Posted By BillHeise on February 11, 2010

Found an article on the Web today entitled 6 Personality Traits to Admire. If you ask me, I have them all in abundance (especially #6), and if you ask them so does every human being on the planet. Maybe that’s why the author makes herself the judge, because people are not particularly good judges of themselves in relation to the larger world. They tend to over-emphasize their good qualities and to under-emphasize their failings.

This leads me to make a hierarchy of judgment:

• When we make private judgments about others, where we are not invested in the outcome of our judgment and where we don’t have to make a public declaration of what we think, we tend to be brutally honest about our opinions. We even share our honest judgments with trusted friends.

• When we have to publicly declare our judgments to the person we are judging, we tend to lie or at least evade.

Is it right that we lie in public even when we are brutally honest in private?

I bring this up because it comes up in my writing class every day. I teach writing as an exercise in making your private thoughts public. And when I bring up my point about it being easier for someone else to judge your work than it is for you yourself, my students agree. But they don’t often use the shortcut of having another reader read their paper for them, presumably on account of my students’ holding on to the childhood beliefs that a) the thoughts they are thinking matters to anyone but themselves (they don’t) and that b) readers are secondary to the primacy of writers in the act of writing (they aren’t).

In my class, which is dedicated to public writing, readers matter. Writers connect with readers by raising a conflict that interests their readers or their writing doesn’t matter. This is the hardest lesson to teach my students, and unfortunately most of my students never grasp it.

Just saying.

Categories: English, Philosophy
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