Pointing at things

Austin riffed on that bit I wrote about how blogging is pointing at things and falling in love—but!—he takes it one step further when he writes what good writing is:

Point at things, say, “whoa,” and elaborate.

Gosh I love that. And I think I’ve been darting around this question for a while now:

...I think we’ve all been taught to write in a style that forgets the reader entirely. My English degree taught me, incentivized me in fact, to write poorly with this sort of obfuscatory language, “nevertheless...”, “in this essay I will set out to...” etc.

All that stuff is me pointing at me, pointing at a thing. But we should just get out of the way of the thing we’re pointing at!

Just point at things, say “whoa,” and elaborate. I gotta remember that.