Last Friday, Natalie Colaneri '12 wrote a column bemoaning Dartmouth's "culture of artificially exaggerated happiness" ("The Happiness Dilemma"). Colaneri's piece was but the latest in a long line of opinion articles whose topics are based solely on the author's personal grievances. In these rant-like articles, the individual complaints of the author overshadow good reasoning and argumentation. Written for an audience of one, these columns read more like a diatribe than an argument. They are precisely the types of articles that have no place on the opinion page of The Dartmouth.
Of course, personal grievances should be included in opinion columns. After all, a major feature that separates an opinion column from a news article is the author's judgment, which is undoubtedly influenced by personal experiences. But when the author's personal injustices consume the article and take precedent over argument, reason and logic, the author starts to lose their audience. Alas, they have written a column solely for personal edification.
A distinguishing feature of an opinion article that is consumed by personal grievances is the overuse of the first person. In the first half of Colaneri's article, for example, almost every sentence either includes "I" or "my". While use of the first person can be helpful in an opinion column to state a personal opinion or describe an anecdote, its overuse proves detrimental. No longer making an argument, the author has begun a rant that alienates readers who cannot relate to her experiences.
From here, the author typically makes the mistake of introducing a large assumption, abruptly replacing the first person "I" with the collective "we." Under the belief that their own personal grievance is that of the entire campus or entity, the author attempts to validate this grievance with an appeal to numbers. In Colaneri's piece, this fallacy occurs most visibly in the fifth and sixth paragraphs "We've all witnessed Collis at a popular lunchtime everyone experiences the same feelings at college."
The product of this error is an egregious miscalculation, whereby the author has wrongly assumed that their personal feelings are widespread. In Colaneri's piece, she is not only wrong to assume that we all have the same experiences at college, but also that we view these interactions at Collis in the same way that she does. At this point, the author has made an unfounded assumption and has transmogrified a personal grievance into a widespread one. No legitimate evidence is provided to account for such a jump in logic. Only the mere shift in pronoun use assists such a transition.
These types of columns, with their overuse of "I" and "we," are inherently self-interested and belong not on the opinion page, but in The Mirror. In The Mirror, each column has a pre-assigned title, under which exists a blank slate for the author to fill with a personal story "The Gospel According to Matthew" being one of the most recognizable examples. With this structure, the unique persona and experiences of the writers are crucial to the success and entertainment value of their columns.
Unlike The Mirror, however, the daily opinion page is not and should not be beholden to the author's name or personality. An opinion column should more or less be able to stand on its own, regardless of what name appears in the byline. For opinion writers, the space on this page is theirs, but also that of fellow opinion writers and editors. Personal author complaints should not guide the argument on this page.
Such emotion-based and author-driven arguments are undoubtedly bad for this section of the newspaper. They turn the opinion page of The Dartmouth into a blog-like medium to vent personal anxieties and grievances. As a result, good reasoning and argumentation take a backseat to personality, when it is exactly the opposite that should be occurring.
