On writing
There’s lots of talk in my academic life of “authentic learning,” something I’m personally quite the fan of. But I’m thinking of it in terms of my writing. I had this dumb idea that I would create a second blog that would be just for compiling all of my research into one place and commenting on it.
Why was this a dumb idea? Because it’s not at all how I actually process information.
I don’t think it was a dumb idea to start a second blog to save you good people from having to read things about academia and research (not that I’ve even written anything yet, that’s how dumb this idea was). It was just a dumb idea to think that it was useful to force a round peg like me (learns by talking about ideas/informal discussion) into a square hole (an empirical blog – seriously! dumb!).
It really shows some deeply embedded (and wrong) philosophy in my own brain about what writing is. It’s what I’m going to call “Research Paper 101 writing.” Like forming coherent paragraphs and boring sentences somehow means you know something/learned something. I don’t believe that even in theory, so why do I believe it in my gut? It feels like a religion I have to unlearn, to get deprogrammed from.
And so it goes. Screw empirical writing on blogs. That’s totally inauthentic. Give me colloquial…fragmented sentences…thinking out loud and in public…sticking my foot in my mouth…setting myself up for a challenge…
It’s funny–the advice I give my students w/r/t tone and the ever-tricky questions of “authenticity” is to write as if they were writing for a really smart blog. There’s still the expectation of content–backing up your sources, etc., but you don’t feel the same kind of pressure to bullshittily “smarten up” your language.
There’s no such thing as empirical writing, anyway.
I have started a Blog to follow nearly every major research project I’ve done. I almost never write in those and have managed to only keep up with a single blog – which is totally unrelated to my research (although directly connected to my interests). Yet I keep setting them up in this wierd attempt to be both accessible and to pin down my thought process.
I think what I’ve learned is that I have either no thought process or a process that is so messy it can’t seem to find it’s way onto paper. It’s also been a lesson that blogging is useful for clarifying and formulating thoughts but only if they are my interest of the moment rather than in the longer term process of keeping a project going to completion.