I have a ritual I do on the first day of every semester in my English classes.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that it’s boring to just read off the syllabus at the start of the course (and the students never remember what was in the syllabus anyways), so I instead address the inevitable elephant in the room: just how is this English instructor going to grade? Because English and writing is all so “subjective,” right? It’s not like math or science, where there’s just “one right answer” you can solve (this is not true at the advanced levels of math and science, but I’m talking about recent high school graduates and college freshmen right now, not doctoral students): what one English teacher thinks is good, another thinks is garbage, and vice-versa. Everyone knows this. So I try to be as clear and explicit as I can be as to my expectations.

One of the hoariest old cliches in writing instruction is “show, don’t tell,” so I show them my expectations with the following exercise:

I put a short political speech up on the screen. I don’t tell them the politician’s name, nor their political party, so as to not condition their response. I simply ask for volunteers to read it out loud (or, if it’s a quieter class, I call on volunteers). The speech in question is quite boring; it’s only saving grace is that it’s short, but even that brevity seems to stretch on forever. The students’ eyes glaze over quickly. Some surreptitiously start scrolling on their phones. I don’t call them out on this; it is in fact the reaction I’m looking for.

After we finish reading it, I ask the class what this politician’s policy stances are. That part isn’t hard: they usually don’t have a difficult time identifying such clearly-stated positions as, say, “we must lower unemployment,” or “we must reform education,” or “communism [is] a method of madness,” or “we will establish Christianity as the foundation of our national morality.” I write these stances up on the board.

The next questions proves more difficult: how does this politician intend to implement these policies? That is, How will they lower unemployment? How will they battle communism? How will they reform education and promote morality? The students all give a blank stare, and finally state blandly, “They never say.” The speech has an infuriating lack of detail.

“Related question,” I then ask, “Did you even like this speech?” The students typically don’t have a problem either with saying, “No, not really. It’s super boring.”

“I quite agree,” I respond, “But why is it boring?” In short order, most students note that this frustrating lack of detail–not to mention it’s utter lack of human warmth or personality–is what makes it boring. The speech frankly feels chatbot generated, and I mean that as an insult.

“So if you want a good grade in my class, what does your essay need?” I ask.

“Detail. Emotion. Personality,” they swiftly list off. That is, the very things a chatbot cannot do for you. But then, those are also the very things they were trained not to do themselves in their various five-paragraph-essays all throughout middle and high school; the five-paragraph format had been training our students all along to write like machines, not human beings.

“Final question,” I ask, “Who do you guess wrote this?” I play 20 questions with them, invite them to play along with me; tell them “warmer” and “colder” based on what era they guess. If they get stuck, I throw them a bone and tell them, “I find it fascinating that you assume this is a U.S. politician.” I also reassure repeatedly them that they have definitely heard of this person.

Someone usually gets it by then (indeed, at least a few students have guessed it immediately, but they are young and most have not yet learned to trust their gut): it is an Adolf Hitler speech, from 1933. That typically seems to wake them up.

I explain that the the vague and boring generalities of this Hitler speech are a feature, not a bug, intended to dull you into complacency, so that you do not pay attention to what he is really saying:

Did he bring down unemployment? He sure did! In fact, the entrance to Auschwitz Death Camp read, “Work will set you free.”

Did he establish Christianity as the basis of their national morality? He killed off all the Jews, didn’t he?

Did he battle communism? He broke the non-aggression pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, didn’t he?

Did he reform education? Surely you have all heard of the Hitler Youth, no?

In each case, he fulfills his campaign promises in the most monstrous and evil ways possible. The Holocaust was already lurking beneath his intentionally-vague language. His dramatic gestures and speaking style were intended to cover up how little substance there really were in his speeches–which again, were intentionally substanceless. I then tell them that when a political figure gets vague, that alarm bells should go of in their heads immediately. They should be asking what exactly these politicians are hiding—and you must always respond against the vague generalities of the powerful by getting as explicit and detailed as possible.

I then demonstrate the importance of citing sources, by citing someone with a lot more authority than me who said the same thing: George Orwell. I read the following passage from his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language:”

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

“Consider for instance some comfortable English, professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

“‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’

“The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. AU issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of hes, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”

Words as true today as in 1946. By that point in the lesson, my meaning becomes clear: if they continue to write in the same vague, generic, and boring style of the five-paragraph-essay that they’ve been drilled in since elementary school, then they will get a bad grade–not necessarily because it sounds chatbot generated (which is bad enough), but because it conditions you to allow the powerful to get away with literal murder.

So what do they need to do to earn a good grade in my class, I ask them? “Don’t write like Hitler,” generally comes the tongue-in-cheek response.

And indeed, when I first started this lesson a dozen-odd years ago, this lesson was intended as a joke, as a way to hopefully help them remember this bit of writing instruction even after class ended. But in recent years, I have found to my distress that the punchline is no longer a joke at all, but an earnest plea: Do not write like Hitler. Do not write like any dictator or wannabe-dictator for that matter. Real human beings live or die based on how much vagueness we are willing to tolerate from the powerful.

If I might try and make an LDS connection on this LDS site: you will note that every time the prophets–or even Christ himself–preach repentance, it is always with harsh detail and blunt specificity: Matthew 23^[1]e.g. “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.”, Mosiah 12^[2]e.g. “If ye teach the law of Moses why do ye not keep it? Why do ye set your hearts upon riches? Why do ye commit whoredoms and spend your strength with harlots, yea, and cause this people to … Continue reading, Mormon 8^[3]e.g. “For behold, ye do love money, and your substance, and your fine apparel, and the adorning of your churches, more than ye love the poor and the needy, the sick and the afflicted.”, D&C 122^[4]e.g. “If thou art accused with all manner of false accusations; if thine enemies fall upon thee; if they tear thee from the society of thy father and mother and brethren and sisters; and if … Continue reading, etc. It’s always the detail that sells it, that gets under the skin of those in power–and that generally gets the prophets killed. We are incentivized indeed to stay courteously vague around the powerful. Nevertheless, these are exactly the sorts of people we must get as explicit as possible with. It is a lesson as ancient as all religious history and contemporary as the college classroom.