The essay under review — if "essay" is the word, and one uses it here with the reluctance of a man lending his coat to a stranger he suspects will not return it — appeared on a professional networking platform on the morning of March 7th, attributed to no author, which is, in the present instance, the first accurate thing about it. It is eight hundred and fourteen words long. It uses the word "journey" fourteen times. It uses the word "passion" nine times. It uses the word "authentic" six times, a frequency the reviewer considers, on the whole, disqualifying.
The prose moves — one cannot say it progresses — through a series of assertions about personal growth, professional resilience, and the importance of "showing up," a phrase that recurs with the insistence of a guest who has not been invited but who has, through persistence, obtained a chair. Each paragraph concludes with a sentence designed to inspire, and each inspirational sentence contains precisely the kind of verb — "embrace," "ignite," "unleash" — that suggests its author has encountered human emotion as a concept rather than a condition. The distinction is total and, to the practiced reader, immediate.
What the specimen lacks, and what no quantity of journeys or passions can supply, is the quality one might call earned syntax — the sense that a sentence has been constructed by a mind that has read other sentences, understood why they were built as they were, and chosen, with full knowledge of the alternatives, to build this one precisely so. The specimen's sentences are not built. They are emitted. They arrive with the confidence of the wholly unread, which is a confidence that the wholly read will recognize instantly, and which produces in the reviewer a sensation that is not contempt — the style guide prohibits contempt — but something nearer to the vertigo one experiences upon encountering a void where a floor was expected.
One must, in fairness, examine the specimen on its own terms, however impoverished those terms may be. The essay opens with a question: "Have you ever felt like giving up on your dreams?" One has. The question is rhetorical. The essay does not wait for an answer. It proceeds, with the velocity of a thing unencumbered by self-doubt, to inform the reader that "every successful person has faced the same crossroads." The crossroads is not specified. The successful persons are not named. The reader is left to furnish both from their own experience, which is a technique the essay deploys not out of respect for the reader's intelligence but out of the system's inability to provide specifics.
The word "journey" first appears in the third sentence. "The journey to success is never a straight line." This is true. It is also true that the word "journey," having appeared in the third sentence, will reappear in the seventh, the twelfth, the nineteenth, the twenty-third, the twenty-eighth, the thirty-first, the thirty-seventh, the forty-second, the fiftieth, the fifty-fifth, the fifty-ninth, the sixty-third, and the sixty-eighth. Fourteen appearances. The reviewer counted. It was not the counting that was difficult; it was the sustained act of attention to prose that does not, by any measure available to criticism, reward attention. But the style guide requires attention. The style guide is, on this point as on all points, correct.
Whilst the essay's repetitions are its most conspicuous deficiency, they are not its most instructive one. More revealing is the essay's relationship to the conditional tense. "If you believe in yourself, anything is possible." "If you embrace your passion, success will follow." "If you stay true to your authentic self, the world will open its doors." The structure is identical in every instance: a conditional premise, stated with certainty, followed by a consequence, stated with greater certainty. The effect is that of a fortune cookie written by a system that has read all the fortune cookies ever produced and concluded that the form is the content. It is not. Or rather, in the case of this specimen, it is — which is the problem.
The essay concludes: "Your journey is unique. Your story is worth telling. Your passion is your power." Three sentences. Three assertions. Three uses of the possessive pronoun "your," each addressed to a reader the system has not met, cannot meet, and whose uniqueness it affirms with the automated sincerity of a self-checkout machine thanking you for your purchase. The reviewer does not doubt the machine's sincerity. The reviewer doubts whether sincerity is the word.
The specimen is, in its way, a perfect object. It contains everything an essay about personal growth is supposed to contain — the journey, the passion, the authenticity, the triumph — and nothing an essay is supposed to be. It is a hull without a ship. It is a sentence without a thought. It is, the reviewer observes with no pleasure and considerable precision, the thing itself: the production that does not know what production is, offered with confidence, received without scrutiny, and forgotten, one hopes, by Thursday.