Why I Could Never Be an English Major

I know what you are thinking. But you went and got a Creative Writing degree! Isn't that the same thing?

You can't see me right now, but I'm laughing at the very idea.

Growing up, I read. Not just school assignments. Not just when a new book came out. I read everything. I got a library card at the age of three, so young my mom had to sign it for me. After that, we would go once a week and raid the shelves. My card got used as overflow because the fifty-book limit on my mom's card was never enough.

Now you're thinking, isn't that an argument for why you should be an English major?

Still laughing.

Here is how I operate: I read, and I forget. To summarize, to analyze, to theorize. I love books but can never catalog the events and quotes and figurative language. On all of those standardized tests in school, I scored lowest on reading comprehension, and that was with only a thirty-second break between the passage and the questions.

Fast forward to college.

Despite holding onto the writing program with a death grip, the degree still had more literature requirements than anything else. Don't get me wrong, I had a few classes that changed my opinions on different writers and novels in a Dead Poet's Society kind of way. Jane Austen went from contrived and melodramatic to witty and understated in one semester. I unexpectedly fell in love with Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent after a rocky start with Heart of Darkness. One teacher even convinced me that it was worth rereading Faulkner's As I Lay Dying despite how much I hate the stupid people that populate Yoknapatawpha County.

But the same reason stayed and a new one blossomed.

I enjoy simplicity. In language, in word choice, in...synonyms. But still, I come from a place where there is no need to use an archaic and overly-complicated word when there is a basic word instead. Writing is not an excuse to show off your vocabulary.

On the other hand, your (stereo)typical English majors wants more. They want words with ten definitions and conjugations. They want the long, dramatic ballads of Whitman and Wordsworth over the artistic choices of Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath. They want Middle English over Hemingway's use of the word "nice."

Writers prefer to put their complications elsewhere, whether it be in the plot, the characters, or the structure. I'd rather spend time figuring out whether the protagonist is a hero or a villain than spend time figuring out what even happened in the paragraph I just read.

Bartender, I'd like the English language, straight up, please.