Quantity vs. Quality

Quantity vs. Quality

This Saturday morning, I made myself responsible for editing the college applications essays for my younger sister. I clearly understood her ideas, as I am used to reading her writings as well as hear her speak. However, I faced the challenge of truly assuring that what she wrote would be read by people who do not know her or her story with the same intention that she meant for other people to understand.

I found myself going into the thesaurus and finding words that could fit her story best, and ended up looking into the dictionary to found whether the synonyms that I found truly convey her meaning. What was interesting of me editing her essay, however, was that although I knew the story behind what she had written, my modification of word choice seem very unfitting to her vision.  I modified words that I thought would make the essay much clearer, but in doing so, I lost the feeling she wanted to present. By the end of the end, my biggest lesson was that although some words may seem intrinsically the same, the combination of set word in a story has a tremendous power over the feeling it conveys.

You may know understand my surprise as I opened canvas and read about Atkins and Levins explain the complexity behind the creation of a dictionary and Slobin contrast the narrative style and structure used to present actions in different languages.

As technical and descriptive Atkins and Levin explain to us the difference between externally and internally caused verb, and made me aware of yet another complexity in the English language  about how some action verbs make sense only based on context (ie. someone can burp a baby, but a doctor cannot burp a nurse), what I found truly interesting was the way that technology has affected the way we relate so many words with each other. As I edited my sister’s essays, I remember typing the word ‘highlight’ and getting more than 3 pages of dictionary results. This made me think about how ineffective it really is for words to have that much meanings attributed to them and having so many other words relate to that same word. I strongly believe that when it comes to the dictionary, a linguist shouldn’t include their whole analysis of the word, but rather leave that for another source. Hence I would disagree with Atkins and Levin’s point of adding more context to words in the dictionary.

Additionally, I found that the many words used to describe that one action that Atkins and Levin describe relates to Slobin’s point of how word change creates different meanings, and this is especially true across languages. Having so many words describing that one action, I believe is what makes stories so different depending on language. Based from my own experience of hearing childhood stories in both, english and spanish, it is amazing to see how the wolf in the three little pigs was much more friendly in the english version than in the spanish one just because of word choice. It makes me wonder how stories would be historically analyzed differently based on different word choice. What would have happen if "To be or not to be" would have been phrased "Am I or Am I Not?" Would the analysis be altered?