Natalie Goldberg's "Be Specific": A Rhetorical Analysis

Introduction

In a brief yet powerful example of the very type of inspired writing she champions, author Natalie Goldberg's chapter titled "Be Specific" — included in the compilation Models for Writing: Short Essays for Composition — manages to convey multiple decades' worth of lessons learned by a seasoned wordsmith in 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.

Goldberg's Central Argument for Specificity

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. 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 depend on the author's ability to successfully recreate reality in the mind of the reader.

Conclusion

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). This closing appeal encapsulates the essay's central lesson: that attentiveness to the precise language of the world is not merely a stylistic preference but a fundamental obligation of the writer's vocation.