Have you ever been told a story where the speaker goes on a tangent about something you cannot understand? Maybe because of the way they phrased it or presented it to you, but it brings about a lot of confusion. Was this frustrating for you, the speaker, or both? It is always hard to communicate effectively, but it is even hard to explain things thoroughly within our writing. The speaker is the writer, you are the reader, and trust me when I say it can be extremely frustrating for the both of you.
There have been so many times in my life where I try to tell a funny story and when I hit the final punchline, my audience just looks at me with a perplexed expression. I often get the dreaded question nobody wants to hear, “Um what?”. This is when internally I roll my eyes and think, “How could they not have gotten that? I was so clear! No way do I want to tell the story all over again”. How could my audience not see how my story had relevance to our previous conversation? This is possibly one of the most frustrating things, and it happens to me on a day to day basis! I do not want to resort to the lazy “nevermind” reply, but I also would rather not rephrase the whole entire story just for them to maybe understand it all over again.
This is metacommentary for you- explaining each claim thoroughly and supporting it to the point where an eight year old could understand. We discussed in class how metacommentary is the buttercream frosting smothered all over the vanilla cake- without the frosting we would just have a boring cake that represents the thought. Yet if we have too much frosting it would be too sweet, and if we have just the frosting we no longer have a dessert. It is all about the balance between explaining the thought without overexplaining. It is a fact that, at least for me, I find it much harder to metacommunicate in speech than in writing. When I write, I imagine a professor hovering over my shoulder saying, “Can you unpack that?”. Yet when I speak, I am not constantly thinking about what I have to say, which makes it much more difficult.
In the novel I Am Not Sidney Poiter, the metacommentary is all over the place. The negation expressed in the word “not” as in “not Sidney” automatically makes my mind go insane. The beginning chapters were a huge adjustment period for me, I kept thinking “Is he or is he not Sidney?”. I had many other characters that were featured in the novel thinking the same exact thing. I often put myself in not Sidney’s shoes, I try to imagine if my name was “Not Taylor Swift”, and how frustrating that would be for me. The hard thing is, you can only explain that so much. and using too much metacommentary can create even more confusion. I can tell you that I am not Taylor Swift, but the rest of my life I am still always going to be associated with the famous star. Perhaps I would just have to accept that.