"What a great first paragraph!"

You’d better be prepared to explain yourself. (Image credit)

As a teacher of writing, I want to get students to share their ideas.

I don’t just want to give them assignments — I want to give them prompts. I want to get to know them and encourage them to share.

However, for many students, anything school-related is to be done in as cursory a fashion as possible. They’re not seeing the opportunity to sharpen their storytelling ability or their skills of self-expression; they just want to be on the other side, finished and free. Hence, on an open-ended prompt like, “Tell me about a place you’ve visited. If you can’t think of anything, make something up,” we might receive something like, “Last summer, me and my dad went to Destin. We went boogie boarding together. It was really fun.”

And that’s it. That’s the whole response.

Sometimes, two or three sentences is utterly exhausting and that’s what the student is capable of. However, that’s not always the case. Therefore, we might respond something like, “What a great first paragraph! Can’t wait to read the rest of the story.”

In terms of structure, the paragraph functions just like an introduction to a more detailed story in which we receive the context for the trip to Destin, details about boogie-boarding, and a resonant ending. Sometimes, we have to help the student by suggesting that structure, and sometimes they can do it on their own.

I see the same thing on many blogs. Seth Godin is a master at writing 200-word blog posts that are thought-provoking and widely applicable, with metaphorical resonances that can allow you to see something new on each re-read. However, not all of his legions of imitators have mastered the formula. Reading the work of these bloggers, I often have the same feeling as when I read that seventh grader’s earnest attempt at getting out of hard work: “Where’s the rest of it?” The writer presented an idea, but didn’t develop it. They might have been trying to leave it open to interpretation, but it just feels unfinished.

Here I am at 300 words; I could stop here. Surely, you get the point, and can come up with the punchline yourself, right? But no, I’m not going to make you work that hard. I’m not going to just drop a metaphor bomb and peace out — I want to take you all the way home. I want to connect the dots. I want to practice expressing myself and sharpen my own storytelling ability. I want to show you what I see. For me, that takes more than just the intro hook.

It’s been interesting to notice similar communication gaps beyond the written word. We make assumptions of clients, colleagues, or family members and believe that we understand their motivations; in our imaginations, we hear the echoes of that which is unsaid. We feel misunderstood or ignored, believing that we were clear in our instructions and we’re being disrespected or dismissed when our requests aren’t followed. We may not see that we’ve only said half of what was needed and heard only half of the story.

In order to communicate clearly, we might have to spell things out. We can’t necessarily rely on symbolism or tone to carry our meaning. We can’t be cute or clever. We can’t hedge. We might have to be brutally, uncomfortably direct or patronizingly literal. We might have to tell the whole story, all the way through, in order to make interpretation possible.

It’s a lot of work to understand and be understood. It’s a lot of work to express ourselves. And there is a time and a place to be beautifully vague or delightfully obtuse or exuberantly evocative. We don’t always have to spell it out. But we ought to make our choices deliberately. What’s more, we should be ready for the questions about the rest of the story if we left things up in the air, even if our plan is to smile mysteriously and shrug in response — which is definitely a tactic my students have tried.