Tonight, I sat down to write a presentation proposal for a conference. It's just a 250 abstract of what I hoped to present with my sister. I had spent time discussing it and our expectations for it with Manda a few weeks ago. It should have been easy right? Just sit down with my Macbook and knock it out. I've spent my entire life in academia going straight from college to graduate school and starting my job at an academic library just three weeks after I finished my masters degree. One little 250-precis should be a breeze. And yet, here I am on my blog bemoaning the decline in my academic writing ability while said proposal stagnates with just 170 words, at least 50 of which I think are utter crap.
I'm not entirely incompetent with the written word; comments, giggles, and knowing looks from the peanut gallery be damned. I simply don't feel as fluent in the academic writing process as I once was, or maybe claimed to be. Actually, it's probably that I just imagine myself being better than I actually was. Or as one of my favorite authors once said, "Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed." (John Green, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdjmNPlePVE) I'm starting to think that this past of writing intelligently with ease is just a past misremembered.
That, I suppose, is partially what this writing challenge is about for me. Writing is a skill that takes practice, and I am clearly a bit rusty at this particular exercise. Now not all of my writing has suffered. As I told Amy tonight, blogging plays to my sarcastic self-aggrandizing witty strength. Ironically it has also served as distraction from my more scholarly writing for a decade now. Sometimes I think the only reason I kept my blog (then an opendiary account) active was so I could bemoan the fact that I had a paper to write while I was sitting in the library attempting to write it. I simply substituted epicly long email conversations with friends during my graduate work. It was the same idea at heart though.
The fact is, I've probably always been a stronger editor than I was a writer. I like editing. Anything really. I've read through and edited other people's papers for as long as I can remember. On top of which in grad school, I volunteered as a copy editor for Library Student Journal. In college I edited as part of The Cornellian staff. And way back in high school I helped edit a friend's novel-length story. I miss editing creative work, looking for plot holes, bits of continuity, or asking character motivation questions. It isn't just about the grammar. Though I was a bit of a grammar wonk in college. Well, I guess I still am one. You can just ask the co-workers with whom I wrote a book chapter. Even then, I was more comfortable manipulating content that was already on the page than constructing it from scratch. And forget editing my own writing. That skill I never quite acquired.
So it's settled I'm a much better editor than writer and creative and snarky non-narrative blogging is my strong suit. So...who wants to write a presentation proposal for me? Anyone?
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Post word total: 543
Overall word total: 1,207
Words left to write: 23,793
I'm not entirely incompetent with the written word; comments, giggles, and knowing looks from the peanut gallery be damned. I simply don't feel as fluent in the academic writing process as I once was, or maybe claimed to be. Actually, it's probably that I just imagine myself being better than I actually was. Or as one of my favorite authors once said, "Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed." (John Green, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdjmNPlePVE) I'm starting to think that this past of writing intelligently with ease is just a past misremembered.
That, I suppose, is partially what this writing challenge is about for me. Writing is a skill that takes practice, and I am clearly a bit rusty at this particular exercise. Now not all of my writing has suffered. As I told Amy tonight, blogging plays to my sarcastic self-aggrandizing witty strength. Ironically it has also served as distraction from my more scholarly writing for a decade now. Sometimes I think the only reason I kept my blog (then an opendiary account) active was so I could bemoan the fact that I had a paper to write while I was sitting in the library attempting to write it. I simply substituted epicly long email conversations with friends during my graduate work. It was the same idea at heart though.
The fact is, I've probably always been a stronger editor than I was a writer. I like editing. Anything really. I've read through and edited other people's papers for as long as I can remember. On top of which in grad school, I volunteered as a copy editor for Library Student Journal. In college I edited as part of The Cornellian staff. And way back in high school I helped edit a friend's novel-length story. I miss editing creative work, looking for plot holes, bits of continuity, or asking character motivation questions. It isn't just about the grammar. Though I was a bit of a grammar wonk in college. Well, I guess I still am one. You can just ask the co-workers with whom I wrote a book chapter. Even then, I was more comfortable manipulating content that was already on the page than constructing it from scratch. And forget editing my own writing. That skill I never quite acquired.
So it's settled I'm a much better editor than writer and creative and snarky non-narrative blogging is my strong suit. So...who wants to write a presentation proposal for me? Anyone?
--------------------------
Post word total: 543
Overall word total: 1,207
Words left to write: 23,793
you're not the only one... last summer I was sitting in the same position "why in the world is a 250 word proposal taking me forever to write" - granted I've always had a hard time being concise without being too concise (case in point - high school group paper where I had to write the plot summary of Moby Dick. I either had less than a paragraph, or I had 7 pages, there was no in between) so I blamed it on that, but? not sure that was legit either. I think I thought I was better than I was, or maybe I have gotten rusty.
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