When you get a wild and crazy sentence like this, a truly mad mix of metaphors, you perceive the intriguing connection between lazy cliche and hyperactive metaphor. Let’s first look at this remarkable sentence more closely. I’ll highlight its images.
Though skyrocketing tuitions and a growing anti-government tide are seemingly swimming against traditional university education, the true educational bubble forming is in the online space.
We set out here with skyrockets in flight. The rockets are up in the air with a tide. Together the rocket and the tide appear to be swimming. The actual mixed water and air action, however, is a space bubble.
Are you trying to picture this? To make the picture make sense? That tends to be how we read – we’re not only reading for an argument; we’re enriching our sense of the emotional and intellectual meaning of the writer’s claims by assimilating his various figures into our reactions, by allowing his images to ground and dramatize what might otherwise be mere abstract statement. But excess and confused figures – coupled here with modifier-madness (skyrocketing, growing, seemingly, traditional, true, online – no noun is left unaccosted) – just produce a confused mess. They make thinking harder, not simpler. And they tend to happen when your argument is little more than a string of cliches. Here are some, from this Forbes piece.
… [C]ollege students tune out during their four years on campus; that, or they memorize what’s needed to get As on the tests… [T]eens go to college with an eye on a fun four years, after which they hope the school they attend will open doors for a good job… [W]hat’s learned in college is irrelevant to what’s done in the real world. … [C]ollege is not about learning much as we might wish it were… [W]hen parents spend a fortune on their children’s schooling they’re not buying education; rather they’re buying the ‘right’ friends for them, the right contacts for the future, access to the right husbands and wives, not to mention buying their own (“Our son goes to Williams College”) status. …Parents and kids … aren’t buying education despite their protests to the contrary. Going to college is a status thing, not a learning thing. Kids go to college for the experience, not for what’s taught.
Note how a weak argument full of overstatement relies on a repeated pounding of the reader by means of cliche. It should not surprise us when a robotic redundancy insisting that American university education represents status obsessives and their bad seed eventually produces nutty sentences like this one.
June 10th, 2013 at 8:58AM
A bad argument expressed in ridiculous imagery–I suppose we can at least admire the fit between form and content.
I’m surprised you didn’t also mention the bad grammar, e.g. the modifier problem in the opening sentence:
“Speaking in Providence, RI not too long ago, the post-speech conversation turned to college education.”
June 10th, 2013 at 9:45AM
Dr_Doctorstein: Yes – the opening sentence… But there’s always the problem, when writing about this sort of writing, of laying it on too thick…
June 10th, 2013 at 9:52AM
A lot of business talk is, unfortunately, cliché, crazy metaphor, hyperbole, etc. I’ve used those oafish tools myself to close a sale that seemed headed nowhere. Yeah, “repeated pounding of the reader”–or sales prospect–is right.
June 10th, 2013 at 10:43AM
“Pushing the envelope”. Another junk business cliché. The “envelope” meant a graphic representation–a rectangle, i. e., an envelope–of performance in two dimensions, for example, aircraft ceiling and maximum velocity. WWI biplanes had small envelopes; the SR-71 a big envelope.
In business lingo, “pushing the envelope” means exactly what? I don’t know. I think it’s often used as a synonym for something specific, such as, “We’re putting in a lot of overtime on Project X.” So why not say that?
June 10th, 2013 at 5:55PM
The language of business (especially “entrepreneurship,” which I suspect doesn’t much resemble what actually happens in the founding of small companies that provide genuinely useful products or services) also sounds (probably not coincidentally) like much sports-pep/psychology talk. I once had a (very) long conference with a student who had written an essay the thesis of which boiled down to “you gotta have heart” (in fact, I think that *was* the stated thesis in the intro). The student couldn’t, for the life of him, define “heart,” even though he had (some) examples that supposedly demonstrated having it. I think the statement was something close to an article of faith for him, and therefore undefinable/analyzable.
June 10th, 2013 at 6:23PM
A few more thoughts after having actually read the thing:
–Yes, it’s egregiously badly written, starting with that first sentence. In addition to the wildly mixed metaphors, the transitions (or lack thereof) and evidence (or lack thereof) wouldn’t pass muster in English 101. Maybe the writer should have made more of his own college experience, and/or maybe somebody should have flunked him a few times along the way, which would seem to be the cure for the worthlessness of college as he describes it — oops; I didn’t notice; it’s apparently easy to memorize just enough to get As on tests. Which brings us to. . .
–Oddly, he’s embracing the idea of education-as-information-transfer even as he seemingly embraces the value of experience to actual learning (just not, I guess, experiences engineered by teachers with the goal of developing skills, understanding, etc. — what I’d call real education).
–It seems to me more than a bit disingenuous/irresponsible for a writer in a business magazine not to at least nod to Brown’s (and other Ivies’) business model, which involves setting a “sticker price” that only a small portion of its customers actually pay (of course, Forbes readers may be precisely the demographic that pays full price, but still. . .)