I was revising my article today and in just the first paragraph found a couple of things that Professor Saul had asked us to avoid. I had written:"What’s it like to stand on Olympic ice, before the crowd and TV cameras, waiting for the music to begin? Pair skater and two-time Olympian Cindy Kaufmann Marshall knows. Quick and athletic at sixty, with striking blue eyes and a blonde skater’s ponytail, the three-time world bronze medalist offered to teach me about her career and the mental side of her sport."
Gag.
Strike the "striking" eyes and the "blonde" ponytail. He is right, I would not have put that much energy into describing her appearance if she were male. She still is, and looks like, a figure skater, and I did want to say that.
I also wrote "offered to teach me," which has that pesky "me." My next-try thought also had me in it, something like, "Cindy met me at Highland Ice in Shoreline, the rink where she and her brother Ron skated together."
I wouldn't put "I" or "me" in an academic paper, but I don't have a reporter's reflex to keep it out of other kinds of writing.
I read an article in the NYT dining section recently that went through some weird gyrations that I thought were intended to avoid the first person. The reporter observed a chef telling a worker to put on a belt, and described it like this, "While he remains a demanding boss — an unfortunate young counter worker at New York’s Bouchon Bakery recently received a personal lecture on the importance of wearing a belt — Mr. Keller says he has become a more patient leader with a greater appreciation for collaboration."
I didn't like the middle of that sentence. I would prefer, "While he remains a demanding boss — I watched him lecture an unfortunate young counter worker recently at New York's Bouchon Bakery on the importance of wearing a belt — Mr. Keller says he has become a more patient leader with a greater appreciation for collaboration."
But on second thought, the "I" does make the aside jump out of the middle of the sentence too much, and it could be written without it, like so: "He recently lectured an unfortunate young
counter worker at New York's Bouchon Bakery on..." I think I like that best.
Why did the reporter put the "unfortunate counter worker" first? She must have wanted to emphasize the person being dressed down (and told to dress up) by his boss.
Now I'm doing something else that scares our professor: rambling.
Back onto the first person, do any of the rest of you have trouble avoiding it? Does it grate on you to see it outside of a personal essay? How about the descriptions of personal appearance? Do you describe a female's physical appearance more than you would a male's?
Mary Saylor
So if the idea was to show that she was still a figure skater, does saying she has a ponytail and striking eyes accomplish that? There may have been some other physical attribute that you could have referred to and defended it to your editor and readers as "doing work," as Zinsser says about what is placed in a piece of writing. A description of her skating? Still as trim as when she skated competitively? There may be a reason for including physical description, but it should never appear gratuitously.
ReplyDeleteYes, I do find it hard to avoid using "I" at times. In fact, I used it a few times in my 800-word project. It's an interview piece, and I felt that using "I" and "me" kept it to the conversational tone that I wanted. Part of me was cringing while writing it though, as the class seems to have an academic/journalistic bent. Curious to see what my feedback will be during class critique...
ReplyDeleteI'm still thinking about the use of "I," so when I read the new Atlantic I couldn't help but notice how it was in almost every article. One long science article, 'Orchid Children,' went on in the traditional way discussing studies and describing life in a monkey colony, when suddenly the author started discussing sending off his own DNA to see which variations it had. In an article about Dave Ramsey, the business and economics editor discussed how it had worked out to use Ramsey's program herself. It almost started to seem like the reporters were doing a bit of their own reality shows. And then there's Caitlin Flanagan, more like a blogger in the way she reports her personal reality (and I do enjoy her, because she's funny and insightful, even if her editor should have stopped her from globalizing from her divorce). I wished I had a copy of the magazine from 20 years ago to compare. (The disappearance of the fiction and all the short little 'dispatches' that are in it now would probably go more with the 'Is Google Making us Stupid' topic we are discussing tonight).
ReplyDeleteOn the personal description front, I did fix that in my article, using some non beauty-related words to say what I wanted.