Voices
DOMENICK
SCUDERA
HUFFINGTON
10.07.12
All Celebrities Say
Stupid Things, and Other
Overgeneralizations
WHEN GRADING college papers,
I often find myself writing “Don’t
overgeneralize” in the margins of
my students’ essays (in red ink,
of course). This is in reaction to
such statements as this: “Since the
dawn of time, all playwrights have
used irony effectively, but none
have used it as well as Sophocles,
the greatest of all ancient Greek
writers, in his masterpiece of dramatic literature, Oedipus Rex.”
Overgeneralizing simplifies ideas
and leads to misinformed and misguided statements.
Recent news stories are filled
with overgeneralizations, so the
problem seems to have gone beyond college campuses. For instance, Paris Hilton was caught on
tape saying that gay men are “the
horniest people in the world” and
Grindr users “probably have AIDS.”
Paris has since backed off these
ILLUSTRATION BY FRANCESCO BONGIORNI
comments and apologized, so perhaps we should give her a pass on
this one. We can think of her initial comments as a first draft. She
has since revised before handing
in her final paper.
But Paris was not the only one
simplifying and overgeneralizing
recently. Chicago’s Cardinal George
Domenick
Scudera is
a professor
of theater
at Ursinus
College