Titles are important.  A title name is not always easy to figure out or understand why a writer chose those select words to label a whole entire writing piece. It may take up to several readings of one specific essay, story, or novel to realize why the title is what it is. Once one has grasped what they think the title really means and why someone would choose to name it that then the reader will ultimately become an expert on critically explaining the writing piece to others. In David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech, he gave to Kenyon College in 2005, he names his speech, “This is Water”.  In his speech, I found what he was saying not to be difficult to understand but the title can be a bit confusing. Foster Wallace only mentions water about two or three times, once in the very beginning and once at the very end. In the main parts of this speech, it seems pretty obvious to me that the point he trying to get across was how think and be open-minded in every situation possible. Put yourself in other people’s shoes and imagine the days they are having and how you aren’t having the worst day possible.  The other point he was trying to explain to these college graduates was that life is a grind and it’s full of repetition, routine, and frustrations that people face every day. So going back to the title and the meaning of that because he doesn’t really touch upon it too much, to me the title means basically that this is the real world now and your swimming in the water known as life.

The variety of different levels of text Foster Wallace uses is great. He explains short examples having to do with things as simple as fish and water to complex words to reach a certain audience, which in this case would be a high educated class of students graduating college. The ironic part of his simple analogy involving the fish and water was that this was basically the main point of his whole speech hence the title of the speech. The water is being compared to the whole world and life ahead of people and the fish is looked at as everyone inside the body of water. Midway through the speech, Foster Wallace states, “Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.” Throughout this speech, this quote is a large focal point. The three adjectives to describe “adulthood” and the “working life” are boredom, routine, and petty frustration which is later backed up by different examples proving how the water (or life) isn’t always easy and fun. The word choice here is well used and covers all parts of that “daily grind” that we, as students, will soon refer to life once we graduate school. Some examples of this grind that was mentioned were traffic or little annoyances at a crowded supermarket that people face after a long day of work. But the point of this speech was not to make one hate life or not look forward to their future, instead it was to change the way people think. When you are not having the best day and have to deal with annoying drivers or obnoxious people in the market, don’t fall into that angry default setting but instead keep an open mind and ask yourself what might have happened to that person and how they might have a worse situation than yourself. My point is not to tell you what he was trying to get across to his audience but rather to explain his title as well as his word choice which helped his point come across better and more effective. 

A big reason why this speech became published and so well-known was because his points he was getting across were so simple yet meaningful and uniquely compared to any other commencement speech most people have heard before. And it was the detailed, complex choice of words that made this speech powerful to a wide audience and not just the graduates from Kenyon College. The mixture of simple and complex words as well as sentences make this passage interesting to me. Even though the voice of David Foster Wallace was mostly passive, it was still a very strong concept he was putting out there and if one takes the time to analyze this, it could just so happen to change a person’s perception of life.
