“[A]n english degree is about literature, it is a medium specific study of history. It is not about writing. Writing is something entirely different.”
The apartment hunt is on. I’ve found a good one, but I have to remind myself that I shouldn’t settle with only looking at two places. I’ve finally managed to get my phone switched over and I’m starting something of a routine. Golly, it’s like a normal life. Now if I can live in one spot for a while it’ll be great.
Now, I’m realizing that I’ve been writing here a lot lately. Much of that has to do with my just being really, really fucking board at work (read: I waited an hour and twenty five minutes before getting a call today) but also I do love to write. It’s something I’ve forgotten about in years past, though I’ve tried to rekindle the experience. Honestly, I used to wake up early to write stories, then bring paper to school and keep going as much as I could during class, even publish my excessively ambitious star wars fan fiction online and live off of the comments I got (those were a lot of work, you know. 5 1/5 books at 150pages a pop ain’t nothing to thumb your nose at if you know what I’m sayin’).
I went to university to write, and wound up doing just the opposite. I stopped writing entirely. I blame a bit of it on loss of routine (I blame a lot of things on loss of routine, you’ll notice). Waking up early when you have a roommate who doesn’t is awkward, and then when you inevitably fall into the student life style and it becomes a near impossibility (at least for a weak-willed person like myself that cherishes her eight hours of sleep a night). However, I am aware that I am rationalizing. The real problem was that I was in an academic environment and they wanted me to change my writing style to something very foreign, and I didn’t wanna.
I can write formally. It is within me to do so and to do it well. However, I don’t like to. I like whimsical writing, just take a look at some of the essays I’ve posted in my portfolio. I want to be engaged in what I’m reading and writing, just as I liked to be engaged in my classes. It took me years to figure out how to apply a whimsical style of writing to my essay work, and only because of something that occurred rather late in my degree. This isn’t to put down the wonderful education I have received, it was a great experience. However, the first part of your degree is spent, by necessity, having strict grammatical and formal stylistic conventions, as well as MLA formatting, reamed down your throat (comma splice, comma splice). I understand this, but it didn’t make it hurt any less when I had 20% deducted off of an essay for double spacing after my periods in my Works Cited.
Crap like that actually sours a girl on writing, makes you wonder if you like doing what you actually thought you liked doing. Maybe what I thought I liked wasn’t writing at all, but something else, something somehow made lower by virtue of the fact that it did not fit into the English student’s Bible, the Modern Language Association Style Guide (or rather, the supplemental Bible, since everyone knows an English students actual Bible is the OED).
It wasn’t until I had a very special professor, Dr. Deborah Wills, that I was able to see beyond that. I took her Critical Theory class in my third year, and I wish I had taken it earlier. In fact, I wish I had planned my whole damn degree differently, but that’s another discussion (actually, maybe that’ll be my next post, since it might be fun to try a linear progression in topics for a change). Anyway, this was a class to teach you how to criticize. Now, you might think that they would teach you that in your first year, but you would be wrong. Hell, I know I would not have done as well in this class if I had taken it in my first year. This class was more, for me at least, about finding my critical voice. There are so many ways to write, and in the classroom environment created in a normal English degree writing isn’t actually a focus. I tell people a lot that my degree taught me to read good. At no point in my degree was I taught to write. I was given a framework and left to my own devices. Of course you received tips on your writing when you get your essays back, but rarely were you given the opportunity to go back to that essay and try again. You simple had to hope you would pick it up as you went along.
Let me say something that I believe is an unequivocal truth: THAT IS NOT A LEARNING TECHNIQUE FOR WRITING. I can trial and error my writing skills on my own damn time and get my friends to read it, or go to a tutor. This is not worth the tens of thousands of dollars I spent. So if anyone is wondering let me tell you a secrete; an English degree is about literature, it is a medium specific study of history. It is not about writing. Writing is something entirely different.
I keep trying to go back to Dr. Wills’ Critical Theory class and I keep getting distracted. So pardon my digressions and I’ll try to focus on what I’m trying to say: her’s was the first class where I was specifically told to flout literary conventions in critical writing. When she told the class that MLA formatting and formal writing were not required, it was met with part cries ecstasy and release, part gasps of horror and panic. For some, the removal of that formal framework is like pulling the proverbial blanket from under their feet. For others, like me, it was like an excuse to have fun with words again. It’s not even as though I went completely overboard, but just having the freedom to write an essay and insert personal pronouns was amazing. How can we take ownership of our ideas if convention keeps us from attaching them to ourselves except through awkward formality, “…is the opinion of the author of this essay” doesn’t really have the same impact as, “…is what I think.”.
Ok, so the point of not referring to ourselves in the first person is supposed to indicate detachment and objectivity. I get it. Yet how can we be expected to get excited over something, to write with passion and conviction if we are constantly forced to forge a linguistic barrier between our thoughts and our presentation? A literary essay is NOT objective, it is an argument, it is an opinion of an interpretation that you are trying to get other people to agree with. It doesn’t matter what the author’s intent was, it doesn’t matter how many other people agree with you. The act of writing an interpretation is as challenging and as difficult as writing the work itself, at least it should be.
The act of writing should never be easy, and it should never be static. It should be as organic, lively and engaging as language itself. Otherwise, it’s just fancy words.
Posted: December 17th, 2007 under Literature, Random Rants.
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