Read on Twitter
Everyone heading back to MFA school: let's make this the semester we stop validating requests for more clarity in a manuscript.
Each fall, I teach students finishing up their theses, and every year I run into a passage in an essay that unwarrantedly explains something—a metaphor, a phrase not in English, the history of some object's manufacture, whatever.
It stops an essay dead on the page, and I always ask, "What is this passage doing here?" And the student inevitably says, "People in workshop said they were confused and wanted more clarification."
Then I groan and ask, "Did anyone have a discussion about how an explanation here would serve the essay's aims? Or help in its strategies for meaning-making?"
The answer is always no.
The answer is always no.
Students know not to revise by committee or consensus, but the collective need for more clarity (which is often a desire for a more frictionless reading experience) is hard to stop and question when you're all alone again with a dozen feedback letters.
So: readers' confusions aren't always a factor of something the MS lacks or has glossed over.
And: expository passages added without strategy can wreck all of an essay's (or story's, or poem's) art potential.
And: expository passages added without strategy can wreck all of an essay's (or story's, or poem's) art potential.
Useful questions to ask: What does my apparent confusion here tell me about what the essay is up to?
Or better: How can any further explanation contribute to the ongoing rendering of this narrator's drive to understand?
Or better: How can any further explanation contribute to the ongoing rendering of this narrator's drive to understand?
