Suppose I relate to my brother, to whom I am related by blood, a tale about one of our relations with whom we have had a sometimes rocky relationship. Would it be accurate to call that story "relatable"?
I don't know. In fact I'm not entirely certain what "relatable" is supposed to mean, despite the number of times I see it in student papers. Lately my freshman writers have been evaluating the credibility of essays they've read, and no matter how often I urge them to consider the author's credentials, the presence of bias, the essay's tone, and the reliability of evidence, a handful of students insist on basing their critiques entirely on whether they find the essay "relatable."
Now there are many types of relationships we can have with a piece of writing: we can find it amusing, engaging, annoying, intriguing; an essay might challenge us to stretch our thinking skills or send us digging in the dictionary. But that's not the kind of relationship my students are talking about. When I press them to explain what they mean by "relatable," they mean the essay deals with familiar ideas and uses accessible language. In other words, they apply their term of highest praise only to writing that feels comfy as an old sofa.
But if they value only writing that reinforces what they already know, why bother paying all that money to go to college? I wish I could find a way to convey to my students the passion for engaging with unfamiliar and sometimes uncomfortable ideas, the joy of encountering words and sentences that make them re-read and re-think and reach for the dictionary--and then find ways to adapt those new ideas and words within their own writing.
That's the kind of reading I could relate to. But please don't ask me to call it "relatable."
3 comments:
I'm so with you on this, it's almost as if I can relate! But it's still not relatable.
I think one of the things that irritates me about the term is that it sees the ability to relate to something in a text rather than in a reader; so if a given reader doesn't think the text is "relatable," s/he sees that quality as being part of the text rather than in his/her approach to or ability to read, empathize or whatever.
This is a subject that fascinates me as a teacher--the common gestures that students engage in before they are ready to do (or in lieu of doing) real close reading work. Relatability is a key idea, but I also see students write reflexively about how sentences have a "certain flow" (what kind of flow, I wonder, and how is it created, and what effect does it have on the work), or about how the author allows you to imagine the story in your mind (I wonder whether this is the author's doing or the reader's).
Do you know if there are any articles about this subject out there? If not, it's something I'd like to investigate more closely and write about.
jdw14@pitt.edu
Good points. I can really relate....
And no, I'm not aware of articles on the topic, but I haven't really looked either.
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