Putting out love

Jacket, Pocket.: End long texts posts with "So fuck you".

marxisforbros:

I watch so many of you write out long arguments, but you start every second or third sentence with “maybe” and end them with “idk”. Then after you’ve made this coherrent and logical argument, you end on a sentence saying “I don’t even know just typing out my crazy thoughts whatever lol”. Stop…

Read it. I’ve been trying to stop padding my opinions in apologetic language. I wasn’t ever that extreme about it, but I would and still occasionally do so. But I’ve been trying to stop, especially in classes or debate-like conversations. For the last group conference in my lit class, we were each supposed to pick a passage from Paradise Lost to read or recite, and then Bill asked us to talk a bit about why we were drawn to the passage. One girl read a passage about Eve, then proceeded to babble for two minutes about how she was “probably wrong, and crazy, but I don’t know, this is just what I thought, but it’s weird, I know,” and then state a fairly straightforward reading of the text. I’m pretty sure Bill had said something along the same lines in the goddamn lecture once. 

I’m all for using phrases like “I think” when talking about interpretations of a text, because nothing is absolute in literature, especially lit from centuries ago, but when you spend as much time disallowing your opinion as you do actually stating it, it detracts from what you’re saying. If you’re not confident enough in your own opinion, why should anyone else listen to you?