This is the Limerick That I Have and Which is Mine

...and what it is too.

One of the best pieces of advice I received on a university essay, one that significantly improved my subsequent academic work, was to avoid writing “it is interesting that...” As the marker said, readers can make up their own minds about whether something is interesting. A wider lesson was that readers can tell the difference between opinion and fact; there’s no need to keep pointing it out. Just the other day, I was going through a student’s dissertation striking out every occurrence of “in the author’s opinion, it is interesting that”, saving them (and readers) hundreds of words in the process.

It would have been different if they were writing an unsigned article for inclusion in an encyclopaedia or the like, rather than a dissertation with their name on it. Then they would be removing those opinions altogether, and sticking only to facts. One might say that the same applies to dictionaries, and that the OEDILF is a dictionary. But it’s a dictionary whose entries are creative contributions that appear next to or over their authors’ names—a compilation of many different authors’ bodies of (limerick) work—and that difference is crucial to its success. If I had been contributing impersonal, scrupulously objective limericks to an anonymous project, I might still have contributed some, but maybe not even a tenth of what I have. Yet my “personal” limericks are only a handful of those I’ve contributed. The key is that having my limericks identified as mine allows me to express myself through them—my self, not some anonymous, collective self. I give the collective my time and energy by workshopping others’ work, and in exchange get a modest audience for work of my own.

I see it as not just coincidental that my limericks have “By speedysnail” next to them, but crucial. It frames every limerick of mine as being written from my perspective. And it’s usually easy enough to tell when my work is stating an objective fact and when it’s stating an opinion.

Some argue that statements in OEDILF limericks should be objectively true or else explicitly marked as subjective. I see that as contrary, though, to the OEDILF’s position that limericks are the work of individual authors (and are identified as such, with ownership retained by them). I’ve approved limericks that state religious and political positions with which I disagree, because any such statement is clearly the author’s opinion—even if the author believes it to be fact. If this were Wikipedia, my approach would be quite different. But I don’t spend much of my time over there, for just these sorts of reasons.

Reworked from a workshopping comment from August 2008.