The Lure of Chatty Writing

Why editorials needn’t be autobiographical

Should writers give the audience what it wants? Is that the writer’s obligation, to serve the audience? And what if the audience’s tastes are beneath the writer’s sensibilities? Wouldn’t the elite writer then be caught in a bind, forced to choose between following her muse at the risk of unpopularity, and betraying her standards to perpetuate the common prejudices?

Writing to Share Ideas, Not to Socialize

Those questions assume that the highest standards usually guide only an elite minority, that what’s popular tends to be so broad, compromised, and degraded as to incorporate the input even of so-called trolls who mean to sabotage art and the other good things in life. In this way trying to be popular would end up being self-destructive.

Take for example the clamouring for personalized editorials. Some publications call their contents “stories” even if they’re nonfictional, perhaps to emphasize that the writings should be at least partly autobiographical rather than objective and abstract. When writing for websites, you’re supposed to start off with an anecdote, and to keep your tone breezy and conversational, to dumb it all down, and to go for the lowest common denominator.

After all, outside of academic circles, most readers would prefer to be socializing. If they must pry their attention away from the gossip on social media or from frivolous videos on YouTube or Tik Tok, and broaden their mind a little by reading, most readers insist that the article express the author’s personal experience. That way the readers needn’t tax themselves and confront the facts or arguments directly, and can feel that by reading they’re just chatting.

Should the author, then, cater to this demand? Should she prostitute herself and reveal something of her personal life to strangers rather than letting her ideas and arguments speak for themselves? Should she submit the venerable art of writing to the dubious benchmarks of reality television? If the audience yearns to interact with reality TV stars or with those who are enjoying their fifteen minutes of fame, is it the writer’s obligation to brand herself by selling her persona through her writing?

Drivel Doesn’t Always Sell Best

Of course, this prostitution would have a straightforward economic justification. The market demands X, so if you want to profit from your products, you’d better supply X to fulfill that demand.

But this isn’t the only way economic transactions work. Clever producers can create demand by convincing people that whereas they want X, they should be looking for Y. In associative advertising, this modification of demand is usually done cynically: the advertiser wants to bring the audience down to the company’s level, narrowing the audience’s attention span and resorting to fallacious reasoning to persuade the audience that owning this or that product will make them happy or sexy or smart. The advertiser associates an abstract good with what’s often a random, shoddy product, and connects the two with deceptive or oversimplified messages.

But the art of persuasion can also be idealistic. Perhaps a writer has some insights that are unpopular. In that case she might choose to elevate the discourse, to attempt to convince readers to question their assumptions and to contemplate her ideas. If the author succeeds, she’ll have profited from her work without having had to betray her artistic vision or to degrade herself and flatter the mob. If she fails and the public ignores or rejects her writings, she’ll go hungry if she’s trying to make a living as a writer.

Certainly, the easier strategy would be to go with the flow, to give the public exactly what it already thinks it wants. This would be easier mainly in that your work as a writer would be cut out for you. To stand against the tide on principle, you first must know yourself which isn’t so easy, as has been recognized since ancient times. But if you identify what the market wants, you can set aside your convictions and serve the public’s will. Whether a writer or any kind of artist can maintain this servitude without harming her character is another matter.

Sweetening the Medicine with Sugar Pills

But let’s ponder this expectation that a writer’s thoughts should be couched in personal tales to make the act of reading a kind of socialization. Eleanor Roosevelt said,

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

If that’s right, the preference for reading autobiographical editorials looks like a willingness to read mainly the output of small minds.

The great minds are off in the Ivory Tower, writing rigorous, objective journal articles about ideas that most people couldn’t hope to read without putting themselves to sleep in the process. More popular writing can strike a balance between the broadest or lowest expectations of small minds and the elite standards. A piece of writing could be structured like a sugar pill: the autobiographical touches would work like the sugar coating that helps the reader digest the more important content, the unpleasant medicine.

The question would be whether the sugar should outweigh the medicine. If an editorial consists mainly of idle chitchat and gossip with no intellectual substance, it’s hard to see how this fluff could appeal to anything other than small minds. Again, it’s also hard to see how a great mind could avoid damaging her integrity by having to narrow her interests from the intellectual to the merely personal in producing these puff pieces. Then again, this panderer might be laughing her way to the bank.

The Option of Objectivity

But there’s another dynamic at work here, a conflict between the philosophical repudiation of the genetic fallacy, on the one hand, and “postmodern” doubt that any idea can stand on its apparent merit, on the other.

The modern philosopher says you should evaluate an argument or opinion based on the principles of critical thinking, which means you should ignore, for example, the race or gender of its author. Indeed, you should ignore any personal touch in the argument’s presentation since such touches are irrelevant to whether the conclusion is rationally justified. This means the entire genre of autobiographical editorials would be at best a distraction if not a counterproductive fallacy.

Yet the postmodern critic maintains that modernity was only ever a fraud. According to the postmodernist, there’s no such thing as pure objectivity, at least not outside the laboratory, so readers should be wary of the writer’s pretense that’s she’s neutral on the subject, that her perspective isn’t biased by her upbringing or by her personality, sexual orientation, politics, and so on.

Indeed, the politically correct view in the early twenty-first century is that writers should go out of their way to avoid putting up false fronts of logic and objectivity. Writers, pundits, and influencers are supposed to reveal every aspect of their personal identity to their audience, to take the reader even into their bathroom, as it were, to show off how they arrange their toothbrush and toilet paper.

Even Impersonal Writing Exposes the Author

Whatever you think about that debate, the doubt about objectivity is a red herring in this context of whether our nonfictional writing should be overtly personal. A writer can concede that she’s not perfectly objective or that she lacks an ethereal, godlike view of everything, untethered to any set of circumstances. But she can do so without belabouring the humility by wallowing in her personal background until her humility is tainted by the ulterior motive of her search for cheap fame.

An experienced writer’s personality and tastes are apparent from her choice of topics and from the voice that should ring out from her editorials. If she writes against conservatism and defends liberalism, the reader can assume she grew up in an urban setting, that she has higher education, cosmopolitan interests, and so forth. If she writes mainly on religion, history, or movies, you can assume she’s interested in that subject matter.

There’s no need for her to make her personal background explicit just to repudiate the modernist’s gambit of feigning neutrality. If you write with passion so that your inner voice speaks through all your arguments and opinions, you’ve already revealed who you are without having to make a spectacle of yourself. You don’t need to talk directly about your personal life to show the reader what you’re like. You can just be yourself by writing and defending what you really believe.