On writing and blogging

I tell my writing students that writing is not just one activity. I try to convince them that writing involves pre-writing activities as well as drafting and editing. Part of that pre-writing is thinking about what they want to write about, but part of it also involves reading. I know I don't convince some of them. Many of them still persist in only starting to think about the essay two days before it's due and writing it the night before. Some of them can produce passable work that way.

I don't blame them. If they're strong writers and can pull off a B in my course by writing essays the night before, then I can't fault them for not trying to get an A. They choose their own level of involvement.

What I do try to impress upon them, and what I do pay a good deal of attention to in their writing, is how they respond to things they have read. (We employ a loose definition of reading in which we include visual, auditory and textual elements) If they try to write those high school type essays where they just express their own opinions about things, they don't get a very good grade. If they express their opinion as a response to something they've read, that they've clearly thought about and critically analyzed, then they get a better mark.

But this post isn't about students. It's about the connection between reading and writing.

I start with students because in my writing classes, it takes considerable effort to get students to see that it's not just about writing - that in order to write well, they have to read as well. And in between, they've gotta think.

I was thinking about this the other day, after doing my "writing as conversation" lecture/discussion, and realized that once you get to where I am, the balance has tipped.

There's something that happens as you progress through academia that changes your sense of yourself as a writer. I know I took to heart the lesson my English teachers tried to impress upon me that what was important in academic writing was not my opinion, but a careful analysis of other people's opinions. I can distinctly remember several undergraduate papers where the professor told me to put a lid on my own opinions and just focus on the facts - or "textual evidence" as we call it in literature.

I now understand what they were trying to say - that my opinions had to be supported by the text - but at the time the concept was a bit fuzzy, which meant that I studiously avoided expressing any opinion. I invested a lot in the authority of the texts I was examining. I needed to find the right quote to support the argument that I was making, and I know that a few times, the argument emerged out of what quotes I could find, rather than working the other way round.

Even in my graduate career, I've seen this kind of comment - that I depend too heavily on the text instead of my own scholarship.

I don't think it's a bad thing to teach students at the beginning of their careers to put a lid on their opinions. It's a necessary step in the process of becoming a critical thinker - to shut up long enough to hear what other people are saying in the texts you read. Most of my students desperately need to learn how to listen to others because they've spent way too much time expressing themselves.

But when you reached advanced levels of scholarship - when you're expected to now become one of those people that students should shut up and listen to - there's very little guidance in making that transition. Or at least I've struggled with making the transition.

My advisor has told me I have to "find my own voice". But how I go about doing that, isn't as simple. It's a case of it being easy to give the advice, but taking it and implementing it is harder.

You may have noticed that in the last few months there have been a larger number of posts that directly relate to arguments I'm trying to make in the dissertation, or my responses to things I've read. I've tried to only blog things that I think would interest other people, but I've also been trying to create blog posts as a way of "finding my voice", as my advisor suggested.

The format of the blog post lends itself well to this project I think. While there are opportunities to "cite" through linking, its more informal nature means it feels more like a conversation with my readers than a dissertation. So I feel less of a need to "support" my arguments with citation. The informal nature of the blog encourages me to express my opinions on things without feeling the need to rely only on other authorities.

One of the hardest things for me is to see myself as having the authority to speak on a subject. It's a malady that many graduate students suffer from. It's what makes it difficult to write the dissertation. I mean literally write the dissertation. We use the term "write" to encompass all those parts of writing that I tell my students are part of the process. But in my case (and judging from what I've heard other say, most graduate students), the actual act of writing - committing words that represent thoughts on paper - is the hardest thing to do. It's terribly, terribly easy to put off writing because you convince yourself you have to read one more important source before you could possibly write, and then another, and another.

But the blog frees me from that self-induced constraint. Since the opinions or thoughts on a topic come out of my reading and thinking about these things, I'm confident that they still have validity, but in the informal venue of the blog post, I feel less need to rely on what others have said about things. This allows me to "try out" an argument to see how it works.

The feedback function of commenting has been an added bonus in this way. The comments of my readers have often pointed out to me places where I'm being simplistic, or even where I've missed something entirely. So not only am I getting a chance to "try out" some of my arguments, but I have people pointing out - sometimes obvious - places where my thinking is incomplete.

I'm happy that I've found a venue that allows me to shift from authority-slave to finding my own voice, but at the same time, I really think graduate education could do a better job of teaching people like me how to make that transition. I've found my own method, but a little more guidance would've gotten me to this point much faster. I have a colleague who is flying through the program, and I suspect that part of the reason is because the reluctance to express an opinion is NOT a problem in that case.

As an undergrad, I needed to shut up and listen to others. But as a doctoral student, I need to learn to speak up. My professors were really good about pointing out how to do the first, but on the second, I've been floundering with little guidance. I'll just have to figure it out myself, and if blogging is the way to do it, then blogging it is.