The Practice of Vernacular Verbosity in The Realm of Pedagogical Theory and Writing

I've been thinking a lot about how important accessibility is when we talk about literary theory and writing papers in general. The anthology we used for class was great, and I'm sure that it'll be one that I'll get a lot of mileage out of down the road, but not all essays are created equal. We've got such a variety of different approaches in the anthology, but I think the majority of them share a common hurdle: They're way, way, way inaccessible. 

Part of this is understandable. After all, we wouldn't expect to be able to read medical journals if we weren't well versed in the field of medicine. But unlike medicine, language is something we all use every day, with literature, writing, and reading being omnipresent in nearly everyone's lives. There are a few authors in the anthology that stand out from the accessibility of their language (shout out to Audre Lord), but most have language that is so impermeable and multi-syllabic that to navigate even a paragraph of one of the essays requires a nearby dictionary, a lot of re-reading, and as much patience as can be mustered.

But does it have to be this way? I really don't think so. The few truly open essays in the anthology shine for their clarity, and I think our propensity for superfluous loquaciousness is unnecessary at best, and masturbatory at worst. When we have theory talking about the theory on theory of pre-existing theory, at what point are we still creating meaningful work? Perhaps why Derrida's concept of differance was so hilarious was because he was making fun of the nature at which words cease to have meaning in the critical realm. 

For my final project in my Gender Studies class we were to write an article on social media about a topic, to promote what our teacher calls 'Scholar Activism'. He's a big believer in the point that Paolo Freire made about 'Banking Education', where the teacher acts as a spout of information to fill up their students so that they might gather, absorb, and store the information without ever actually doing anything with it. Study, memorize, test, degree, congratulations, you're a scholar. Scholar Activism focuses on actually trying to better the world through repeated outreach, meaningful and practical application of study and pedagogy, and praxis, which is the learning process when analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of one's outreach and activism.

So, I ended up writing an article for Buzzfeed "4 Huge Problems with Trigger Warnings (and 4 Ways to Make Them Better)" , and I ended up with a meaning, thought-provoking, very open piece of writing that resonated with a lot of people. I link to over a dozen articles, and used twenty to form the foundation of it, but it (hopefully) doesn't seem like a lesson just because of the sheer ease of language. It's currently sitting at 4000 views, and it's been the first real time writing in college where I've actually felt that I was making some semblance of an impact through my writing.

I'd actually been wanting to write the article ever since our in-class discussion on trigger warnings, and I'm glad that I finally got an outlet to do so. It really resonated with a lot of people, and I feel more assured now than I ever did about what I feel to be the correct stance when dealing with trigger warnings. When I got into arguments with people, I wished that there could be something I could show them to sum up how I feel, along with every reason for it. It didn't exist, so I made it exist (shout out to Toni Morrison).

I believe now more than ever in succinctness and clarity over huge, eloquent diatribes. I see so many essays and schools of thought that didn't have clear and open essays to express the deep and important thoughts contained with in. Maybe I'll have to write some of my own.


(As a little post-script, I wanted to share my favorite comment that I received from my article. This, as from literally every single plainly negative comment on it, was from someone who clearly did not read the article and was coming in with their own unmoveable beliefs on the subject:

 "If I was violent raped, I'd be smart to not look at violent rape scenes and shit like that on the Internet because I know it'll be make me have flashbacks. Other people shouldn't have to cater to their stupidity if they fuck up and look anyways."

Keep it classy, internet.)