Blogocentric Formulations

The Imperative to Act & Elliptical Addiction

PROMPT: What personal responsibilities do we hold when we see something bad happening? Are these personal responsibilities different when the offender is a close friend or family member?

I think we have a moral obligation to act when something bad is happening to anyone, not just loved ones, assuming it's in our power to help change the outcome and it's not already being handled by someone else. But I also acknowledge that the victim being a loved is one probably more like to spur people to action. And I suppose it also has a lot to do with what bad thing is happening. The more inevitable or dangerous the anticipated outcome, the more reticent people are to step up or speak out. For example, I think people are generally less inclined to, say, bring themselves to the attention of a crazy person threatening someone else with a gun than they would be to, say, confront someone they caught shoplifting or slapping their child.

If the offender is a loved one, we have a greater responsibility to do something because these are people we know and care about and for whome we should have a vested interest in wanting to prevent them from doing bad things.

A lot of us, even when we know something bad is happening, will avoid getting involved. We might convince ourselves that we're running late to work and don't have time to stop and make sure the people in the two cars that just got in an accident in front of you are okay. Or we might think, "I don't need to call 911 about that mugging because there are tons of people around and I'm sure someone else will call." Or we might even say to ourselves, "I think it's terrible that her husband's cheating on her, but it's not my place to get in the middle of things." And while we might come up with a variety of justifications or excuses for why we don't want to get involved, I think that's a separate issue than whether we should. I'm sure we all have points in our lives where, after the fact, we think to ourselves, "I should have done something" or "I should have said something." That, to me, is always an indication that I had a moral responsibility to do something. Whether you think that little voice in your head is God, karma, your conscience, the universe, or whatever, it's something inside you saying that you should have taken personal responsibility and at least tried something.

In order to keep this blog entry from being a complete downer, though, I think those moments where you choose not to act when you kinda know you should have are natural parts of our existence. As humans, we're flawed and we make mistakes. The point is to learn from those mistakes and realize, "Gee, I felt really bad last time I said nothing when I saw that cashier giving a blind person back smaller bills instead of the correct change. I'm not going stay silent if I see something like that happen again."

We have a personal responsibility to help other people, and to do our best to communicate to our loved ones the important values we have and think they should embody themselves, especially when it comes to children, younger siblings, or other people in our lives who look to us for moral guidance or as a role model for their own behavior. That doesn't mean we're not going to make mistakes or that we should be two hours late to work because you stopped to help every old lady across the street, to check on the status of everyone involved in every accident, and to put a dollar in the change cup of every panhandler ... but we do have to accept responsibility for the fact that almost all of us have people in this world who look up to us as a behavioral example, and it's for the benefit of those people that we need to try and help when bad things happen that we have the ability to influence.

PROMPT: Let's talk about those lovely ellipsis points. Do you think they suggest faltered or fragmented speech? Should they be save for confusion, distress or the big reveal. Do you use them when you write? How about with dialogue, are they best used when one speaker interrupts another?


I have a serious problem overusing ellipses. In screenwriting, they typically indicate a pause or a sentence that trails off and is left unfinished. (Dashes, on the other hand, indicate a sentence being cut off or interrupted by something else.)

EXAMPLE

         JOHN
Do you maybe want to...

         JANE
Maybe want to what?

         JOHN
You know, go upstairs and...

         JANE
What kind of girl do you think I am?
I can't believe you think I'd just--

         JOHN
Okay, geez. It was just a question.

My problem is that I'm a very intuitive writer, where I'll create natural pauses not just in my spoken conversations, but also in my writing. I tend to put commas wherever I'd pause naturally in the delivery of a sentence if I were to read it aloud (even if a comma doesn't usually go there!), and then have to go back and edit them out. The same is true of ellipses ... I'll often use them in sentence to indicate a pause or shift in direction but ... like this sentence itself ... it probably could have been accomplished just as easily without so many ellipses.

I don't think I'll ever entirely get rid of my ellipses. I cling to my lesser-utilized stylistic devices like ellipses and dashes to create variety in my writing. And they're standard conventions in screenwriting because they can so often help cue actors on how to deliver a line with the presence of other characters or events going on around them. But I know I definitely overuse them - especially in formal writing where perhaps the traditional comma, period, semicolon usage would be more appropriate - but I'll never get rid of them entirely. As long as there's a screenplay to write or an a casual email to draft, you're going to keep seeing ... um ... those ... three tiny sequential dots peppered throughout my writing!