Your poetic license has been revoked!

Source: Wikimedia Commons public domain
photo (with text added by the author).

For a reason I cannot fathom, some high school students seem to have the hardest time distinguishing between the terms fiction and nonfiction. Not so much in practice. They can often identify whether a book is “true” or not. But the labels “fiction” and “nonfiction” seem to baffle some of them. For example, they will often describe any book as a novel (when a novel, of course, is fictional by definition).

As a new college writer, remember this: You are working solidly in the realm of nonfiction. Unless you are taking a creative writing class (writing fiction, poetry and/or plays), your “poetic license” has been revoked. The word “license” means that someone has been given permission to do something, whether drive a car, cut hair or practice medicine. My dog-eared copy of Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines “poetic license” (under “license”) as: “deviation from fact, form, or rule by an artist or writer for the sake of effect gained.” In this manner, although the playwrights of Inherit the Wind obviously based their play on the real-life Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1920s America, they very specifically pointed out that their play “... does not pretend to be journalism. It is theatre.” Sometimes the lines blur. Frank McCourt’s groundbreaking memoir Angela’s Ashes, although ostensibly nonfiction, abandons quotation marks in dialogue in order to achieve McCourt’s desired effect.

Now facts and truth are two different matters. A great work of fiction (or a classic Greek myth, for that matter) can contain more “human truth” than a fact-based newspaper article or magazine essay. Nonetheless, your college essays need to be grounded in fact. As the late U.S. senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once famously remarked, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Rest assured, in college essay writing, you are seeking the truth. But in doing so, you do not have license to play fast and loose with the facts.

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.