I have an intense love-hate relationship with essay writing.
Essays are just about the worst on-again/off-again boyfriends ever, and this class is like singles therapy (if such a thing exists?) It's refreshing to walk into a class where there's no essay writign involved, because as I plow deeper and deeper into Undergradlandia, it's something I've just learned to expect:
"This essay is worth 25% of your final grade!"
"Your final paper is waited at 40%."
"For your final project you will submit a 15 page research essay on a topic of your choice. The paper will be worth 60% of your final grade and all your remaining sanity."
When I was first telling people about this course, they couldn't quite wrap their heads around the fact that an English class had no essay writing component. But why should it? When Malcolm was in talking to our class yesterday, he said something that I think a lot of professors know but don't like to admit: essays are (often) boring, required reading in the land of academia. There are others, like our fearless leader H.Z., who actually understands that, and is trying to help us out of the rut we've been stuck in when it comes to REAL writing.
What point am I trying to make?....English classes help make you a better theorist, a better essayist and a better critical thinker, but many of the most accomplished writers of our times are novelists, not essayists. Sure, they must have written some essays on their way to becoming published authors, but I think we can all agree that A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime is a far better novel than it would be an essay on autism.
I don't want to dump on essay writing. I get a lot of satisfaction from finishing an intense essay, especially when I feel it's well-written. I guess what I'm trying to say is it's nice to have a break, and to find new ways of spurring on my ideas.
I have a love/hate relationship with essays, too. I have to admit I have an uncommon fondness for reading them, & I love the planning stages of writing. I find them good for thinking through topics; they demand rigorous, precise thinking that really forces me to drill down into an idea. But I don't think they're always the best way to present concepts. I wish there was more exploration of this in academia.
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, the "required reading" aspect of academic writing means that a lot of it is just ... bad. It reminds me of this quote from John Searle (which I don't totally agree with, but which I find hilarious anyway): "With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.”
The blogs thing is one of my favourite aspects too, and not just because it feels like less writing (really, just word count-wise, it's probably more.) Since starting university, the amount of "fun" writing I've done has basically become nothing, which I do attribute to the fact that I do so much academic writing that I've forgotten how to be creative. The blogging's helped me get over that; in the past few weeks I've done more than I have in a year. YAY.
ReplyDeleteOther benefit: required reading that doesn't feel like required reading.