Posts tagged with writing.

Academic writing: Hemingway on Red Bull

Ian Wylie, April 6, 2009 at 10:43 AM

I had a revelation earlier this week. In the wee hours, sitting again in the library and avoiding sleep, I realized my academic success was based on coffee and chance. The former increasingly caused stomach cramps while the latter was outside my control. Together, they contributed to a blossoming anxiety.

 

There's a period a week or two after spring break where exams and papers are assigned unremittingly. With a swamp of academic responsibility you possibly can't maintain, it is a matter of coffee and chance.

 

You pore over enormous quantities of data, stimulated, reviewing every note and problem. The hope is you will have a sudden insight into what you are learning. Or, by chance, you will find the perfect evidence to tie your paper together.

 

Ernest Hemingway had the same perspective with his work. He drank a lot of coffee, too. For him, writing was a lot about chance and fishing was his metaphor. It's a good metaphor and applies in many circumstances. We tend to do a lot of waiting.

 

Hemingway liked to fish for trout and marlin. Marlins were a struggle of great proportion. Trout fishing was a tranquil pursuit. Contemplative, calculated, with much patience between precise drops of the line and catching the product: fish.

 

However, the peaceful image of a beer-bellied and bearded Hemingway with a rod, gaiters and a bucket hat doesn't come to mind when I write my papers. I don't think of him fishing for marlin, either. My Hemingway is still looking for trout, but he's impatient. He's diving shirtless into the river, planting his feet in the silt and provoking the fishes. He'd be out around at 4 a.m., with a can of lukewarm Red Bull and Oh Henry bars for snacks. Disappointed with a lack of fish, he'd go on Wikipedia. Forty minutes later and hyperlinked miles away, he'd read about pygmy shrews and wonder what he wanted to begin with.

 

Academic work isn't a struggle of heroic proportions.  It's a lot of waiting; the hours invested with little sense that you understand what you're doing or where you're going. Reconciling yourself to the waiting is hard. A willingness to spend a long time on an assignment and to do it without anxiety does not come naturally.  It takes practice to work in quiet contemplation and with precision.  Patience and persistence, when confronted with so many competing commands, is a skill. One I am still learning.

 

(Editor - for tips on essay writing papers and taking exams, see the "academic" section of GlobeCampus's University 101 section on "what to do once you get there")

 

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Trying to find the words

Ian Wylie, October 22, 2008 at 12:35 PM

 

At 8 o'clock last night Julien, a floor-mate of mine, released a staccato of knocks on my door. Julien is typically a very composed individual. He has great academic ability, which he expresses through wire-rim glasses, socks with sandals and a thicket of curly hair. However when I opened the door, I found an agitated Julien bouncing where he stood and emitting a stream of clipped sentences.

 

Julien explained that he'd been writing a paper when he reached a verbal impasse. He'd caught himself on a turn of phrase and no arrangement of the words he had would communicate what he wanted to. 

 

The human language capacity is remarkable but it struggles with the university paper. A university paper has to be written clearly and persuasively. Yet we rarely use language clearly or persuasively. Instead, in our e-mails and conversations, we use language like a paste; dispensing it in dollops and blots, creating tangents and fragments of ideas.

 

I've had little practice writing in the direct and efficient style demanded by TA's and professors. I'm dreading submitting my first paper this Thursday. And if Julien, a third year, is still struggling to get out the word, I likely have a long way to go before I'm a paper master.

 

That said, after building diagrams with arrows and stick men, Julien and I managed to break his verbal impasse. Soon ideas and arguments flowed forth on a river of perfect sentences and order in the world was restored once more. Now if only I could put dumb lines like that in my history paper I'd be fine.

 

A few writing resources online:

 

http://www.utoronto.ca/writing/ - The U of T Writing Center's website offers a moderate collection of, yes, well-written articles on a number of topics, including one on how to read. The website also has a few links to other online resources, including the one below.  

 

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/ - Purdue University in Indiana's online resource, it's incredibly comprehensive and well-organized.

 

http://www.writingcentre.ubc.ca/online_resources.html - UBC's very comprehensive list of links to online resources, including some related to creative writing.  

 

 

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