There's More Than One of Everything

"The horror...The horror..." --Colonel Kurtz

Oh, how well you know your audience, Miguel. This is irrelevant, (EDIT: actually having read it, it actually gets pretty relevant, so hold on, be strong) but when I was in the second semester of my Mortuary Law class back in mortuary school (I'm a licensed Funeral Director in the state of CA, in case you haven't taken one of the several classes with me wherein I revealed that information), we had to look at 50 cases regarding lawsuits against funeral homes and funeral directors and for each one write a summary and our own personal thoughts. Now, we were given this assignment early in the semester, with the idea that we'd do them piecemeal throughout the semester.

This was the last semester of the program, so I'd already gotten a reputation as somebody who always did essays at the last minute, so as soon as this was assigned by the teacher (who gave explicit warnings about not waiting until the last minute), my friend turned to me and said, "You're waiting until the last minute." Not even a question, just a statement of fact. I actually--you know what, this is getting a little bit off topic. Long story short: I did them all in one night with the help of caffeine pills (the same pills that helped Jessie Spano reach new and terrifying heights on a classic Saved By The Bell episode), and after I had finished, I went back and added relevant Simpsons quotes to each of the fifty cases because it's my favorite show, and it was harder than I thought it would be.
















ANYWAY, Miguel, I think you're right that there isn't really a great opportunity to infect, no that's not the right word...inflict? No, that's even worse...imbue! There it is! Take two:

ANYWAY, Miguel, I think you're right that there isn't really a great opportunity to imbue a piece of academic writing with the kind of ethos that might reveal itself in non-academic writing. Though, I suppose that, because everything you see, think, feel, experience is filtered through a very specific lens, and that anything a person expresses, even if it is, like, 10 pages on Derrida or a just a 1 page close reading of Huck Finn will in some way reflect your view of the world.

And maybe I'm different here, but when I've written assignments for class, I never picture the teacher reading it, at least not consciously. I don't ever think "Is he/she going to like this?" I only ever think, "Is this the best I can do? Is this the best, most thorough support of my thesis that I can muster?" But with academic writing, I kind of divorce myself a bit from the material I'm writing/writing about. I don't put less effort into it, but I put less of myself into it, if that makes sense. Which, for some reason, makes it easier to write academic essays than it is to write fiction. I don't know. There's something more there I was about to say, but I stopped to answer a text after that last sentence and now it's all gone. Ah, well, C'est la vie, life is cruel, treat you unfairly.


Switching Gears--


Like Grace, I also found the Harris piece illuminating. I've always been closer to the "One-Draft" side of the continuum, even though this was not what they taught in school. (I remember my very traumatic first experience with multi-draft writing. It was a 5th grade social studies essay about the Boston Massacre, and this was before computers, so I had to hand write two pages as neatly as I could. My dad asked to read it, then he took a red pen and started marking all over my beautifully written words! The horror! When he was done, he looked back at my stunned face and said something like, "this is what writing is. There's no such thing as an only draft, just a first draft. Go correct this and we'll do it again.")

I used to think that I was just dysfunctional, that I was writing wrong, until I read Stephen King's On Writing when I was like 19. His prewriting process was essentially making sure he had a pen and sufficient paper. No plans or outlines, just sit down, write and figure it out. I recognized myself in that and I wished that I had known that there was more than one proper, or normal, type of writing earlier. You don't have to necessarily know what you want to say before you say it, but rather you can figure out what you want to say by writing.

I think I might be mixing my points there. Anyway, that's all I have for right now.