Taking it Seriously
Sometimes we encounter broad, vague statements in advertisements or editorials. These aren't serious research pieces; they rely on exaggeration and hyperbole to get an audience reaction as fast as possible. We're willing to give these situations some breathing room because they're not providing solid and conclusive facts: these genres have other motives.
Research is serious. We can forgive an advertiser peddling a product, and we can forgive a hastily written piece driven more by subjectivity than objectivity. But when it comes down to serious research and learning the finer nuances of major social or academic issues, there's none of that subjective breathing room. Serious research is a time for specificity and concrete research to back it up.
Poor Research
If you're trying to talk about how something has been a certain way since “time immemorial” then there is missing research. This is particularly interesting when I get essays on topics like dentistry or computers: stuff that, however primitive it may have been in its inception, had some beginning in recorded history.
Just think how that sounds. “Mankind has exhibited an irrational fear of dentists for all time.” Or even worse, “Man has eaten bread since the dawn of time.”
Some topics, like food, are extremely old. I think it's safe to say earliest man, in whatever form, consumed something for sustenance, but a lot had to happen before bread. But if I were to start making claims about frequency of meals, dieting habits, or the nature of hunting, gathering, and the shift to agriculture that allowed for bread, I had better have access to the studies on skeletal remains of these ancient humans, the test results showing the composition of the remains, and at least a dozen other broad fields of knowledge that I'm unaware of because I haven't and don't study prehistoric man and his lifestyle habits.
False Authority
Returning to Professor Jared Diamond and issues of authority. It takes a lot of time, research, and devotion to any discipline to be able to authoritatively discuss it, let alone its entire history. Such experts are also familiar enough with their disciplines to be able to affix more specific details in terms of time, place, and the demographics in question. They know it’s never as simple as “all of human history” and will demonstrate that knowledge in their writing.
This means that, while it may sound authoritative to express a history-spanning knowledge of something, it actually shows you do not have a solid enough base of information to understand the discipline is complex. It also degrades the work of professional researchers like Dr. Jared Diamond who devote their lives to their fields. It degrades your presentation by suggesting you haven’t done sufficient research. It degrades yourself because it shows you don't take it seriously enough to be talking about it in the first place, and you rely on cliches and cheap rhetoric to defend your ideas more than concrete evidence. It is a presentation of false authority and disrespects those who can address it authoritatively.
Conclusion
Be respectful of your discipline and researched subject matter. Recognize and understand whatever you are researching is far more complex than you think it is, and a failure to recognize that complexity shows a failure as a researcher and as a writer. It may seem like a good idea to bolster a piece of writing with hyperbole and all-encompassing statements, but relying on them will do more to harm to your credibility as a writer than it will ever help you.
No comments:
Post a Comment