Goldberg\'s \"Be Specific\" in a Brief Yet

¶ … Goldberg's "Be Specific"

In a brief yet powerful example of the very type of inspired writing she champions throughout the passage, author Natalie Goldberg's chapter titled "Be Specific," which was included in the compilation Models for Writing: Short Essays for Composition, manages to convey multiple decades worth of lessons learned by a seasoned wordsmith into just a few hundred words. Goldberg, who established herself as the nation's foremost writer of books about writing in 1986 with her debut work Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, begins her stirring defense of direct, forceful writing by immediately commanding her readers to take the chapter's title to heart. By following this exhortation with an unmistakable example of writing with specificity, telling readers "don't say 'fruit.' Tell what kind of fruit -- 'It is a pomegranate," (299) Goldberg emphasizes the advantages of her preferred writing style by demonstrating its effectiveness.

Her fundamental message throughout "Be Specific" is that a writer must hold themselves to a higher standard of description if they ever hope to convey the dynamic nature of the living world. For a writer like Goldberg, knowing the exact names of trees, plants and wildlife in a given area has become an obsession, and as she describes her fascination with nomenclature, "I bought a book on them and walked down the tree-lined streets of Boulder, examining leaf, bark and seed, trying to match them up with their descriptions and names in the book" (300). This attention to the minutiae of everyday life is especially important for a writer, says Goldberg, because storytelling, reporting and other variants of the craft are dependent on the author's ability to successfully recreate reality in the mind of the reader.

To reinforce her overall rhetorical objective of teaching young writers to appreciate the dozens of details which define a single moment of existence, Goldberg references the poetry of William Carlos Williams, saying of his poetry that "you will see how specific he is about plants, trees, flowers -- chicory, daisy, locust, poplar, quince, primrose, black-eyed Susan, lilacs -- each has its own integrity" (300). This is an especially deft touch applied by an experienced author, because Goldberg knows that critical readers will demand supporting evidence to back up her own claims, and by citing the work of an acclaimed writer like Williams, she is able to illustrate the relevance of her recommendations. The point of using specific names to reference items mentioned in a written work is to trigger a moment of recognition for the reader, as they repeat the exact word and instantly imagine the scene as the author themselves envisions it to appear. In Goldberg's estimation, superior writing is capable of "penetrating more deeply into the present and being there" (300), and an author hones their ability to effect this phenomenon simply by maintaining a continual awareness of their own surroundings. Goldberg concludes her advocacy of this highly specific style of writing by imploring the budding writers reading her words to "learn the names of everything: birds, cheese, tractors, cars, buildings," because as she states so eloquently, "a writer is all at once everything -- an architect, French cook, farmer -- and at the same time, a writer is none of these things" (301).