Thursday Thoughts: A Ridiculous Little Dog

Thursday, July 14, 2016 Fun With Writing Center Staff , Scholarly Writing , Writer's Workshop No comments

In creative and other forms of writing, descriptors or qualifiers are a great way to show your viewpoint and help communicate how the reader should see a certain object, person, or situation. In academic work, however, we need to be more concrete and objective. This basically means that if you’re describing something, it needs to be “provable”—but sometimes we slip into the opinionated by adding qualifiers.

By “qualifier” I mean descriptors which come from a place of personal opinion rather than clear, indisputable observation.

Let’s look at a visual as an example:

A picture of a cute little dog wrapped up in a blanket looking sad.

A Ridiculous Little Dog

In this case, I could describe it as “a ridiculous little dog”. However, someone else might describe it as a “sad little dog” or many other things. How would you describe it?

Here are examples of other dog statements with qualifiers:

The really big dog
The super small dog
The overly-large dog
The silly little dog

I could draw pictures of what I think these dogs might look like, but if you asked ten people to draw a dog based on this description, you would have ten completely different pictures, right? In academic writing, we want everyone to draw the same picture from our descriptions. In order to make these examples more professional, just remove the qualifiers!

Here are our example statements without qualifiers:

The large dog
The small dog
The black dog
The large black dog

For the photo example I would say: “The small dog”

While there will always be slight variance in what your reader imagines based on any description, all of these are much safer and would be easily understood by your audience, whereas something that’s a qualifier, like “ridiculous” could mean a lot of different things, a word like “large” or “small” have much more generally understood meanings. Of course, it’s always best to be as specific as possible, so when describing something, try to be as detailed as you can without adding qualifiers.

Here are some specific examples without qualifiers:

The dogs with fewer than ten spots
The dogs smaller than fifteen pounds
The black dogs over the age of five
Large black dogs over the age of five compared to small white dogs of the same age

Keep these descriptive tendencies in mind when writing and, when in doubt, think about if you showed your audience a picture or statistical document about what you’re describing, would they be able to clearly identify what you mean?

Questions? Tricks and tips for avoiding qualifiers? We’d love to hear below!

Claire Helakoski is a Writing Instructor at the Walden Writing Center and holds an MFA in Creative Writing. She has taught writing and Composition as well as acted as a writer and editor in a variety of mediums. She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and enjoys reading, writing creatively, and board games of all kinds