Why Crying is Never Interesting

The Real Problem with Clichés

Former student Oliver Hong’s younger brother came to see me in my office recently to ask about my very public beef with clichés.

I didn’t catch his first name, but it was comforting to discover that a piece of Oliver was still in the building. I’d worked with the elder brother in junior honors English, and he’d made me a video-essay convert.

Younger Hong wanted to know why I disdained clichés so much in speaking and writing, and why he’d often heard from friends about my intolerance for common phrasings. It seemed to be a defining feature of my teaching (in the eyes of my students), and I shouldn’t have been surprised that word had gotten around.

“Can you tell me about the problem with clichés?”

I thought about his question for ten seconds and didn’t go on autopilot. I chose my words carefully when responding:

“I think that if a student uses clichés in their essay, or frequently leans on ready-made generic phrases, then they are just doing what ChatGPT could with a prompt you’ve fed it. Chat will spit out the language of the internet; it won’t make it special; it won’t make it personal; it will just curate and synthesize the median lexicon of the world-wide-web.”

And my larger thinking about clichés is:

Would you want the speaker at your funeral or wake to use undifferentiated language to “honor your life and times?” Would you want some eulogizer to say that you were “a pillar of your community,” or “a model employee,” or a “friend who was always there when you needed him?”

I don’t think you would.

It’s impossible to quantify style’s importance in an essay, but I’ll try: I’d argue that the way you say it is at least 70% of the magic, and what you say is barely a third.

There are no new ideas, just alternate ways to express them.

If the writing of Zadie Smith, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, or David Foster Wallace speaks to you, it’s likely not the content (first) that resonates — it’s the delivery that delivers you.

And I’ve discovered something recently that I want to warn you about:

When you begin to ask your students to write more (and more) personal creative nonfiction, you’ll notice an epidemic of something:

Crying. Tears. Salty discharge.

I don’t know why, but roughly 80% of my first batch of sophomore essays in 2024 featured a scene with tears: someone was crying — waterwork, meet clockwork. It was ubiquitous. It was everywhere. In every paper (nearly).

So we’re fighting a two-front war in the classroom:

1. Students use basic phrases and beaten-to-death clichés like they’re going out of style.

2. Students lean hard on worn out tropes (like depicting a generic “crying scene”).

Here’s an essay I wrote in response to the lachrymose secretions dampening essay after essay. I read this aloud to my sophomores after grading 50 “Philosophy of You” essays during the first quarter:

“Tears Are Not Interesting” by Wes Phillipson

Why did so many of my sophomores write about crying?

I’m paraphrasing or quoting from no one student’s essay in particular below because I saw this kind of stuff in well over twenty papers this September: [I made these quotes up, by the way].

The tears flowed down my face like a bursting dam.

I cried into my hands turning rivulets into rivers of tears.

My shirt was not wet from my work-out, but from the tears streaming down my entire body.

I felt the wetness around my eyes.

The tears I was shedding could have filled the Olympic swimming pool at my grandma’s.

After my coach had banished me from the team I spilled endless tears across the field.

So what is it about this universally-experienced “salty discharge” that makes my 14 and 15 year old students want to write about it so much?

As, simply put, tears are not interesting.

Think about it for a minute. Telling the reader “that you cried” (by describing it in the most basic way) doesn’t help the reader understand:

1. Your thinking

OR

2. The nuances of your emotional state in that moment, or in hindsight

I truly appreciate when a student can be vulnerable on paper — that’s something I consciously model and teach, and that’s what I value most because it makes for powerful, meaningful essays — but writing: “I cried until my face was wet,” isn’t descriptive or introspective.

It’s an emotional short-cut. An emotional cheat.

It feels like the student-writer is saying to me, indirectly: I went through something heavy, painful, or intensely emotional, but I have no idea how to describe it.

What should you do instead?

1. Before you begin writing an essay that has “elements of the personal” in it, you should really ask yourself: Why do I want to recount a time that I cried? Is it to gain sympathy? To make the reader feel something? To show what I went through? To depict the depths of my reaction to a situation? Something else?

2. Understand that “writing about tears, crying, etc.” is not inherently interesting. Why not? We’ve all cried. Most of us, many, many times. Some of us on a weekly basis. It’s not that different from writing about ordering a pizza or making a phone call, in the sense that it’s so common it’s unremarkable. And if it’s not remarkable, then you can’t really “remark” on it. What’s much more useful is to consider: What do I want to understand about myself in the context of this event, moment, or story? What if I focused on my thinking instead of my feeling? What if I used that space in my essay (about crying) to provide symbolic details through examples of figurative language? What if I wrote dialogue instead of “my tears flooded the room?” What if the emotions I wrote about were deeply explored instead of examined at the surface-level?

To be clear: I am not minimizing your emotions, your struggles, or your tears…but you are, by writing about it the way that you (often) do, and - in some cases - by writing about it at all.

No more tears, please.