Putting Things in Perspective

     I was tasked with creating an exercise for my advanced literary non-fiction class, so I came to classed armed with two distinctive ideas. One dealt primarily with the use of imagination in non-fiction, while the other dealt with the use of perspective. The imagination exercise may have been a hard sell, and the one regarding memory and perspective fit perfectly into the day's class, as it was already an issue based on some of the pieces presented that day. So I forced the (my) class to put pen to paper and write out a memory, any memory. In order to examine the effect that perspective has on our work, I asked the class to rewrite the memory, only this time they had to shift their perspective. Instead of a factual recalling of events, I asked them to write this memory as if it was boring to them. And to take the experiment one step further, I also asked them to write the memory as if it was really exciting, or as if they were really amped about whatever memory they chose. The results were at least moderately successful.

     Most people employed some pretty similar tactics when it came to writing the really exciting version. I saw a lot of words in all caps, and a preponderance of exclamation points to really sell the excitement. The language became more colorful, and most of the writers took themselves out of the position of spectator, and into the position of participant. Many of the writers wrote their first version in some form of third person, and when the time came to amp it up, they switched to first to pack the piece with emotional language, and to up the tension.

     However, for the boring piece, there were about three different tactics. Number one was the drawn out response. To increase the boredom, the words and sentences were lengthened, and the whole paragraph became slow and drawn out. Some of the authors chose to shorten their pieces. They cut all the detail out and left just a shell of the former piece. And finally, some people just went out of their way to deflate the situation. They would just come out and say how boring it was.

     But regardless of how people did it, I'd say it was at least moderately successful in displaying just how we use perspective while writing our non-fiction pieces. Every adjective, or descriptive phrase, our tone and our point of view, our syntax and our diction are all based on perspective. To really drive the point home, I was going to ask the class to write the memory down for the fourth time, but this time, they'd be writing through the perspective of someone else involved. I wasn't sure how this would work with some people, since some people's memories didn't involve anyone else. The point of adding this was going to be to really highlight that our perspective determines how we write, but I think I achieved the same effect with the second and third paragraphs. If something is boring to us, we'll write about in a certain way, and if it is exciting, we'll write about it in a different way. I think understanding the biases we put into our own pieces can help us become better writers of non-fiction.