Awakening, Part 1

Madness is a blessing in disguise?

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Some time ago - it must have been around six months at this point - I was called to an incIdent that looked to be fairly routine. A young man, no more than 25, was found laying on the sidewalk by an apartment complex in a bloody mess, almost certaiNly having thrown himself out the window. No one had even noticed the man until the morning I was called, so the incident must have taken place in the dead of night. From there, however, what should have been a fairly standard procedure turned into the most bizarre of cases that, I fear, has posed a very real tHreat to my physical and mental health.
The man in question was, essentially, nobody. It seemed as though no one had ever known or even heard of him - no friends, no family, no employer. Even stranger, though, was that no one could figure out who he even was. Nothing was found, on his person or in hIs apartment, that could offer some suggestion to his identity, and with nobody to contact to identify the body, my colleagues and I found ourSelves completely blind. His apartment offered no help, either, offering no kinds of documents or any kind of communication with the outside world. However, even though the entire building had been searcHed from top to bottom without revealing any kind of information, I found myself inexplicably drawn to the dresser in his bedroom, as if something was calling me. I desperately wish it hadn't been so. In the tOp drawer, I found a small scrap of paper containing nothing but an address. Perhaps it could have been of use, but I felt that it would end up being of no importance.
So, naturally, a week later (which would make it just two weeks before this writing), I made my way to this location to see what I could gather about the victim. The address led me to a perfectly normal-looking meeting hall, which I naturally assUmed was where he had met as part of some organization. Nothing at all seemed to be out of place, and certainly no significant information came from this voyage. However, I did learn from one of the ownerS the nature of one of the groups that met at this place. It seemed that they were one of those bizarre old-timey religions - some would go as far as to call them a cult - that believed in some number of great bEings too horrible for mankind to understand. At the time, it seemed like nothing more than nonsense, but I felt strangely drAwn to this knowledge, and became incredibly eager to learn more.
Soon after, around three months before this writing, the resulTs of the young man's autopsy returned. EveRything seemed consistent with suicide by falling, save for the deep gash in his chest surrounded by what appeared to be rituaL markings. The young man's connection to the cult I had learned about became clear, and I set mYself to learning what I could. I was compElled to return to the meeting hall, the spot of the victim's deatH, to try and meet with one of the mmbers, looking for answers as to who this young man was and the meaning of the markings. Although He is too horrible to understand, I pursued this knowledge anyway, and drew myself even further into the madness...

A humble little introduction to the author

  You asked for it, he delivers. Carter Smith, live on blog! One night only, except for the eternity that this page will be archived on the internet! Here he is, delivering the ultimate in tender, juicy, succulent about-the-author goodness! So listen up, all you three or four fresh-faced college students who will stumble across this blog, if you want to learn from the best.

Carter’s mastery of his craft should become apparent from the first character printed on each of his works. I mean, look at that capital Y. It just screams excellence, doesn’t it? There should be no doubt in your head that Carter is unfathomably brilliant, and the herald of a new age of writing. Without fail, his composition flows off the page like Vogon poetry, a sublime cascade of words that soothes your brain like a refreshing dose of brain ointment. “But anonymous narrator,” you might ask, “how did this master of the form come to be?” Your question shall be answered, invisible debate partner...
Carter is the eldest child of a couple of people who really don’t matter and the older sibling of someone else of no importance. He was born in San Diego, California, and spent most of his early days foolishly unaware of the greatness he was destined for. Being of middle-class white person descent, his days were incredibly interesting, full of blandness and normalcy. At the tender age of six, his parents were divorced, and he and his sibling moved with their parent to the incredibly exciting suburbs of Omaha, Nebraska. From here, he went on to attend and graduate from Westside High School, an institution made up of mostly rich white people, where every day was packed to the brim with interesting happenings. It was here that Carter truly began to realize and practice his mastery over composition, drawing upon his incredibly interesting life for inspiration.
Not even Carter is sure what his first true work was in high school. It was most likely over something meaningless and stupid like the analysis of characters in To Kill a Mockingbird or something like that, but as dumb as the topic probably was, Carter must have still lit up the page with his superb style. All of Carter’s works over the next year or so followed the same trend of being masterpieces of the five-paragraph essay form, until sometime during his sophomore year, when he was presented with the mind-blowing idea of thinking and writing outside of that particular form. Naturally, the excruciating amount of work this new development would entail almost convinced Carter to give up, but he took this lemon and came up with one hell of a lemonade by improving his craft and becoming more amazing than ever. His breakthrough occurred with The Trial of Apheidas, a short play written to emulate (or spit in the face of, it really could go either way) the form and language of ancient Greek plays. Now the world looks back on this piece as perhaps Carter’s finest work, while Carter will deny writing it to anyone who asks, seeming to have  forgotten it exists, proving his commitment to looking forward and not fixating on the past.
Where does Carter draw his inspiration from? Clearly, his greatest source is his incredibly interesting life, he also draws much inspiration from his hobbies. Carter enjoys gaming of all kinds, playing the jazz trombone like a boss, acting for the stage like a boss, and being a lazy sack of crap like a boss. For some reason, despite his incredible life, hobbies, and writing skill, he is single. Just putting that out there.
As tempting as it might be for him to look back on his previous work and smile, Carter sees nothing but the future. During this semester, he will properly introduce himself through his work to a brand new audience at Georgia Tech. One can only imagine how far, how quickly he will move during and after this time. He continues to strenuously improve his craft when he feels like it, so that one day, he may attain his ultimate goal of being recognized not only by more than five people, but across time and space itself.
Laugh all you want. Because, one day, Carter will be the ruler of the world. Didn’t expect that, did you? See, even though people generally don’t think of Carter as “outgoing”, “fun”, or “likeable”, he secretly knows that he is far, far above the uneducated swine that call themselves “people”. He also knows that, one day, the swine will finally drop their guard. Just when everyone has begun to think they are safe, bam! Carter comes out from under everyone’s noses and smacks society upside the head, letting society know who the new boss is. In fact, he is so confident that no one will expect it that he’s straight-up bragging about it on this blog! Who gives a damn about how it happens? All you need to know is that it will happen, you will be unprepared for it, and Carter will keep using italics until he gets his point across! He will usher in a glorious new age for this world and crush the swine underneath his mighty foot! You just try and stop him!
...Please don’t try and stop him. He has neither the physical or emotional strength to defend himself.

An exploratory essay about stuff

During my time in high school, at least, grizzled old English teachers loved to complain of my generation that we no longer knew how to “properly” communicate through the written word. Almost every student inevitably heard that complaint at some point every year, and it certainly grew tiring. However, as tired as the complaint was, I couldn’t help but agree with it, to a degree. A large part of the writing curriculum consisted of peer review sessions, which are certainly a good idea, but had the unfortunate side effect of exposing me to the horrors of student writing. The greatest sin, committed in nearly every paper I sifted through (and one that I have, admittedly, struggled with myself), was that none of them ever said anything. Each paper was an endless parade of the same trite, disgustingly vague nonsense that would, inevitably, be repeated ad infinitum, because they still received A’s. That is the cause of the downfall of composition - not, as too many English teachers would believe, because of the degradation of grammar or semantics, but because actual substance is vanishingly rare in student writing.
"Substance" is, of course, an impossibly broad term, and trying to nail down a certain definition would be a fool's errand. However, a few traits extended to nearly every paper I looked through that, I believe, show a distinct lack of substance. The first, and most important, is shallowness. Rather than just being confined to a few passages, this trait permeates the entire work. Very few essays ever delved into significant background detail on their topic or supported their argument to a substantial degree. As a result, I found it impossible to understand exactly where these arguments were coming from or why the authors thought they were valid, and I was left to wander each paper, lost and confused. Either this was the case, or the author completely built their work around the words of others, like the fictional Menard's exact duplication of the Quixote, making their works seem completely artificial and placing none of themselves into their papers. I will concede that devising a sound argument is an arduous task for nearly any essay (and one that kept me awake for many a long night of composition in high school), but practically every paper I reviewed gave the impression that it had been written the night before, and that the author simply had not put in the effort to make their paper anything more than a loose string of phrases and ideas, with practically no argument tying them together.
With very little sound reasoning behind their arguments, most authors instead tried to dress their essays up with a hearty dose of pretentious language. This actually seems to be the most obvious signifier for a lack of substance - finding a weak argument took some digging, but if the author threw in lots of them high-faultin' fancy words (whether they seemed to actually know how to use them or not), it usually followed that the essay itself was weak. Case in point: one spectacularly bad paper I peer-reviewed threw in the word "platitudinous" from absolutely out of nowhere, the author seemingly having only heard it from an episode of Spongebob Squarepants. In addition to adding useless big words, an alarming number of authors weighed their sentences down with words that were completely unnecessary to conveying the author's thoughts and served no other purpose than to give the semblance of being a fully fleshed-out paragraph. George Orwell laments both practices in "Politics and the English Language"; in the context of purely political language, he claims that such words "are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements." I believe the same complaint applies to student writing without issue - big words and long sentences are used to craft a mask of intelligence and authority, to manipulate the teacher into handing out a good grade.
Both of the previous traits went hand-in-hand with repetition. With such weak arguments to make up their essays, and since big words can only take up so much space, most authors filled in the rest of their papers by simply repeating the same themes in different language, adding nothing at all to their ideas in between uses. Absolutely nothing was being accomplished and the reader's time was thoroughly wasted, but hey, at least the paper met the length requirement. Repeating the same ideas over and over was likely meant to give the impression that certain themes tied each essay together; all that was actually accomplished was the pretense that meaning existed where it did not, as in Borges' proposed reading technique of "deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution." These certainly seemed to be the point of each essay, to fool the reader into believing that they actually had substance.
How is it that the standards of student writing fall so flat? One possible answer is the same one that bitter English teachers like to assign to the decline of grammar and spelling - modern forms of communication like social networking. Not only are the standards of English lightened through these (amazingly prominent) forms of communication, but the standards of content as well. Satirical though the article may be, The Onion's "Nation Shudders at Large Block of Text" distressingly mirrors the attitude of too many students towards the standards of composition, as well as the ways of modern communication. Students are inundated with insipid, meaningless articles and Tweets every hour of the day, with a hundred more distractions lurking within each; when confronted with the fact that they will have to create their own blocks of uninterrupted text, how does one expect them to react? Rather than attempt to actually put substance behind their essays, students unsure of how to accomplish this instead resort to the above tricks in order to get it over with as quickly as possible.

In addition, the very nature of high school and high school English classes themselves appear to be some of the greatest culprits in causing this issue. As I have come to understand, high school is really all about getting its students out. Society needs you to get that degree, so high schools will do everything they can to hand you that diploma on time. The unfortunate side effect of this, of course, is that actual progress and learning are shoved aside in favor of pushing every student forward and catering to the lowest common denominator. So, students learn to game the system and end up doing the absolute minimum amount of work needed. In English classes, this means that a paper thrown together the night before it is due, using the trickery mentioned above, is perfectly acceptable for getting by. Obviously, there are the few students who will push themselves and stand out, but the bad habits of high school composition will (at least for some length of time) follow all others.
Now, this is certainly not a new problem - George Orwell himself was bemoaning the same problems in 1946 - but I would argue that the circumstances have shifted in such a way that the problem within student writing is a more pressing one. A much larger number of high school students are actually graduating and moving on to academia, but high school English has progressed to actually enforcing bad habits in composition - habits which these students will carry with them to college and possibly beyond. The result could very well end up being a world completely inherited by men and women who carry the same half-assed attitude they brought into composition with them into communication in the real world. The potential consequences of this world are beyond the scope of this essay, but I believe that a world where the standards of communication fall to meaningless Facebook and Twitter posts, and where academic writing is allowed to remain at high school level, could not be a world of effective communication. Students must push themselves, teachers must push them, and all must learn, as Orwell described it, the proper place for "verbal refuse -- [in] the dustbin, where it belongs."