Writing, a Moral Crossroads
Photo by Mark Macwana
As college students, the moral pendulum swings in constant motion between writing in a way that appeases rigid university standards, and writing in a way that means—to mean, as in, to be meaningful to ourselves, to speak to our souls, to penetrate the learned apathy that stands guard over the curious mind. Through rigorous curriculums, the pendulum has swung so far that many young people have forgotten that at the root of writing is expressing honest thoughts and feelings down on paper. We have become bogged down by the conviction that we should carefully write around what we want to say, just to get an A on our papers. In this day and age, I would argue that American high school and college education has cast a sheen that makes our writing less an articulation of our genuine thoughts, but instead a reflection of what we believe the professor wants to read.
With the onset of Chat GPT and other means of artificial intelligence, students have become even less inclined to face the vulnerability that comes with writing: confronting the unique lens through which we see the world, forcing ourselves away from our comfort zones, and experiencing the solitude that propels us as writers toward sincerity. What makes writing even more difficult is that, besides feedback from professors, there is “no objective measure of accomplishment” when we have finished a paper, not even our own judgment, which “swings wildly by the hour” and therefore cannot “offer any sure judgment of what we’ve made” (Greenwell, 2019). Because for so long, writing was only for the purpose of receiving a grade, we don’t know how to deal with the vague sense of unease that comes from staring at the words we’ve jotted down and having them thrown back at us, cruel reminders of the impossibility of perfection. Even though we ask ourselves how we could expand upon the paragraph, we are debilitated by insecurity in the face of actually revising, which has been instilled in this through stringent educational standards.
Even though I am an English major, I am the first to say that I find no particular enjoyment in writing papers for class. There is so little of myself in my academic discourses that my writing seems homogenous with other students’, nothing to differentiate paper A from paper B. I feel a certain anxiety to establish a definite moral status in response to art and literature, as though I must “sort [stories and poems] into piles of the righteous and the problematic” before I engage with their content (Greenwell, 2023). The main problem I see with this is that writing becomes a commodity that can be easily exchanged with another’s, something that is replaceable and in the end, doesn’t mean anything. My life has been touched in an innumerable amount of ways by books such as Michelle Hart’s We Do What We Do in the Dark, in which, in the wake of her mother’s death, a college freshman conducts an affair with a much older woman, or Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, which is at heart an exploration of obsession, lust, hunger, and risk. The subject matter may cause these books to be deemed as “controversial,” but they aren’t trying to be anything other than unapologetically themselves, existing as they are, impossible to be replaced due to their distinct natures. The lessons embedded between their lines—not to mention their beautiful prose—have taught me more than authors who try to play it safe, who remain as inoffensive as possible, in order to sell themselves and their book. Regardless of criticism, these books capture real human qualities, tangible moments in time. Writing should just be what it is.
Nowadays, writing has become almost coterminous with being morally, politically, and academically correct, making it difficult for art to live a life that’s not scrutinized under a microscope. Writing is an art that is uniquely human, at least to the extent that we can achieve it, and to be human is to be flawed, to be wrong, to acknowledge our failures and learn from them. Mistakes and all, in its delightful imperfection, writing is ours to do with as we please—so say what you will, and I will write about it.
References
Greenwell, Garth (March 20, 2023). A Moral Education, The Yale Review, https://yalereview.org/article/garth-greenwell-philip-roth.
Greenwell, Garth (March 6, 2019). Garth Greenwell on What It Means to Live the Writer’s Life, Literary Hub, https://lithub.com/garth-greenwell-on-what-it-means-to-live-the-writers-life/.