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“The story of Mason Cox thrums with a giddy torrent of are-you-kidding-me. It exceeds far-fetched, romps on past farcical and turns up at preposterous.” These are two sentences from a recent Washington Post article titled How does an American become an Aussie football star? Pull up a chair, by Chuck Culpepper that serves as a prime example of what The Chatterbox doesn’t do.

Kudos to all of you who continued reading on, even after a start like that. And a special kudos to those of you who managed to even understand every word in the opening quote without a dictionary on-hand. 

Another line from a recent article of Culpepper’s describing one of the games from the 2023 Women’s world cup states, “[The game] ended on penalties, which themselves would not quit their fierce tug upon the central nervous systems.”

The list of convoluted line’s found among various articles, newspapers and any form of rhetoric for that matter, whether written or spoken, could go on endlessly. It’s not just Culpepper either, it seems as if several writers have strayed from writing for the purpose of being read, and instead have taken it upon themselves to flaunt their lavish vernacular whenever (unnecessarily) possible.

Benjamin Hoff wrote an amazing description of this in his book, Tao of Pooh that compares these mucky writers to the Confusianists from over two and a half centuries ago.  

“The Confusionist, Desiccated Scholar is one who studies Knowledge for the sake of Knowledge, and who keeps what he learns to himself or his own small group, writing pompous and pretentious papers that no one else can understand rather than working for the enlightenment of others.” 

The Chatterbox writes solely for the purpose of informing students. This is why you will never see words like ‘farcical’ in a Chatterbox article, why you’ll never see any dialogue tags other than some form of ‘said’ and why you’ll never find a Chatterboxer using more words than they find necessary for any given story.

The whole point of producing literature, in any form, is to tell a story or pieces of information and make the reader understand it. Why, then, would it make sense to use 18 words to convey a point that a stronger writer could convey in 9.

The essence of how The Chatterbox writes is embodied best in a single line from Kevin Malone, a character in The Office, “Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?” 

On the surface, it’s just a whimsical remark from an entertaining character, but as you think on it for a little longer you can start to see how valid his remark is. And it is for this reason that there is at least a small element of Kevin Malone in every article The Chatterbox will produce.