11.12.14

Well, that misfired. The general idea: if you have to justify your writing as though its a niche concern, there will be a pressure to share and, thus, to overshare. But all of those niche concerns are pretty universal, and I do wonder if articles on, say, parenting, would be better if they began with the assumption of their subject matter's universality and importance; it's a slight but important shift between "I've had a problem with my child with x" and "a lot of parents have a problem with x". Writing from a third-person, objective perspective is not always earned, but there's no reason it shouldn't ever be used.

4 comments:

Katherine said...

What?!?

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

I second the What?!? - should I take my post down, since the post it responds to is gone? What misfired? I'm confused...

Nicholas said...

Phoebe, I in fact quite liked your post, which said a number of the things I did not quite manage to articulate as well as I'd liked (the comment previous to yours came before the update), and given a few of the other mentions it got, I had some concern that it came across as an attack on journalism-written-by-people-other-than-white-men rather than what I had intended, or more incoherent than I had intended, and neither of these I particularly intended.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Ohh... Well, in any case, I took it down, since I like to err on the side of not upsetting anyone, plus a post responding to one that's no longer up is confusing. But for the record, I didn't get anything sinister from your post at all!