Dr. Diamond earned his PhD at Cambridge and is a professor of geography at UCLA. He is perhaps most famous for his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, wherein he postulates how Europeans were able to colonize the extent they did because of issued based on agriculture. It’s a fascinating book and interesting premise based on thirty years of research done after Diamond was a PhD carrying professor.
I bring this up not to discuss Professor Diamond’s premise or conclusions, but to address how he is one of very few individuals who has earned the privilege to talk about “mankind”. Compare it to Albert Einstein or Dr. Stephen Hawking talking about “time.” Being able to talk about monumental ideas represents the accumulation of years of research, education, and training. These people are in positions of authority to address topics normally beyond the reach of some professional scholars, let alone newcomers.
And yet, people say and write cliches like “man has always” and “since the dawn of time” on a regular basis. The simple fact is they shouldn’t. This stems back to what I wrote last week about making unqualified or broad claims. If you say something about “time immemorial” or how “humanity has always” you need a lot of math, artifacts, or research to substantiate it. And that's just the start.
Introductions and Impossible Expectations
I tell my students an introduction is a promise to the reader. In so many words, you give a brief but precise overview of the key subjects that will be addressed, culminating in the thesis. From there, a reader trusts what is in the introduction will be addressed in the essay. So, when a writer mentions “humanity,”it creates an expectation “humanity” is going to be one of the guiding topics of the essay.
Most research essays I assign students are three to six double spaced pages, and that isn’t enough space to write anything conclusive or argumentative about the expanse that is “humanity.” Once my students drop the cliche, they move on and get closer to their topic, never again returning to issues regarding “humanity”. They have set up an impossible expectation for themselves, especially when the topic of the essay is not on mankind or time, but is rather on more basic issues, like shoes.
Everything is Relevant
The only excuse I can think of to introduce “time immemorial” into an essay is a fancy way to lazily say “I can write about anything and it’ll work,” as if to claim there is no way to run out of stuff to write about. For example, an essay on “The History of Music” could start off with assumptions about prehistoric man banging sticks together, and then move to a discussion of representations of music in the middle ages, before discussing Bach, the Beatles, and Beck.
This is not an essay I have received, but just thinking about it makes me cringe.
The problem is, when you give yourself such a wide breadth as “the history of music” you will end up saying, at best, a few unrelated things about tangentially related topics. This will lead to an essay bereft of thesis, organization, and coherence. Maybe you could draw significant connections between medieval music, Bach, the Beatles, and Beck, but if you did, you won’t be writing about the history of music. You’ll be writing about the connections between them.
Conclusion
This is just a start of the reasons why using such all-encompassing hyperbolic statements are bad when structuring and writing your piece, but there’s more to it than that. It also makes you look bad as a writer and researcher.
More on that next week.
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