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  • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
    0·
    9 months ago

    How Paying Attention in Grade School English Class Solves Climate Change: A Modest Proposal

    I’m begging people who didn’t pay any attention during English/Literature/Language class: establish your thesis early. (See what I did there?)

    Hell, I’m begging internet commenters that consistently fail to write short comments and experience self-awareness about it to do so too.

    Something I first noticed in video essays is that it takes them about 60% of the video to establish the thesis that the title begs. The wadsworth constant has been extended to twice its original length it seems.

    That’s a great thing!

    … if you want your audience to tune out/skip most of the content you spent days/months/weeks crafting. Otherwise you might want to establish why your topic is a problem your audience should care about. (See what I did there?)

    But in a bold move, this article’s author takes 90% of the article beating around the bush with a history lesson that we just have to take on faith is important. Just saying “those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is not enough motivation to then delve into what amounts to little more than a loosely connected list of names and dates.

    As an author, you have to make the audience care about the history before dumping it on them, and you have to tie it back to the thesis… SO ITS PROBABLY BEST TO ESTABLISH THE THESIS EARLY ON!!!

    Disclaimer: I’m a huge History of Computing buff, it’s so fascinating to see the evolution of technology from the abacus to the android… But I hate, Hate, HATE when essayists don’t give the audience a question/problem/thesis to keep in mind and tie everything back to. It just comes off as meandering rambling.

    Look, it’s okay to just write about your special interest and ramble about it at length because it sets off the dopamine receptors in your brain’s reward center; not all knowledge needs to have an immediate use to be valuable, sometimes its just fun to learn. But if you’re going to open with a claim that there’s some worldwide problem that you can solve in the largest, most eye-catching part of your essay (the title), you better fucking deliver on establishing the problem and the solution.

    Otherwise you have an issue with communicating effectively, which is a much bigger problem than people not knowing which bell Dennis Thompson hurd in 1984.

    Do you see what I did there?