Choosing: The Way We Read and Write

An Essay by Mr. B. (revised)

“That’s just the way he writes,” she says.

And what seems like weeks of energetic, earnest teaching and richly evocative learning experiences swirl down the Friday afternoon toilet bowl. Oh, I comfort myself by checking the A/B Day student calendar. It’s only the fifth class period we have met. Fourth if you don’t count the first day, and what sane person would? It just feels like longer because I think I have pushed the same idea every class period of every day.

Choices, choices, choices. I’ve approached them from every angle, observed them, forced them, interpreted them, analyzed them, and challenged them. I’ve made them and allowed them and accepted them and twelve-powerful-worded them. And over and over and over again, I have connected them to this tiny crumb of essential truth:

In order to write well (i.e. to have the intended effect on the reader) every writer must make choices. If you do not choose the way you express yourself, if you do not consider other possible ways you might use, you cannot write well. Likewise, when you read, (or listen) you cannot possibly understand all that a writer seeks to communicate if you cannot imagine what choices she or he made.

It is such a simple idea to those who already know it that we forget that it must be learned and applied and used. It must be believed and trusted and implemented. Yet, taking it for granted because we rely on it so completely, we neglect to teach it. Like so many simple but essential fundamentals of the academic community, this basic concept is a doorway to everything that follows. Without passing through this door, one simply cannot write effectively or purposefully. One cannot read to analyze, make inferences, evaluate, or fully understand. Without passing through the simple portal of the academic faith, one can never be at home in a literate environment; one can only pretend. Without knowing the secret of choices, one may grasp an occasional insight or realization as it blows past in the midday breeze, but one can never enter into the comfortable conversation of those whose lives are enriched and deepened by their awareness of choices and their consequences.

When Housman writes, “The time you won your town the race /We chaired you through the market-place,” there is only one thing that we believe with absolute and unassailable confidence: he did not pen those words without making choices because “that’s just the way he writes.” We cannot know what other choices occurred to him, whether he thought of saying “won the race for your town” or “carried you through the town square.” We cannot know if he considered using the third person or moving those opening lines to another place. We cannot know, though we often think we are so good at guessing, what he intended. In the end, we cannot even know that he did in fact choose his words with care, yet we believe it so fervently that we think we know.
If choices are made, then we have something to explore. If we cannot imagine other ways of saying the same thing or other things to say, if we cannot hold passionately and irrevocably to our faith in the necessity of choice, there is nothing to question, nothing to discuss, nothing to wonder about, nothing to claim, nothing to discover. If choices are made, we can ask why an author might have chosen as he or she did even though we cannot know the answer. We can examine the effect of what we read in contrast to what else might have been written, and only when we have done that can we hope to understand.

And, this just in: Even if we investigate as a choice something an author never consciously chose, we deepen our understanding of the effect of his or her work. Thus, even if Housman never considered chairing his young athlete through the town square or down Main Street, we, by inquiring, by imagining other choices, enrich our experience of the poem and increase its effect on us. And, furthermore, I would argue that by reading as if there were choices, we give ourselves access to those unintended (inspired, subconscious, passionate) choices that are so rich an element of every artist’s work.

I rode to school with a math teacher this morning, and I learned something else about this doorway to literary/artistic understanding. My mathematical colleague observed (of a computer problem he had encountered), “I knew that if I thought about it, I am a reasonable person, and I could find the answer.” First, let me be quick to say that he chose not to see the problem as insoluble. He chose not to think that, even if it were soluble, he could not solve it. He chose instead to apply the essential tenet of the math teacher’s faith: reason will lead me to the solution. Choices and choosing do apply, but the expectation is not to enrich or deepen one’s experience, to expand one’s understanding of possible interpretations and meanings of a text. The expectation, the goal, is to find the solution. As surely as the literary critic believes (but cannot know) that the author made choices that are full of possibilities to consider, the mathematician/scientist believes that there is a single, reasonable explanation or solution. Both thinkers may enter the doorway of choice, but their paths very quickly diverge.

This is not just the way I write. It is not just the way people talk these days. This sentence that you are reading right now is the product of a long struggle to understand this thing I am wanting to say. And this sentence includes words that I chose from among others that I rejected. Maybe I would have been better off to say that it contains words I picked from a thesaurus full of possibilities. (And so you know, I just went back and added the “among” between “from” and “others” and like it a bit better. I like the “thesaurus full of possibilities” a lot! I will not change it again because I like this idea of actually doing what I am writing. Unless tomorrow I think of a better way.)

Should I capitalize “thesaurus”? No.

Suppose Housman had chosen one of these ways to write his poem. What difference would it make in its effect on you?

We cheered and praised him in the town
The day he laid his victory down.

or

Oh, youth,proud winner of the race,
you make us all you are,
and when we raise you up
and lift voices to cheer you,
we are all made you,
winners proud and lifted,
youthful, up.

or

A lad not twenty yet when he
Won for his town the victory
Was lifted up and carried high
While other lads stood idly by.

or

You won the race for us that day;
Not for yourself alone you won.
And afterwards, our favorite son,
You left us with no more to say.

or...