5/23 Qualifiers, Absolute Meanings, Modal Auxiliaries, Or The Hedging Academic by Hannah

These chapters made me want to respond by raising a question of the effect of qualifiers, absolute meanings, and modal auxiliaries, or what Kolln also calls hedging and the conditional mood. These elements are interesting because it’s so hard to tell if you’re using them effectively or not.

When earlier in the quarter we were writing about enacting genre, I said: “…thinking a lot about how I demarcate and often delimit my claims….These phrases most often, however, come out of me uncontrollably. It’s like pure genre is coming out. Most of the time though, these phrases (‘it seems to me’ or ‘it seems that’) make a sentence awkward and weak. Yet, they are powerful markers of genre that just keep spilling out of me. This is a strange automatic compulsion that almost every time needs editing.”

In addition to the written word, academic speak is riddled with qualifying language; we hear “it’s like this kind of X…” or “it’s this sort of X” all the time. This sort of language is part of the discourse and as I say above I think these phrases are conventional and familiar and, thus when we find ourselves saying them, probably unconscious. But they also do some work, as Kolln notes that the condition raises doubts and “thus connect[s]” readers and writers to share doubt (134). But when do you want to raise doubt? When is raising doubt or demonstrating a lack of certainty effective and when is it not?

ONE: OLD, with modal auxiliary:
“Though I only have a few examples as yet to demonstrate this, it is my sense that in this turn to more “artistic” travelogues emerges the composite of genres in the travel volume.”

POSSIBLE New (actually very close to the next sentence in the proposal):
“Travel literature at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth century is marked by composite genres and [deleted: IT SEEMS] that History of a Six Weeks’ Tour exemplifies this trend.” [here I am pretty certain that HSWT stands on its own as an example of composite genres—that I would assert. But this larger claim does really function as a tentative one, so I guess I like the work of both of these sentences]

TWO: OLD:
“It is often difficult to tell the difference between the mode of reportage and description in the journal/“History” section of History, which may be symptomatic of the rather indistinct way these genres were considered in the eighteenth century…”

POSSIBLE New:
It is difficult to tell the difference between the mode of reportage and description in the journal section of History as it is symptomatic of the indistinct way these genres were considered in the eighteenth century…

This hedging for me marks out a claim that I didn’t really believe; I let the quotation that follows this excerpt SUGGEST to me that such was the case in History. Perhaps then, (perhaps!!) attention should be paid to overly conditional or hedging statements and probed for certainty. In other words, what is certain should be marked as such. Unfortunately though, I think that rules about these verbs and adverbs stop there. It’s difficult to puzzle out when you should qualify and when you should be “strong” and certain, as both can come across effectively.