Be Mean

I got my start as a non-academic writer in 2018 with a piece for The Hedgehog Review called “Be Nice.” The essay was pretty well-received and gave me unreasonable expectations for how many people typically read your writing and how much they typically like it. It was eventually republished in The Norton Reader, although I have to take this on faith, because I never received a copy of the anthology, and on principle I am unwilling to spend $100 to read my own essay. One effect of being anthologized is not-exactly-flattering seasonal influx of emails from first year composition students asking me, unhelpfully, “what did you mean?” Of course, as the author of an essay called “Be Nice,” these inquiries are a special sort of trial. This is the sort of lazy, general question I discourage in my own students, and the fact that the subtext of the question is that I did a bad job explaining myself the first time, it makes me feel grumpy. Even though Norton has a reading question about how I establish an “authorial persona” of niceness in the text, I therefore sometimes feel like responding to these inquiries in a way that is, in the words of a certain former president, “not very nice.”¹

“Mean” has the distinct sense of illiberality—being cheap of stingy. Not unironically, being asked what I meant makes me feel like being a little bit mean. But it would be illiberal, maybe even cruel, to be mean in that way. So, is there ever a time when I think it’s ok to be mean? Well, in the new Hedgehog, I tried to think it through (with a slightly different “authorial persona” than I usually employ). Please read it!

1. In general, I do try to be nice to the stressed out students making these inquiries while not giving a single inch. It does raise an interesting question about real education as opposed to education aimed at the acquisition of “skills.” Does the student who looks up my contact information and composes an email trying to get me to write their first-year composition paper not demonstrate certain skills? Skills that will surely serve them well in their future careers? This student is already less lazy than the student using generative AI, although that student is also demonstrating certain skills. You can “learn skills” just about anywhere, because skills make us efficacious. I would prefer that these “what did you mean?” students spent the time trying to read what I already wrote and thinking about the essay themselves. This would be something closer to education, although, truth be told, I’d rather they were reading Aristotle than Dinan.