Thursday, September 5, 2013

Burritology

Build-your-own burrito places like Qdoba and Moes are generally regarded as being bad at giving you back burritos well mixed. The burrito below shows the layers within the burrito - there is rice on the bottom, pico de gallo covering the rice, a blanket of guacamole on the pico and beneath a tasty mix of steak and beans.

(http://dqk458w0nf3mo.cloudfront.net/assets/hero/whole-wheat-tortilla-d8a665d5026a83d690c10760d18cf944.jpg)

Generally, most burritos are too big around to take a bite that encompasses all the burrito. So you must choose where to bite of the edge - this is the science that is burritology.  You may eat your rice and vegetables by biting off the bottom, and then take a big bite of meat and beans from the top. Or you can approach the epic task of eating from a slightly different angle (quite literally), and get some meat, pico, and guac in one bite, but then get rice, pico and guac in another. Generally, big burritos have more layers that wrap around and mix and make this an even more complicated task.

Burritology can basically be summarized in that there is more than one way to eat the same burrito, and each way gives a different gustatory experience. This can be said of writing too. There are many ways of writing literature, but each may lead to a different literary experience for the reader. On the one hand, a writer can discuss the "outrageously ginormous burrito" they ate the other day. Or they can say the same thing by writing about  the "very large burrito" they ate. Yes, both refer to a burrito that is big in a big way, but the former refers to a burrito that may be more crudely big, as outrageous has more of a crude connotation than very does. And the latter does not make the burrito sound quite as awesome - ginormous is more of an awe-inspiring word than large is. This is how an author's diction, or word choice, can be used by a writer to make the reader feel one thing versus the other without changing what they are conveying.

Thus, the same principles apply to eating a burrito as they do to writing literature. You can do the same thing, but by approaching things at a slightly different angle you can change the experience very, very much.

2 comments:

  1. Very astute analogy. Could you have taken it further than simple diction options? Lots of places to go with this comparison.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Perhaps you should analogize the textures and flavors of food to the description and context of writing literature? What does guac mean and how does it differ from sour cream?

    ReplyDelete