Remember when you were little and had those tests where you're given a sentence and there is a blank, so you have to put down the right word to make it make sense? It was another way of testing that you knew something without having you write a pargraph about it. Or maybe such things were designed to make it look like something different to do, some supposedly new and original way to test what you managed to memorize over the course of a week without making it look like too many things of the same sort at once.
When answering those you always wondered what exactly were they looking for. Was 'nucleic acid' enough, or was it 'DNA' specifically that they were looking for? Some teachers would be picky and would only accept one specific word, so even if you said it was plural and they wanted it to be singular, they wouldn't accept it. Others would let you get away with things more specific or more general than they were looking for. How easy or hard such questions were was almost always more dependent on the teacher than the subject at hand. As always, it was about your audience.
If you have ever taken a writing class, you will have been told that one of the first things you have to take into account when writing, beyond the purpose, is the audience. In short, who you have to prove something to, who you have to impress. When answering questions, stating your mind, the question always comes down to who you're answering to, who is watching you, whose approval you're trying to gain.
For some people, you are not satisfied with anything less than perfection. Each word must be perfect because you do not want them to misunderstand. If something is not quite right, it must be amended and fixed until you can be absolutely certain you are precisely right. For other people, it doesn't matter quite so much. If you say you're just fine and they interpret that as happy, so much the better for them if that's the answer they're looking for. The question is one of where the line lies. Sometimes you make a mistake and end up being right. Certain things in these blanks act as triggers that act far beyond the confines of the single interaction implied by the blank. Or the conversation.
You go through life filling in the blanks that come up. Sometimes you can explicitly control who sees what, other times you can't. There are days when you don't know what to say or what to do, when you really have no idea what to fill the blank with. And then you throw down something, anything, just in case you happen upon something acceptable, sometimes more vague than you know is right but hoping against hope that it will be acceptable, that it will be enough, that maybe, just maybe you'll get lucky and your answer will be adequate.
Sometimes things do work out. There are days when you manage to spin a tale you're not sure how to tell, or ask a question you weren't sure whether or not you wanted to ask, or find the perfect word to say even when you didn't know what it was. It doesn't happen often, but sometimes it does. On the days when it doesn't, sometimes all you can do is just hold on, just keep on filling out those blanks because every time you neglect to answer one just because you don't know, you lose one more chance at being right. One more chance at making things better. One more chance at making it all work.
After all, one chance is all it takes sometimes.
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