Long Form Essays Make Me Crazy
Aug. 27th, 2018 11:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lydySo, there was a link in my Twitter Feed to this article about child abuse at Catholic Orphanages. Here's the link, in case you care: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/christinekenneally/orphanage-death-catholic-abuse-nuns-st-josephs
I tried to read it. I could not make it all the way through. Not because it's long, but because of the way it's structured, and because of the graphic abuse described. To be clear, I do not have PTSD, and I do not have flash-backs when reading graphic accounts of abuse and torture. But at some point, my brain just nopes out. It does this before I get traumatized (thank you, brain).
As these pieces are wont to do, it starts with a graphic, personal vignette. Then the piece weaves together other people's stories, the account of at least two different law suits against the orphanage, brief tangents about other orphanages, all of it punctuated by stories of graphic abuse, and with an underlying theme that maybe some of this didn't happen. The one thing I know about human memory is that it is profoundly malleable. False memories are a thing. I am less clear on recovered and repressed memories, but it wouldn't surprise me. People lie, and people attempting to tell the truth get it utterly wrong. The article kept on holding out the promise of sorting all this out. But the structure of it, the constant interweaving of graphic stories of abuse with other bits of personal history from one of the nuns, one of the lawyers, some of the children remembering abuse... And the structure made it such that trying to skip the really graphic bits made the whole article become incoherent. The story was written so the that the through-line was not uncovering the truth, but the stories of abuse.
Dear reader, I do not need this in my life. I just don't.
This style of writing is pretty common. Start with an intriguing personal anecdote. Pull back, suggest a wider context and big themes. State a question or thesis. Pull in close to the personal, pull back to the general, rinse, repeat. Even when the detail isn't about terrible horror, I find this structure really hard to read. The personal details often strike me as irrelevant, or derailing. There's a real lack of causality in this structure that just makes me crazy. If the totality of the story actually answers the question or supports the thesis, I am often unable to tell by the end, even if I get there. It often seems to seems to me that the detailing of the subjective experiences is used to undermine rather than support an objective conclusion. And this shit just makes me crazy.
Possibly, I am just a bad reader. But I really hate this style of reportage/essay.
P.S. If anybody can tell me if the story that I cite above actually comes to a conclusion about how supported the claims of abuse are, I'd be interested. After the mass grave in Ireland and the stories of the Magdelen laundries, I'm inclined to believe almost anything about Catholic run orphanages and charities, but that doesn't mean that every story is true.
I tried to read it. I could not make it all the way through. Not because it's long, but because of the way it's structured, and because of the graphic abuse described. To be clear, I do not have PTSD, and I do not have flash-backs when reading graphic accounts of abuse and torture. But at some point, my brain just nopes out. It does this before I get traumatized (thank you, brain).
As these pieces are wont to do, it starts with a graphic, personal vignette. Then the piece weaves together other people's stories, the account of at least two different law suits against the orphanage, brief tangents about other orphanages, all of it punctuated by stories of graphic abuse, and with an underlying theme that maybe some of this didn't happen. The one thing I know about human memory is that it is profoundly malleable. False memories are a thing. I am less clear on recovered and repressed memories, but it wouldn't surprise me. People lie, and people attempting to tell the truth get it utterly wrong. The article kept on holding out the promise of sorting all this out. But the structure of it, the constant interweaving of graphic stories of abuse with other bits of personal history from one of the nuns, one of the lawyers, some of the children remembering abuse... And the structure made it such that trying to skip the really graphic bits made the whole article become incoherent. The story was written so the that the through-line was not uncovering the truth, but the stories of abuse.
Dear reader, I do not need this in my life. I just don't.
This style of writing is pretty common. Start with an intriguing personal anecdote. Pull back, suggest a wider context and big themes. State a question or thesis. Pull in close to the personal, pull back to the general, rinse, repeat. Even when the detail isn't about terrible horror, I find this structure really hard to read. The personal details often strike me as irrelevant, or derailing. There's a real lack of causality in this structure that just makes me crazy. If the totality of the story actually answers the question or supports the thesis, I am often unable to tell by the end, even if I get there. It often seems to seems to me that the detailing of the subjective experiences is used to undermine rather than support an objective conclusion. And this shit just makes me crazy.
Possibly, I am just a bad reader. But I really hate this style of reportage/essay.
P.S. If anybody can tell me if the story that I cite above actually comes to a conclusion about how supported the claims of abuse are, I'd be interested. After the mass grave in Ireland and the stories of the Magdelen laundries, I'm inclined to believe almost anything about Catholic run orphanages and charities, but that doesn't mean that every story is true.
no subject
Date: 2018-08-27 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-08-27 09:12 pm (UTC)P.