Excuses, excuses: why I dread writing

It is telling that I am writing this blog at 2:30am... happy exam week, everyone (sarcastic inflection). We have talked a lot about blogs and the ways we present ourselves to other people, and I thought I would quickly give a personal angle on the subject.

Writing for me is a very labored, anxiety-producing process. Even in a blog post, I cannot type a sentence without backspacing, pausing, choosing a different word/phrase, and then repeating the process three words later. I have been known to take 3+ hours to write a simple email to a professor. Writing papers is a similarly lengthy process.

Even before I took this class, I was overly concerned with how I present myself in words. I could probably date this back to childhood or various educational experiences, but I am more concerned with where it puts me now, based on what I have learned in this class.

I think that my writing anxiety has a lot to do with managing identities and a desire to meet others' expectations. In today's world of constant motion, we are constantly trying to "make a good impression" on relatively new acquaintances, and, often, we have few friends with whom we can be secure in ourselves. So for me, writing is maintaining this terribly burdensome front that constantly threatens to disintegrate into stream-of-consciousness note-writing, chock-full of idiosyncratic abbreviations.

I find the relationship between thought and language very interesting. We spoke in class about whether we ever speak completely extemporaneously. To what extent do we arrange words in our minds before we utter them? Writing obviously takes more preparation, especially written work we will submit for grading. However, I notice that when I am in a AIM/Gmail Chat "conversation," the words spill out as in conversation. Why do my fingers stall so much as I type this blog post? Why do my thoughts scatter so? Certainly, one part of the problem is that right now I am consciously trying to follow grammatical rules that I might flout in conversation. I am concerned lest my words fail to be comprehensible to a wide audience, but in AIM conversations I know my friends will always understand my meaning or ask for clarification.

I always wonder whether good writers can think writing. Can anybody write grammatically correct prose at the same pace at which they speak? Or is writing pretty much a tough job for anybody? Winston Churchill said that writing a book was, for him, something rather like a long bout of illness. Yet you hear about literary figures who were able to dictate works from their deathbed. I mean, think of Mozart, who could think up sonatas during a coach ride and then transcribe them. If these geniuses could order their thoughts so precisely, why can't the rest of us? Or, if we can't all be geniuses, why is it unacceptable to write stream-of-consciousness? Why is there pressure to write a certain way?

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Speaking of different ways of writing (can this count as a second blog post? the first took me only about 50 minutes after all), I was thinking about the different requirements for anthropological writing as opposed to journalism as opposed to philosophical writing, mathematical writing, etc. It seems that in each case, the writing style stems from the values that are important to the discipline. For instance, first person writing became acceptable in anthropology when a wave of theoretical papers brought subjectivity and positionality to the forefront of the discipline. Philosophy and mathematics place great value on rigor and logic. They have developed precise vocabularies, and many writings in these disciplines follow convention structures (i.e., proof of a theorem: states the problem, defines the variables and concepts needed, applies concepts step by step, occasionally stopping to prove lemmas, sometimes has to prove the theorem for different cases, e.g. n<0, n>0 or real/imaginary).

As undergraduate students, we do not take classes that describe the nuances of writing an anthropological paper or a humanities thesis or any other specialized writing style. Our writing styles develop according to often contradictory remarks from professors of various disciplines who expect us to adjust our writing for every class we take.

I think it is a shame that we students receive so little formal writing guidance. In the American system, we churn out papers at a hectic pace, and there is rarely any chance to revise them. There is also an illusion of anonymity when the class size is above 20. Until my abroad year, then, I never really identified myself with my essays. In the British system, they seem to have no coursework that focuses specifically on writing, but since all the classes they take at the university level are in their major discipline (no philosophy, social science or fine arts requirement), they are always practicing the same writing styles. While advocates of the American system would claim that our breadth of education makes us more well-rounded scholars, I would argue that taking a whole slew of subjects in which the main goal is to pass an examination rather than expand one's knowledge, and for which the scholar receives very little personal feedback, is counterproductive. The American system (and this ritual period of torture known as Finals Week) is not conducive to my higher learning. I have become a nervous wreck, and I don't even have time to focus my energies on things I would like to learn.

To return from my rant, all disciplines' writing styles serve a purpose. As a student of a particular discipline, it is important that one learn to write according to the accepted conventions to ensure that one's work is intelligible and meets quality standards. While the American system of undergraduate education does NOT promote the development of specific writing skills, it is something that one can learn with repeated exposure to others' writing. I would be curious to find out whether writings in other languages follow the same disciplinary lines as in English. I know, for example, that German books on music are more more dense and theory-heavy than English books. To what extent is this driven by differences in the structure and vocabulary of the language, and to what extent does it reflect cultural preferences and culture-specific ideas in the discipline?