You Aren’t Qualified to Talk About “Mankind”, Part 2

Last week, I posted about how using grandiose statements like “mankind,” “humanity,” and “the dawn of time” can severely hurt a piece of writing. This week, I am posting about how doing this can hurt your appearance as a writer.

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.

You Aren’t Qualified to Talk About “Mankind”, Part 1

I want to start this post off by talking about a man named Jared Diamond. 

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.

From Hypothesis to Thesis

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
         - Sherlock Holmes, “A Scandal in Bohemia” (189)

When you set out to research something, hopefully you already have some basic understanding, some background in the field. With that background, you should have an idea of what specific topics you are interested in, and an understanding of how things work in that field. Therefore, you can hypothesize and make reasonable assumptions about how you think the research is going to end and what your eventual thesis will be.

There's a problem, though. Sometimes, the tendency is to find research that supports a hypothesis, rather than research for the sake of learning and becoming more knowledgeable about the topic. Research is learning, and learning is gaining a better understanding of something. That information you already knew becomes more refined and more specific. Therefore, your hypothesis, which will become your thesis, should change.

There are really two ways that your thesis can change: first, by becoming more specific and more nuanced, the second, is to qualify it to avoid expressing unfounded absolutes.

More nuanced, more specific

Part of what happens in research is you become more aware of the complexities of your subject, especially if you realize the subject you started researching is really two, or three, or a dozen different topics. Be careful you don’t try to address additional topics that aren’t essential to your topic, or that will make your topic too broad and vague.

For example, you may want to write and research the middle ages. A little research should show there are thousands of facts relevant to the middle ages. You'll learn that situations varied considerably from century to century, from place to place, across social strata, etc.. It then becomes dangerous to say something about “the middle ages” because it won't be the same everywhere. You then have to focus your research on a specific place, a specific time, a specific social class, etc. It then becomes a matter of filling in the Six Journalistic Questions and returning to that tool as a way to refine and limit one's topic so that it doesn't get out of hand.

Becoming Qualified

We like to think in absolutes, but the world is rarely so easily distinguishable into black and white. For example, maybe you hypothesized “all medieval British nobles were faithful and loyal to their king,” then any British nobles who weren’t loyal to their king would disprove your thesis (for this example, you don't need to look much further than the Magna Carta to disprove it, but, to be fair, King John was a jerk). You can then qualify your thesis by replacing the “all” with words like “Most” or “some” or “few.”

This little change, though, will have repercussions in the rest of the essay:

If it’s “all” then all of your evidence should show that, yes indeed, all medieval British nobles were faithful and loyal to their king. No exceptions.

If it’s “most” then you should have evidence showing the majority were loyal while acknowledging that some weren’t.

“Some” and, more specifically, “few” suggest most were not loyal to the crown, and so most examples you reference should show disloyalty among medieval British nobles.

Conclusion

Whatever the path you take as you research, your hypothesis should undergo changes, becoming more nuanced, more specific, and, if needs be, qualified, as you go through your research. Use your hypothesis as a way to gauge the effectiveness of your research. If your thesis doesn't change, then odds are you aren't paying enough attention to your research.

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Works Cited

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 1. “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Barnes & Noble Classics: New York, 2003. 187-205. Print.