On Reporting.
It is hard for me to read anything that passes its self off
as fact and is only loosely based on immediate experience. If you don’t even
have the nerve to insert yourself into the description, showing how you reacted
and why these things would have appeared this way to you, then I cannot trust
you as a writer.
My plaint is not a sentimental one. “And here I might have
distorted this” encourages the writer to elaborate, and that gives more
information. Rather than a direct statement, cumbersome to work with because it
is definitionally dubious, the reader is given now a series of either very
concrete details or potential impressions, as a kind of colloid, left to decide
what might have happened without being expected to believe it. This is not an
insult to a reader’s intelligence, whereas an account that makes pretenses
towards objectivity is.
Dm.A.A.
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