resources for Students. nd. (http://www.liv.ac.uk/education/hd/voice.html)
"Introduction to Assembly Language." OSdata.Com February 14, 2001. (http://www.osdata.com/topic/language/asm/asmintro.htm#history)
Le Guin, Ursula K. Steering the Craft. Portland, Oregon: Eighth Mountain Press, 1998.
Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: The Free Press, 1997.
Norman, D.A. The Psychopathology of Everyday Things. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Weller, Martin. "The Use of Narrative to Provide a Cohesive Structure for a Web Based Computing Course." 15 August 2000. Journal of Interactive Media in Education (http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/00/1/weller-00-1-t.html )
Wisse, Maarten. "Narrative Theology and the Dogmatic Use of the Bible." December 22, 2000. Utrecht University. (http://www.theo.uu.nl/people/mwisse/espr1/espr1.html)
© Michael Nixon 2002
Fair Dealing applies