What Grad School Taught Me: Shut Up!

I had a lovely time in grad school earning my Master's in English, the second most useless degree for making a living after my B.A. in theater. I figured I would just read a lot of pretty stories and then talk about them, plus I'd hopefully learn how to actually write something. But there was one major drawback. A lot of the required reading (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, etc.) and all of the classroom dialogue tried waaaaay too hard to sound intelligent. An English degree, outside of teaching, is essentially useless in almost any business sense. So many academic writers try to offset their lack of useful skill by writing with big words and complex sentences, essentially putting up a language smokescreen that sounds important but ultimately is the same, simple message heard in other arenas. See how long it took me to say, "People talk big to avoid looking small?" I can be as bad as those I rail on. I'm working on curbing my verbosity. Honestly. But I gotta kick my vodka tonic habit first.

Anyway, I was very intimidated when I first went into graduate school because people were speaking English and I couldn't understand a word they said. They also used important metaphors for criticism like "The Gaze" and seeing life through a "[Insert critical theory] Lens" or some such crapola. Granted, it's very, very, very, very, very intelligent. It's cool to think about examining Queer Theory through a Marxist Lens using the Everyman Gaze. It's also mind-numbing. Most of all, it's inefficient thinking. It took me a little while to learn this and I'm still trying to put myself into efficient use of English in spoken and written form.

This is why I like busting the balls of inefficient writing, like the ad for the show replacing ER. First, I love sharing the chuckle-inducing text. Second, I get to be a massive hypocrite. I can indulge myself in the vice I criticize. Unlike the work I do for a living, busting the balls of bad language gives license to scribble. See? I'm already on my twenty-sixth line before getting to my point. My day job is to write ad copy that's quick, easy and attractive. I can't wax on, provide details or be the language blowhard I've been trained to be. My day job is good for me. It helps me learn to shut up more, which is what I should have been learning in grad school. Other stuff I work on (like the Dinosaur Novel/Stage Play for the Factory) needs to be like ad copy: slick and to the point. That work will boil down to the point of studying English or any language: be understood. I'll shut up now.