An Exploratory Essay
By Mitchell Neill
"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
Jack London
The “Infinite Monkey” theorem posits that a monkey given an infinite amount of time to bang on a key board at random would eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. This of course is pure codswollop, and the statistician who thought it up should be ashamed, and aught perhaps to devote his or her mathematical prowess to more worthy endeavors, like counting glasses of spilled milk, and by extrapolation, how much crying is done over them. In this contiguous reality, writing is work. Good writing is hard work, even for the professionals, and only a small portion of that work involves actually dragging a pen across paper. Good writers are craftsmen and women who invest heavily in the tools of their trade. Mountains of reading, endless hours of research, practice, and ever increasing drifts of scrapped work can leave an author sweating into his or her sheets at night. In many true disciplines, first attempts fall well short of best intentions, and it is frequently at this point that many would-be authors throw their hands in the air, and decide that coherent and interesting writing is quite beyond them. When author Richard Bach said, "A professional writer is just an amateur who didn't quit" he was speaking of the most important tool in an author’s arsenal, and his most valuable asset---perseverance.
Once an author has decided to write, he or she is obliged to choose a format. Be it the purest distillation of thought and emotion in the form of haiku, or the mind boggling detail and expanse of an epic novel, the format in which any given work is presented provides ground rules, or a framework upon which the author can hang ideas and arrange them in a manner that is both pleasing and coherent. For our purposes we shall explore that widely used (and most dreaded) form of academic exercise; the essay.
Essays are at heart simple structures, and provide a safe place for authors to play where they can’t really hurt themselves. As distinct from poetry, essays must have an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. This simple construct serves to support the author’s thesis, that is to say, the idea that the author wishes to communicate to his or her audience. For instance our frustrated statistician, having left Bobo the chimp, and his beleaguered typewriter to his own devices, may have gone on to investigate the minutia of spilled glasses of bovine lactation, and the lachrymose collateral damage thus derived, deciding that, by God, the world needs to know about it.
He would begin by pouring countless hours into research, gathering statistics, and exploring the collected works of giants in the field that he may stand upon their shoulders and expose the plight of sniffling babies and soggy table linens the world over. He would then organize this growing mountain of data into one of several formats; perhaps an idea map, a story board, or a more formal outline.
Then the author must choose his audience. Shall he communicate to other scientists who aren’t fortunate enough to have found such a fascinating field of research, to exhausted mothers relegated to serving dry breakfast cereal to heart-stricken children, to the cattle who are the unwitting agents of this terrible negligence, or perhaps to the producers of household cleaning products, who may in turn leverage this new body of knowledge to better market their wares?
Choosing a specific audience will dictate the style or “voice” that the author will use to convey his thesis. For example, the subtle nuances of complicated data sets and lots of fancy words could be lost on an audience of cattle whose daily life consists of finding food, eating food, and trying to avoid becoming food. Similarly a parent who’s daily activity consists of earning enough money to buy food, make food, and clean up recently digested food, cannot be expected to care deeply about the exponentially increasing glasses of milk that are spilled on tables that they themselves do not have to clean. Scientists however, crave data and complicated theories, from the most ridiculous to the most reasonable they will devour them voraciously, and then have blistering arguments about why it’s all so much balderdash and would best serve humanity in the bottom of the nearest recycling bin. Choosing the proper vocabulary and context for a specific audience will help ensure that the author’s intent and meaning are clearly understood.
Having decided upon his thesis and audience, the author has an array of tools or “modes of development” with which to present his thesis and connect the progression of his gathered evidence. Our author could for instance introduce his thesis with the mode of definition in order to clarify that a glass of spilled milk is not to be confused with the less common but equally messy cup that simply runneth over. Narration could be used to share with the reader the author’s own unfortunate memory of a glass of milk spilled into a brand new television set and how his father gave him a very good reason to cry about it. He could use exposition and argumentation to preempt the scathing rebuttals that are sure to come from his colleagues who are anxiously waiting for Bobo the chimpanzee to produce even so much as a charming limerick. He could use comparison and contrast to highlight the differences between the antiquated glass, and the newer shatterproof, spill-proof sippie-cup. He could use cause and effect to illustrate how the wonderful advent of the sippie cup could eliminate forever both the inherent waste in a glass of spilled milk and the trauma of the consequent crying. Our author being a thorough type, and not one to leave a job half done might use them all in concert to draw a conclusion that nobody had ever thought of before.
A closing paragraph can serve a number of functions. Our author could illustrate how his body paragraphs tie into one unifying incontrovertible line of evidence that in fact there are glasses of milk, they can be spilled, and that this frequently causes tears. He can also provide further insight that may not have occurred to the reader. Cows really don’t mind making more milk provided there’s lots of grass, and no one tries to make hamburgers out of them, parents don’t really mind cleaning up milk as long as it’s reasonably affordable, and children are going to cry anyway, so it might as well be about something inconsequential in order to save clear headed thinking for the really important stuff. Or, having thought long and hard about it, he may depart entirely from his original intent and conclude that so often we as adults rush through our hurly burly world without taking the time for a good soul cleansing cry; that maybe the little ones have got it right, and if more of us would simply heave a tall glass of milk across the kitchen and let nature take its course, the world might be just a little bit easier to bear.
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