Word: detail
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Such distractions from contemplation are, of course, merciful, leaving Kate less time to brood over her mother's inevitable descent toward death. But her attention to detail can sometimes try a reader's patience. When her father, long divorced from her mother, pays a visit, Kate makes them breakfast from "a box of Shredded Wheat for her father (two biscuits carefully broken up in just enough milk to make them edible) and All-Bran for Katherine (with Sweet'n Low because of her diabetes, half a banana, whole milk to encourage weight maintenance)." This is probably too much...
...seeds of a candidate's demise can often be found in the details of his own policies. As George W. Bush discovered last week, there is no surer way to invite a scathing attack than to spell out in detail what you plan to do. And Bush didn't even do that, really. When he committed himself to partly privatizing Social Security, he blurred the details but committed heresy. Bush's plan, Gore warned grimly, would "put the retirement income of American workers at risk...
...revealing some of his thoughts on Social Security reform, Bush succumbed to the journalists and voters who clamor for specificity. For the Texas Governor, who has been caricatured as an intellectual lightweight, there's a special imperative to provide detail. It's seen as proof of gravitas. But specificity kills. Just ask Bill Bradley. He was running strong until he laid out a detailed health plan. Gore cherry-picked details and used them to paint the former Senator as both a spendthrift crazy and a Medicaid-destroying ogre...
Somewhere in the high school years I began to appreciate the elegance of the short form. Perhaps all arguments are not meant to be flushed out in excruciating detail. Perhaps, like the parting shot delivered to one's ex just before the door slams, they could be short, timely and pack a punch...
This loss of detail--the loss of the long form--takes with it our impetus towards consistency. After enough sections and response papers we can all be opinionated, or at least appropriately melodramatic, for 800 words or 55 minutes, whichever comes first. But is their continuity between these spurts of eloquence? Does a clear voice emerge and transcend? Or is everything reduced to a comic strip box--a snapshot with the most interesting pieces of life squished into the inked borders...