Sometimes it seems like coming home from college is one big test of how many times you can answer the questions, “How is school?” and, “Do you LOVE New York?” without exploding. It comes when you least expect it—from that annoying sophomore you bump into at the mall, your least favorite aunt, or your parents who ask you every night at dinner. Over winter break, I was starting to forget that there are inquiries besides this one. And then, in between these priceless questions being hurled at me from every direction, my favorite high school teacher asked me, “So, what have you learned?” Finally, a real question.
I knew that “what I had learned,” in the simplest of terms, was not as broad and worldly as what my high-school self had hoped it would be, but it was also not quite as mundane as who the great Greek writers were. No, “what I had learned” was somewhere in between. And as my mind jumped from class to class, one pattern emerged: this semester, I learned how to write. I wrote about 14 papers, totaling somewhere in the range of a 100 pages. That’s a lot, I thought to myself, as I smiled and patted myself on the back.
Happy as this sentiment made me, my mind wouldn’t allow it to prevail for long. Yes, I wrote a lot. And yes, there was a good deal of learning that went into this. However, as I look back on those 100 or so pages, while still managing to get a massive amount of sleep, I realize one thing about the proliferate amount of writing I was expected to do. At the moments when it sounds the best to me and is receiving its highest grades, it is, well, bullshit.
You know the kind—a sequence of five questions in a row which I could never actually answer, but which somehow sound more scholarly than actually taking a rudimentary but fundamental stab at them, is what gets an “interesting!” from a professor. An introduction which draws on some personal narrative barely related to my paper is mentioned in comments as a “really strong lead-in.” This is the opposite reaction that most of my legitimate writing gets: on one paper that I was particularly proud of for lacking in bullshit, I received a paragraph-long explanation of how my opening sentence should have used the phrase “un-countable” instead of “countless.” Yeah—I’m serious. It seems professors prefer to read bullshit just as much as I prefer to write it. In the late night hours before the Literature Humanities final, I had to write my entire “Retrospective Essay” for University Writing. I was sick of everything on Earth at that point, so I decided to actually bullshit a paragraph about how I had bullshitted all the writing in the entire course. No surprise—my professor loved it.
While I was disheartened by the realization that the writing I was least proud of led to the most success here at Columbia, my new analytical skills gleaned from LitHum discussions shed new light on the situation. If learning bullshit is the key to success at Columbia, it is probably also pretty important out there in “the real world,” and therefore a pivotal skill to learn and have. In other words, if everyone around me is bullshitting and being commended for doing so, maybe bullshitting is in fact the modern-day equivalent of supreme analytical writing. It seems that if we as a society accept this bullshit-type writing as the ideal, then we are in fact taking away the connotations of the words “bullshitting” and using “bullshitting” to describe the way one should write.
It seems as though the former ideal for writing is becoming obsolete. It’s being replaced by writing which is neither deep nor necessarily true, but which gives the appearance of being both. This is, after all, the way much of society functions—America is about appearances. Being “hip,” “now,” or “trendy” is not (don’t even try to argue) about some state of mind—it is about an outward appearance. Is it so much of a stretch to think that what we think of as “the best” writing is beginning to mimic this cultural value? And if so, isn’t learning to write in this way not only a good thing to do, but the most important thing we will learn to do during our time at Columbia?
So here’s what I say—the next time you sit down to write a paper, go for what seems like the shallow approach—splice up your quotes to make them fit, use the biggest words, throw trying to understand your subject matter out the window. Instead, concentrate on just sounding smart. When you turn this paper in (and get an A-plus, no doubt), don’t feel bad about robbing yourself of the opportunity for some sort of academic enlightenment. Take a deep breath and allow yourself to accept that what you did was more important—you forcibly taught yourself the skill of tomorrow, and in the long run, this is going to serve you a lot better than knowing about some Google-able subject like global warming, international politics, or nanotechnology.
Ariel Hudes is a Columbia College first year. Undeclared runs alternate Fridays.