Paper balls of words

A week ago, I was asked by our friends whose young daughter is applying for colleges, to have a look at her personal essay for college applications. The very first paragraph absolutely conquered my heart: it was a true piece of very creative and realistic writing, describing her calming down a new-born baby as a volunteer in the children’s hospital. The writing reflected her personal perception of the situation so well that you almost felt like being in the hospital hall yourself. The rest of the essay had the same vivid and powerful “visual” approach of the writing. And as a writer I absolutely loved it.

However, the second thought after “I love this” was “is it appropriate for the college application?” I have never been a high school student in the US applying for a BA degree in the liberal arts college, so I’m not entirely sure what are the expectations. But when I was applying for a Master degree in American college, I had a very strict and clear idea of how my essay should be structured: stating your experience and explaining how this experience makes you want to apply for the program. There was no question of being “creative”: you know what they expect from you and you are trying to make your candidature sound as strong as possible. Having that in mind, I recommended my friends’ daughter to keep the originality of the personal situations but add explanations of what each situation taught her, how did it make her want to go to the college, and in which way this situation influenced her perception of her own future.

No doubt, I wanted my friends’ daughter to get to the college she dreamed about, I wanted her essay to be strong and persuasive. But somewhere at the back of my mind itched a question: why do we consider things to be “appropriate” only if they follow the well-established, traditional scheme or structure? Yes, these are very important and serious things such as college applications, graduation thesis, scholarly papers, job CVs, and official statements. And of course, it is easier to check thousands of essays or CVs when they follow the well-established templates. So, we teach these templates at school, at the career and academic centers, we correct students’ papers according to these templates, we write press releases following the template, and we start leaving by these templates. We start expecting everyone around to behave according to these templates: what to say at your job interview, how to talk to your boss, how to behave with the clients, how is the shop assistant supposed to address you, etc. etc. etc. When someone’s behavior suddenly does not confirm to our “templates” we feel uncomfortable, we think that the person is at best “funny” and “a little strange”, at worst “creepy” and “dangerous”.

There is a very clear distinction in the academic world between “academic” and “creative”. If you don’t follow a long manual of requirements on how to write an academic paper, your paper will be returned to you for correction. If you want to be creative, go for arts and creative writing, which is not considered “very academic” disciplines in the society. I have to write quite a lot for my work – mostly position paper, statements for lobbying the European institutions and national governments, sometimes informative news items. Luckily for me, there are templates to follow for all of these papers: I don’t need to spend much time deciding how to structure my writing. Unluckily for me, I see how superficial and ‘inhuman’ my words are as I myself get sometimes bored from my writing. And I know that if you’d risk writing something unusual, something from a personal perspective, something with human passions and human feelings, it would not even be considered neither by my organisation, nor by governments we are addressing. It is as if the words don’t actually mean anything: officials already know what we are asking for, we know that they don’t want to do it so we keep demanding. The actual wording doesn’t matter, they don’t even read it, they highlight the important words, “investments”, “working conditions”, “professional needs”. It would have had the same effect if we threw paper balls at people in the governments to remind them about our demands. The words became the paper balls in our world. They are only signs signifying what category the paper belongs to: academic work, political statement, or a piece of art.

There is no place or time for creativity and unusual in the modern world of effective service, profitable business, effective politics, and serious science because it takes time and effort to perceive and understand it, it brings uncomfortable and unknown, and you can’t respond to it with an email template “Dear XXX, Thank you for your message. I’m looking forward to seeing you soon. Best regards, XXX”.