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Tortoise Tuesday: Orienting and C.S. Lewis’ Scholarly Side

BY Writing Center

Writing is an empathetic act; the good writer must always keep the interests of the reader in mind. I consider orienting one of the most overt empathies in scholarly writing. How much should I, the writer, define, describe, and elucidate? How do I find the middle ground of understanding which fall somewhere between overwhelming the reader and patronizing the reader?

C.S. Lewis is a remarkably empathetic orienter. Although he is better known today for his fictional works (The Chronicles of Narnia, of course!), he was also a prominent medievalist at Oxbridge. His medieval scholarship, like his fiction, is complex yet accessible, formal yet conversational. I’m thinking especially of his book The Discarded Image, which, as he puts it, provides a “lead in” to an understanding of the medieval worldview for modern students (ix). He observes that scholarship can sometimes overwhelm and distract students to the extent that they lose interest in the object of study altogether. His solution, then, with The Discarded Image, is to provide a map of sorts, a general overview to the medieval worldview so that students can dive into medieval literature and the scholarship on it more confidently. The book as a whole, is a kind of extended orienting.

One of Lewis’ first orienting moves is the dispelling of a longstanding myth about the Middle Ages: that it was a savage, illiterate time. See what he does here:

“Some time between 1160 and 1207 an English priest called Laȝamon wrote a poem called the Brut. In it (ll. 15,775 sq.) he tells us that the air is inhabited by a great many things, some good and some bad, who will live there till the world ends. The content of this belief is not unlike things we might find in savagery. To people Nature, and especially the less accessible parts of her, with spirits both friendly and hostile, is characteristic of the savage response. But Laȝamon is not writing thus because he shares in any communal and spontaneous response made by the social group he lives in. The real history of the passage is quite different. He takes his account of the aerial daemons from the Norman poet Wace (c. 1155). Wace takes it from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (before 1139). Geoffrey takes it from the second-century De Deo Socratis of Apuleius. Apuleius is reproducing the pneumatology of Plato. Plato was modifying, in the interests of ethics and monotheism, the mythology he had received from his ancestors. If you go back through the many generations of those ancestors, then at last you may find, or at least conjecture, an age when that mythology was coming into existence in what we suppose to be the savage fashion. But the English poet knew nothing about that. It is further from him than he is from us. He believes in these daemons because he has read about them in a book; just as most of us believe in the Solar System or in the anthropologists’ accounts of early man. Savage beliefs tend to be dissipated by literacy and by contact with other cultures; these are the very things which have created Laȝamon’s belief. (2-3)”

Simply by tracing the origin of this single medieval poem, Lewis provides the reader with a more nuanced way of understanding the Middle Ages more generally. This orienting sets the stage for an argument that Lewis will develop throughout the course of the book: the Middle Ages were characterized by a curious bookishness that tends to get overlooked today. As he notes, “Though literacy was of course far rarer then than now, reading was in one way a more important ingredient of the total culture” (5).

I think in scholarly writing we tend to get impatient with orienting – we just want to get to the argument. What Lewis and the best writers show, however, is that orienting is absolutely essential to the argument. Just like in fiction, where the exposition of setting, atmosphere, and feeling primes us for the characters that occupy most of our attention, in scholarly writing, orienting primes us for the analysis and evidence. Orienting is the all-important appetizer: it teases the appetite for a delectable argument.

— Myrial Holbrook ’19

Quotations from C.S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image taken from the Cambridge UP edition (2016).

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“What’s a kick?”: Key Term Definition in Inception

BY Writing Center

Christopher Nolan’s 2010 masterpiece, Inception, is a (literally) multi-layered science-fiction film that explores the concept of extracting and planting information from the subconscious through shared dreaming. “Inception,” as defined in the film, is the planting of an idea in a subject’s mind, in a natural way such that the subject believes the idea was originated from their own mind. Besides the concept of “Inception,” the film is filled with seemingly technical jargon, such as “kicks,” “limbo,” “fences,” and “dreamscapes.” And yet, as a viewer, being taken through this complex maze, you consistently feel as if you are able to follow the intricate story that’s being woven. So how is Christopher Nolan able to familiarize the viewer to all of the jargon necessary to understand his world of shared dreaming, in a way that seems organic and functional to the story?

Nolan uses one key character in order to help orient us as viewers to the story: Ariadne. After the team’s previous architect betrays the team, Ariadne is brought on board as the new architect. She is the outsider, like the viewer, who knows nothing about the world of shared dreaming, and needs to be quickly brought up to speed, enabling us to get oriented to the jargon of the shared dream world. A perfect example of Ariadne’s function as the proxy for the viewer can be seen in this brief 17-second clip. As the team is planning out how to exit the different layers of the shared dream world, the technical term “kick” arises in the conversation. Arthur asks Cobb how to wake people out of a shared dream, and Cobb responds by saying that the team needs a “kick.” However, this simple response assumes that we have knowledge of what a kick is, which as viewers, we don’t. Ariadne is the proxy for the viewer here, asking, “what’s a kick?” The team then explains to Ariadne that a “kick” is the feeling of falling that jolts the dreamer awake, enabling them to exit a dream. By having the team define the key term, “kick,” to Ariadne, Nolan is also able to define the key term to us as viewers.

By using Ariadne’s character as a narrative technique for orienting the viewer to key terms, Nolan is able to construct a highly complex world of shared dreaming that doesn’t feel utterly confusing. This impressive feat results from Nolan’s incorporation of key word definition into screenwriting, and allows us as viewers to also feel like we are being challenged to solve a puzzle, invited as intellectual equals and insiders on an exciting journey.

–Catherine Wang ’19

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Tortoise Tuesday: Phone Calls as an Exercise in Orienting

BY Writing Center

I don’t think I know anyone who likes making phone calls — and no, ordering takeout or calling your parents at midnight do not count. Real phone calls are nasty little beasts. Think about it: you dial the number, and then the phone rings, and rings, and rings. You don’t know when the other person is going to pick up, or if they will at all. Then suddenly, when you least expect it, they do pick up and — you panic! What are you going to say? More to the point, how are you going to avoid starting in the middle of a thought, or missing something terribly important, or trying to say everything at once and winding up saying nothing at all.

Having a conversation in person is far easier than calling on the phone. When you’re standing face to face with someone, you don’t feel as bad when you have to start over twice before you are actually coherent. You can wave your hands vaguely in the air to clarify a particularly tricky point. You can even make pained faces to impress on the other person that you really are sorry that you sound out of breath and nearly incomprehensible. Or rather, while you can do all these things when you talk on the phone, they won’t make a bit of difference. All that matters on the phone is your voice, and what you say. In fact, since the connection is likely to wash away most of your inflections and any subtleties of your tone, you are left with just your words. The only way to avoid embarrassment is to speak more precisely than usual, but of course, that takes more thought than we would like, so we all put off that awkward telephone conversation with our great-aunt until tomorrow, or next week, or maybe when the school year ends in June — because after all, that’s the next time we’ll have enough energy for this kind of exertion.

Come to think of it, that horrible scramble for words at the beginning of a phone calls is not unlike the beginning of a paper. Here again, you have nothing bare words by which to convey your meaning. You desperately want to make a good impression, but your audience has a limited attention span, and no preexisting knowledge of what you are trying to say. Again, you must be unbearably precise. This is why the introductory paragraph, which should be the easiest to understand, is often the most difficult to write.

I tend to handle phone calls and introductions the same way. First, I put them off as long as I can. This sounds frivolous, but it is not entirely so, or at least, not in the case of introductions. In order to concisely prepare your audience for your argument, you have to understand your argument first. I often wait until the very end of the writing process, when I know exactly where I am going with my piece, to actually write the opening lines. The second step — the actual “writing” part — is the same for phone calls and introductions. I shut my eyes and think about how I would explain things to someone if I met them in person. Where would they narrow their eyes and look puzzled? Where would they become bored and start to glance over my shoulder out the window? The first time around, I know I will stumble over my words, but this is okay, too. The key is just not to have that first stumble happen when I actually answer the phone — or on a final draft. Precision is rarely achieved on the first try. Like much else, it is iterative, and can be improved with practice. After the fifth or sixth time, you are very likely to stumble as much as you did at first. After ten, you will be almost entirely coherent. After sixteen, you may even work up the nerve to pick up the phone and call your great-aunt, though perhaps not. After fifty honest attempts, I myself might still fail in that.

— Isabella Khan ’21

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Scope and Motive in “More Beautiful, More Terrible”: Finding Lexicon Terms in Class Readings

BY Writing Center

This semester I picked up a new technique of looking for lexicon terms in assigned readings in an attempt to make them a bit more entertaining. More importantly, this newfound habit has given me opportunity to see how lexicon terms are implemented in real scholarly writing.

To give just one example, one of the most interesting instances of motive I found from my readings for AAS235 was in More Beautiful, More Terrible, written by Princeton Professor of African American Studies, Imani Perry. Perry writes in her introductory chapter:

…the “postracial” discourse reflects both anxiety and confusion about what race means and doesn’t mean now. In order to answer these questions, we must approach the enterprise with great rigor and sophistication.

…

Those are tall orders. My ambition in this book is much smaller. This book seeks to pursue a very specific question, which nevertheless demands a complex body of information and analysis: how does a nation that proclaims racial equality create people who act in ways that sustain racial inequality? I suppose a second question is pursued, too: what can we do about it? (Perry, 2-3)

I particularly appreciated these two paragraphs from Perry’s introduction because they have very specific purposes in laying down the foundation for the rest of her work. In the first paragraph from the excerpt, Perry orients the reader by providing context on the goals of the broader field. In the second paragraph, Perry clearly introduces and explicitly states her motive for her research in question form.

The most critical move Perry makes in these two paragraphs is narrowing her scope. Instead of tackling the expansive question of “what race means and doesn’t mean”, a question that motivates an entire field of research, she chooses to focus in a more specific question: “how does a nation that proclaims racial equality create people who act in ways that sustain racial inequality?” Perry demonstrates that even a skilled writer, setting out to construct a text of significant length, has to think about the scope of his or her work and focus in on a specific relationship to explore. In the specific field of racial studies, Perry utilizes the same lexicon terms and techniques that we learn in Writing Seminar.

While applying Writing Seminar knowledge to your upper level classes may initially pose a challenge, the best way to overcome that challenge is to learn by example: read good writing and look for the ways in which leading scholars use lexicon terms in their own work. Conveniently, with an abundance of good writing at your disposal, assigned to you for your classes, why not start learning from more than just the content?

–Ellie Shapiro ’21

Works Cited

Perry, Imani. More Beautiful and More Terrible: the Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States. New York University Press, 2011.

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Tortoise Tuesday: Key Terms in “In Her Words”

BY Writing Center

In the March 19 issue of “In Her Words,” a newsletter published twice-weekly by the New York Times that reports on feminism and gender (in)equality, Maya Salam reviews the book “Why Does Patriarchy Persist” by Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider. Salam identifies the central and seemingly “obvious” question Gilligan and Snider pose — “Why and how, after decades of activism, does the patriarchy persist?” — and succinctly explains their argument: patriarchy is hard to eradicate not because, or not principally because, men are reluctant to give up their political, economic, and institutional dominance, but rather because both men and women internalize and perpetuate sexist norms. In her review, however, Salam does more than simply summarize the book’s argument. Because she is writing about a term, “patriarchy” – with which most people are familiar, but which few people might be able to define precisely – her column is also an excellent example of the definition of key terms.

Whenever authors write for a non-expert audience, they must take into account their readers’ lack of familiarity with the terms they use. Even when key terms could be assumed to be universally understood — most, if not all, of Salam’s readers will have at least heard of “the patriarchy” — the specific definition used in a paper can be crucial to its argument. To support their argument, Gilligan and Snider must define “patriarchy” broadly: not only as a system of constraints that limit women’s opportunities but as a mindset, expressions of which range from the unfair distribution of “emotional labor” to differing, gendered expectations in heterosexual relationships. Salam writes:

As adults, [patriarchy] manifests in other ways. In how women shoulder their family’s emotional labor, meaning the invisible mental work of holding a household and relationship together. If a woman registers that this is unfair and complains, she’s often told that she’s “selfish, a drama queen, hysterical,” Snider said. Eventually, “she believes it.” That’s patriarchy.

Snider also cited the cliché of a woman who doesn’t tell a man she is dating that she wants a committed relationship for fear of scaring him off and being rejected. That too is patriarchy, Snider said.

In essence, Gillian and Snider write, patriarchy harms both men and women by forcing men to act like they don’t need relationships and women to act like they don’t need a sense of self. The crux, though, is that we are “not supposed to see or to say this,” they write.

Only by defining their key term in a way that serves their argument can Gilligan and Snider make their case, and only by defining it clearly for her readers can Salam offer a solution. To end a patriarchy that is “hard-wired into our minds,” she argues, a “drastic self-reckoning” will be necessary.

— Rosamond van Wingerden ’20

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/us/what-is-patriarchy.html?emc=edit_gn_20190319&nl=gender-letter&nlid=8615940520190319&te=1

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“The Death of Ivan Ilych: A Psychological Study On Death and Dying” as a Lens Essay

BY Writing Center

The lens essay is a commonly-assigned paper, particularly in Writing Seminars. The prompt for such a paper often asks students to “critique and refine” an argument, to use a source as a lens through which to view another source and in the process gain a better understanding of both sources. This type of essay can be hard to explain and difficult to understand, so it is one of the most common types of essays we see in the Writing Center.

Recently, I read Y.J. Dayananda’s paper “The Death of Ivan Ilych: A Psychological Study On Death and Dying” which uses the lens technique. In this paper, Dayananda examines Tolstoy’s famous short story The Death of Ivan Ilych through the lens of Dr. E. K. Ross’s psychological studies of dying, particularly her five-stage theory. Dayananda’s paper features strong source use, shows how structure can be informed by those sources, and serves as a model for an effective and cross-disciplinary lens essay.

Dayananda establishes the paper’s argument clearly at the end of the introduction, setting up the paper’s thesis in light of this lens technique and providing the rationale (part of the motive) behind applying Ross’s study to Tolstoy’s story:

I intend to draw upon the material presented in Dr. Ross’s On Death and Dying and try to show how Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych in The Death of Ivan Ilych goes through the same five stages. Psychiatry offers one way to a better illumination of literature. Dr. Ross’s discoveries in her consulting room corroborate Tolstoy’s literary insights into the experience of dying. They give us the same picture of man’s terrors of the flesh, despair, loneliness, and depression at the approach of death. The understanding of one will be illuminated by the understanding of the other. The two books, On Death and Dying and The Death of Ivan Ilych, the one with its systematically accumulated certified knowledge, and disciplined and scientific descriptions, and the other with its richly textured commentary, and superbly concrete and realistic perceptions, bring death out of the darkness and remove it from the list of taboo topics. Death, our affluent societies newest forbidden topic, is not regarded as “obscene” but discussed openly and without the euphemisms of the funeral industry.

Dayananda then organizes the paper in order of the five stages of Dr. Ross’s theory: denial, loneliness, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. This gives the paper a clear structure and places the texts into conversation with each other on an organizational level. As the reader moves through each stage, Dayananda combines quotations from Dr. Ross’s study and evidence from The Death of Ivan Ilych to show how Ivan Ilych experiences that stage.

Dayananda’s interdisciplinary close-reading of Tolstoy’s text through the lens of Dr. Ross’s study allows us to better understand what Ivan is experiencing as we learn the psychology behind it. As Dayananda writes, “psychoanalysis offers a rich, dynamic approach to some aspects of literature.” The only way Dayananda’s paper could have been strengthened is if the essay also argued explicitly how reading the literature critiques or refines the psychological text, as the best lens essays run both ways. However, overall, Dayananda sets up and executes an original and effective lens reading of The Death of Ivan Ilych.

–Paige Allen ’21

Dayananda, Y. J. “The Death of Ivan Ilych: A Psychological Study On Death and Dying.” Tolstoy’s Short Fiction: Revised Translations, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, by Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi and Michael R. Katz, Norton, 1991, pp. 423–434.

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Structure in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey

BY Writing Center

Many if not most video games have maps. They help orient players to the world of the game, illustrating the scale and extent of the world while pinpointing specific areas of interest to the player, such as important cities or sites, checkpoints, or fast travel options. Games can have one or many maps or even discoverable maps, which only reveal certain information once the player has progressed far enough in the story or world. Along with orienting the player to the world of the game, maps help to structure gameplay so that players can reach the intended conclusions set forth by their developers. In this way, video game maps function much like the structures of essays, which lead readers through their authors’ arguments to their intended conclusions.

Take the map of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey as an example. The game takes place in the world of ancient Greece at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE, and the player can travel from Kephallonia to Lesbos to Crete as they please. Compared to traditional games, whose maps are more restrictive to directly guide the player through certain levels (think classic Super Mario Bros.) or along certain paths (as in many Pokemon games), AC: Odyssey’s map is navigable to its players nearly without limit. So long as they have a horse and a ship, the player can go anywhere on the map. It is part of a growing trend of expansive, open-world games that seemingly lack a map structure and thus allow players to do whatever they want, whenever they want.

However, while AC: Odyssey’s map feels endlessly explorable, it still contains an interlocking set of structures through its many different map markers and symbols, which are themselves inherently tied to certain conclusions or questlines. One set of markers are the “Quest” diamonds, which appear on the map wherever there is a task for the player to complete. These markers encourage the player to move through the map in order that they may gain experience and items while also advancing various storylines of the game. Another set of markers is the “Location” markers, some of which show places where Spartan or Athenian soldiers may be targeted. Following these markers compels the player to advance the Peloponnesian War, which was the conflict of Spartan and Athenian forces for supremacy of Greece set forth in Thucydides’ famous history. A final set of major map markers are the “Mercenary” markers, which show the locations of mercenaries who are and are not being paid to pursue the player. By tracking down mercenaries using these markers, the player can improve their own status as a mercenary in order to become the most feared assassin of the Aegean.

Although Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is an open-world game without any obvious paths or levels, its map still contains an implicit structure. Like in any piece of good writing, this structure allows the player to follow the game’s storyline—its argument—to its logical conclusion, whether they notice it or not.

–Leina Thurn ’20

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“Shallow” as an Analysis of Shared Experience in A Star is Born

BY Writing Center

After that late-February Oscar performance, pretty much everyone on the planet has heard “Shallow,” a song performed by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in the film, A Star is Born. The song has been a pop-culture phenomenon, becoming a Billboard-topping platinum hit and winning an Oscar, a Grammy, and a Golden Globe. The song, beyond being an obvious earworm (devised by Mark Ronson, the man behind hits such as Uptown Funk), has also generated a strong emotional response from audiences. So what has made the song resonate so powerfully with audiences? In a November 2018 interview with Billboard, Gaga noted that “it’s the connection and the dialogue established between Jackson and Ally, which made “Shallow” impactful.” In other words, Gaga believes that the conversation through which the main characters, Jackson and Ally, get to know one another, is also a form of introducing their characters to the audience. This moment of shared intimacy is what has made the song so precious to audiences. From Gaga’s claim, we can see “Shallow” as a form of very effective character analysis.

To show how “Shallow” effectively analyzes Jackson and Ally’s characters for the audience, let’s put “Shallow” in the context of the movie (some small spoilers to come). Jackson has just met Ally after her performance at the bar, and now they’re sitting in the parking lot chatting. Ally realizes that Jackson is often objectified as a celebrity, with his privacy violated consistently by fans and non-fans alike. Meanwhile, Jackson recognizes that Ally, in spite of her powerful voice, lacks the confidence and opportunities to express herself as a songwriter. In this key moment of realization and recognition of key aspects of one another’s personalities, Ally breaks up the dialogue by immediately interpreting it into another form: a song. This analysis opens the audience up to an implicit realization of the commonalities between Jackson and Ally’s experiences, and how they are obviously yearning for something beyond what they currently are experiencing. Ally uses her song as a form of analysis to point out that neither of them are truly happy with who they presently are. This analysis is so powerful that, it resonates with both of them, as well as audiences (in the movie and in real life), making the song the foundation of not only Jackson and Ally’s relationship, but also the start of Ally’s career and the source of another trophy in Lady Gaga’s Givenchy bag.

“Shallow” by Lady Gaga, Andrew Wyatt, Anthony Rossomando, & Mark Ronson

Tell me somethin’, girl
Are you happy in this modern world?
Or do you need more?
Is there somethin’ else you’re searchin’ for?

I’m falling
In all the good times I find myself
Longin’ for change
And in the bad times I fear myself

Tell me something, boy
Aren’t you tired tryin’ to fill that void?
Or do you need more?
Ain’t it hard keeping it so hardcore?

I’m falling
In all the good times I find myself
Longing for change
And in the bad times I fear myself

I’m off the deep end, watch as I dive in
I’ll never meet the ground
Crash through the surface, where they can’t hurt us
We’re far from the shallow now

–Catherine Wang ’19

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Methodology in Evicted

BY Writing Center

One day on a whim, Arleen stopped by the Housing Authority and asked about the [housing assistance] List. A woman behind the glass told her, “The List is frozen.” On it were over 3,500 families who had applied for rent assistance four years earlier. Arleen nodded and left with hands in her pockets. It could have been worse. In larger cities like Washington, DC, the wait for public housing was counted in decades. In those cities, a mother of a young child who put her name on the List might be a grandmother by the time the application was reviewed.

Most poor people in America were like Arleen: they did not live in public housing or apartments subsidized by vouchers. Three in four families who qualified for assistance received nothing.

If Arleen wanted public housing, she would have to save a month worth of income to repay the Housing Authority for leaving her subsidized apartment without giving notice; then wait two to three years until the List unfroze; then wait another two to five years until her application made it to the top of the pile; then pray to Jesus that the person with the stale coffee and heavy stamp reviewing her file would somehow overlook the eviction record she’d collected while trying to make ends meet in the private housing market on a welfare check. (59-60)

Evicted, by Matthew Desmond. Broadway Books 2016.

Professor Desmond is teaching a class called Poverty in America (SOC 207) this semester. For this week, we read the first part of his book on eviction, one of the most common issues facing poor communities in the United States. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, was a New York Times bestseller, and received lots of attention from the press because it is both well-written and well-researched. Notably, the research was not just done in a library. As a sociologist, Desmond also did fieldwork. He went out into communities in order to interview and interact with people who face some of the problems related to eviction.

Professor Desmond’s book is a wonderful example of the benefits of conducting ethnographic research and how it can be used to give a more holistic understanding of the issues at hand. Statistics can report the basic numerical facts, but if one has not experienced it, it is hard to have an understanding of what being evicted actually looks like from numbers alone. Desmond uses his detailed observations and his knack for storytelling to give the statistical skeleton some meat. His quotes and the situations in the book are all nonfiction, as Desmond says in his author’s note, yet he is able to use particularly telling moments to get his point across.

In this passage, Desmond explains the problems with trying to take advantage of public housing, which could theoretically be an alternative to the private rental market. Desmond tells the statistical story by following Arleen into the Housing Authority when she asks about getting on a list to receive rent assistance. After the reader hears the woman in the Housing Authority tell Arleen that the list is frozen, Desmond is able to explain to us what that means and why it might be frozen. Most effectively, I think, Desmond uses Arleen in a conditional paragraph to explain all of the steps Arleen would have had to go through to get public housing. Arleen has been established as an individual whom we know, but here, Desmond uses her to stand in for anyone who might want to go through this process. In this way, we understand this long, bureaucratic process in reference to our character Arleen.

This deft movement between the large and small scales is worth examining and emulating. Learning how to use particular examples, to have the material being analyzed speak for itself in order to prove a larger point, is important for writing in all disciplines.

–Tess Solomon ’21

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Tortoise Tuesday: Scholarly Conventions in the Kitchen

BY Writing Center

The first thing I learned in my mother’s kitchen is that you never, ever, sample measured ingredients. Unless, that is, you wanted to lose a finger. My mother is a master baker, and after nineteen years eating her breads, cookies, and pastries, I am convinced that there is nothing she cannot bake. But no matter what she bakes, the recipe is sacred. The first time she makes anything, she follows the recipe to the letter. The results aren’t always satisfactory, even when (as usually happens) everything goes as it should. Countless times, we’ve sat together at the table while she took tiny bites of a piece of cake, saying things like “well, the top-crust wasn’t quite what I would have liked,” or “the crumb would have been better with an extra egg yolk, don’t you think?” And then, of course, she would go back and make notes in the margin of the recipe in crisp cursive handwriting, and the next time she made the cake, it would really be her recipe, not the cook-book’s. But when it came time to bake, whatever the recipe is, she follows it.

I always wondered about this when I was little: my mother was such a fantastic baker, why didn’t she just improvise? Wasn’t she good enough to change the rules on the fly? At one point when we were baking together, I asked her just that. My timing wasn’t the best. She was beating egg-whites, and instead of answering the question, she kept her attention firmly on the electric beaters and told me to wait until the eggs were done. When the egg-whites were finally beaten, she told me (a bit hurriedly, since as she said, she needed to add the sugar quickly before the egg-whites fell) that cooking well is always about control. No matter how improvised a dish seemed to be, the cook could never lose control of the steps involved in its preparation. Changing things up, she said, was all just perfectly-prepared spontaneity. Then she motioned me to pass the 1-cup measure for the sugar, and the conversation ended abruptly as we both went back to baking.

A similar statement can be made about going against conventions in scholarly writing. When an author deliberately disregards a standard convention, the results are often striking. A single prosy sentence at the end of a paper can capture the author’s meaning better than a paragraph’s worth of explanation. But conventions, like recipes, are there for a reason, and wantonly ignoring them can lead to disaster. (Just imagine trying to read an analytical essay written in the same style as a Hemingway novel.) In writing and baking alike, control is key. The trick, of course, is to make your audience think you are completely free of constraint, while in reality, every break with convention is a conscious choice. As I learned from trying to improvise my way to a chocolate cake, you can change a recipe as you like, but it usually helps to know what you’re changing before you start, not after. Begin with something you know how to do, and modify it gradually until you get what you want. And of course, never take from the measured ingredients.

— Isabella Khan ’21