How turning to geometrical concepts can strengthen nonfiction writing
A poster in the back of my high school math classroom announced Math Is Everywhere. The words were displayed across a flowering shaft of lavender, the feather of a bird’s wing, and the interior of a seashell. Mapped into the center was the Pythagorean theorem: the square of a right triangle’s hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of its other two sides. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras swam in math, leading devotees to believe in the “harmony of the spheres,” a relation of the vibrations and distance of celestial bodies from earth to string length-ratios. This idea, that numerical ratios are present in both math and music, was taken by Johannes Kepler and further extended into geometry. I often think about that poster because it reminds me of the kind of harmony creative nonfiction writers strive to achieve.
We use , , and (among other terms) to describe work that departs from traditional, continuous expository form. Conceptions of. Yet they all share similar craft elements that often cohere into a form, much like the parts of a geometrical figure.
