Academic Writing

So I like my voice. I don't mean my physical voice but my writing voice. It makes sense to me and I think it's pretty interesting.

However, I realized that my writing changes in an academic setting. I don't like it. I think I try too hard or something. When I read it, it feels kind of like constipation. Or rather, when I write, it feels like constipation. The words just don't come out and when it does, something still doesn't feel right.

I re-read an old research paper I did (I think the first one I ever wrote, which was sadly, pretty recently). It's actually pretty decent. It follows all the really boring conventions of how an essay should be (it's not that organic in flow, but it works pretty well, in my opinion - like the topic sentences and all that). But when I was trying to edit it after I wrote it (and after I more or less made it flow and edited the more glaring mistakes), I was at a loss as to where to start because I didn't like how I wrote it. I suppose I just didn't like my strategy behind it or something and I wanted to rewrite the whole thing. Reading it now, I don't think I need to.

Perhaps the reason I had such difficulty with that paper was that it didn't actually say exactly what I was thinking. The point I was trying to make and the way the paper kind of came out were two different things.

I suppose my point is that I want to somehow mesh the two types of writing together.

The type of writing I do for this blog is pretty free. I just kind of write whatever the heck comes to mind and I just go at it. I try to present my ideas in a logical way - at least what works in my logic, but there's some editing (though I go back and read some entries and cringe at my typos...) but for the most part, it's relatively coherent at the first or second draft and I usually keep it - especially because it conveys (for the most part) what I'm trying to get at.

I wonder if it has something to do with the actual freedom in the parameters of a blog. I can write whatever I want, however I want and there's really no consequence.

Academic papers, if they go to a larger community of scholars (e.g. the paper is publish in some kind of hoity-toity journal), have consequences. If you mess up, there's ridicule. In classes, if you don't do well, you get a bad grade. And so on and so forth.

I suppose what it comes down to is that I don't seem to do too well under pressure. Yet interestingly enough, I still get decent grades (I don't mean that in a braggy way as much as this fact surprises me most of the time - though I do want to clarify that it's not the "I-half-assed-this-paper-and-got-an-A" but the "I-wasn't-satisfied-with-how-this-paper-turned-out-but-I-got-a-good-grade" kind of thing). I mean don't get me wrong - I do try with these papers. It's just that the result is not the picture I have in my head.

I think that my sense of my own writing is kind of off-kilter. I don't know if I'm a good writer or not. I suppose if I'm good to me, that's all that matters (at least by this era's philosophy) but is it really? I'm trying to create a career out of not necessarily my writing, but out of the thoughts that my writing enables me to do, so I suppose I should care more and I still don't know where I stand exactly. I suppose I can keep plugging along and hope that I'm not doing so bad.

And I suppose with that I can go into this huge long discussion about pride and humility but we'll save that for another day.