What voice do you listen to when choosing your path?

Voices. Your own.

-- By JocelynCazares - 13 Mar 2015

Choices

With every choice in life, public or private, there is an endless set of possibilities and outcomes that arise.

A sentence wasted at a very bad time. Begin your essay by stating an idea that takes hold of the reader's attention. Presentation of a truism, in the passive voice, won't do that.

As people we encounter an infinite array of “choices,” the majority that go by unnoticed and unthought-of, such as the choice to walk on the street rather than crawling or skipping to get around, and the choices that demand the active thought and consideration of people, such as what to do with one’s life. Though this classification is rudimentary, at best, and it is clear that classifications through dichotomy limits perspective—there is not simply two types of choices that we encounter in life, and there are certainly people in the world who actively engage in the choice of walking on the street and who never spare a moment in thought of what is to become of their lives—given the Western perspective I grew up in and my background, it is much simpler to address the choices as the ones I have been taught to deem significant enough to demand active thought to get where I want to in this essay.

The run-on sentence is a substitute for editing. You are taking back the "dichotomy" you used to oversimplify in the preceding sentence, but not advancing yet, after more than 150 words, an idea the reader can identify as your core contribution in the the essay.

This choice I am making.

The “Look at Me” choices.

Now, clearly I want to explore the choices that make people notice that they are being made and illicit active thought as these are the ones that we have been socialized to believe determine the trajectory of ours lives, and thus, must be taken seriously.

Again, the sentence structure rambles, and the idea behind is suffering from not being stated clearly.

These are the choices we are taught will determine who we become, as though we only become one thing or person, and also the choices that will close doors and burn bridges to other possibility. For how can you be a lawyer and also an artist? They’re mutually exclusive, right?

Who thinks that?

Well, that’s for another time, another paper, maybe. Importantly, these are the choices where the most voices, all that you possess and those from others, seem to spring out and demand to be heard. (Of course, if I suddenly decided tomorrow to start getting around the city by walking on my hands, I am sure many voices would arise, though many would go unsaid and rather be communicated physically through looks and body language.) But which of these voices should be heard, silenced, ignored, and ultimately, taken? That’s the hard part. Especially for those who have taken to heart that anything that has the potential to determine your life must be a decision made after serious inquiry and thought. Moreover, with these types of choices, whether to be the doctor or the writer, the lawyer or the artist, comes the choice that truly matters, which voice matters. And I don’t mean that in a general way, as though only one voice will ever matter, and it will be the same voice throughout, but in a definite way, in that moment of decision, given the particular choices and voices, which one will determine what you do. Which one, or ones, will outshine the others. So now how does one go about answering that when the very answer is generated through the evaluation of a series of infinite answers which in themselves are choices, it’s kind of like begging the question. Right? Right.

I don't see why it's right. People don't actually behave as you are suggesting they do. But for the reader, the primary outcome of these sentences is confusion: What is she trying to say, and why is she asking me whether this something is "right"?

The Inquiry

To get anywhere then, the overarching questions, at least for me, must be contextualized, situated in a concrete example in the real world. With that determined, I can look to a series of choices made throughout history, whether it be why a certain president was elected or ran, or why my parents left Mexico for a life in America. However, these choices have already been made, and as such many of the answers to what voice made that choice have been forgotten about. More importantly, they are choices made by other people, and as such all the internal dialogue, the voices they rather not acknowledge go by unsaid so that an honest inquiry cannot be done. Therefore, it must be a personal inquiry if I wish to reach some type of answer, or so I tell myself. Choices, choices, choices. Now, I can speak to a simple example that will generate a relatively easy inquiry and response, something along the lines of how I chose this particular essay, but it’s kind of inconsequential in the confines of the actual essay though it’s responsible for its birth. Choice made. So then it must be not only a “look at me” choice that demands active thought and consideration, but also one that will alter my path in life. There are my choices that I am constantly rethinking and reevaluating: public defender, to do or not to do, or rape, to prosecute or not to prosecute. But those are choices that have been decided for the most part. Sure, I can go back and change my choices, but all the serious inquiry has been done, many of the voices have already been silenced. So then, it must be a choice that has recently introduced itself, so that most of the voices are still present. How do I continue on with the absence of a loved one?

The Answer

Does it matter? The actual voice that dominates this new choice? Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter. Too personal. Can’t have that…let’s just leave it at what we know, what we are comfortable with: we listen to all voices, and reasonably come to a conclusion after evaluating them all equally. Right. Just more perspectives and rationales to justify our own choices. Choice made, Access Denied.

Editing is the route to improvement. Start by finding, and stating in a succinct sentence, the idea you want the reader to take away from this essay as your core idea. State it in an introduction that presents it as clearly and with all the brevity you can muster. Develop the idea in subsequent paragraphs. That means unpacking your succinct introductory statement to provide more perspective on your idea. That also means addressing, directly or indirectly, the most significant questions and objections that your skeptical editorial attention to your outline has generated. (Outlining is crucial to the terse and comprehensive development of the idea we are looking for. Outline carefully, down to the sentence level.) A conclusion can then take the idea you've developed and suggest a further implication or two that the reader can take away and think about for herself.

With careful editing and more discipline in the structure of the essay, the primary writing problem—those run-on sentences that ramble away from wherever they begin—will ease automatically. But watch it anyway. Keep your sentences short and your grammar simple. The discipline of minimalism will be good for your writing in every context.