MOST BEAUTIFUL IN ITS ERASURE: WASHINGTON’S SPEECH AND COMMONER’S DIARY

Timmy Zhang, 2016 AP Lang Synthesis

Generally speaking, preserving records or our past is indeed important, but

gathering everyday writing and preserving them is also of great concerns to

many, since there are both pros and cons affecting the value of everyday writing.

Indeed, preserving everyday writing is essential, but studying those writings,

though important as well, require more discretion.

Everyday writings do provide the academia field a certain degree of historical

significance. History not only needs to be comprised of national leaders winning

major battles or rare prodigies like Einstein achieving high scientific

accomplishments, but it also needs to be comprised of ordinary, average

individual’s experiences; the rational behind this is that most of the people in a

society are commoners, and since history reflects societies, it should reflect

commoners’ interests. In a commoner’s letter, M.F. Stafford, the sender of a letter

describes the family members’ well-being to the cousin Martha (Source B),

which is fully reflective of a general feeling of what 19th century life looks like

for the ordinary. It is true that an individual among millions might not be

reflective of an entire society; however, the modern world has a high capacity to

gather a high majority of all personal writings. This is proven by the U.S.

program “Documenting the American South” (DAS) that captured many

personal narrative works from enslaved people from 1860s to 1920s and many

other genres (Source A). Other public programs can help preserve a wide scope

of personal writings as well, as seen by how the Library of Congress employed

more than 300 terabytes of storage room to preserve personal Twitter posts

(Source D). Based on such premises in which our modern world has the capacity

to store personal works that otherwise might be seen as redundant in size,

historians can, similar to analyzing massive data in the STEM fields, process

these massive amount of pieces to get a comprehensive picture of what the society looked like in the past. As long as they do not limit their perspective to few

of those every day writings, preserving and studying them do possess high

historical value.

Beside from historical significance, preserving and studying everyday writings

also encourage us as individuals, not as collectives, who are able to appreciate

our rich national heritage. When listening to the national anthem, we do feel

pride, but that pride is often restricted to collective pride rather than individual

pride as yourself; nonetheless, viewing everyday writing preserved from the

past would greatly enhance the appreciation you have for yourself. For

example, a postcard about Brooklyn Bridge might be insignificant at first when

compared to Lincoln’s own postcard, but the image of the bridge and its

background would resonate with those who lived there now. Indeed, each

personal letter represent a different feeling that one of us could find really

intimate and closely relevant to our lives, as if ourselves are preserved by those

everyday writing, thus creating a sense of importance for ourselves. Therefore,

preserving a wide array of these messages can be highly valuable to trigger

individual pride.

Despite how a person cannot reflect all of the millions of everyday writing in

their lifetime, preserving a large amount of them still possesses a net benefit. It

is true that a person cannot read through all the books in a library, just like

they cannot learn everything in their lifetime, according to the Roman

philosopher Seneca (Source F). Nonetheless, the significance of preserving

writings should not be explained with each individual’s capacity to learn: it

should consider every one of us instead of one person. We might not all

exclaim in awe and feel pride or any other deep emotions when seeing a single

postcard, but it is most certain that we can definitely find what we appreciate,

from an 18th century diary about British industrialization to a diary written by

an Eastern German during the Cold War. These collection serves for not one

person, but all people, and variety often accompanied with large amounts of

written pieces should be very valuable.

When comparing a commoner’s diary with George Washington’s speech,

individuals might easily neglect most of the everyday writings and their

importance. However, we must remember that it is everyday writing that

constitutes our society, so preserving and studying them are of vital

importance.