Monday, July 13, 2009

The necessity of writing

For years as a writing teacher I've told reluctant students - usually engineers - that they need to learn to write to be successful. They don't need to do it wonderfully, but they do need to do it adequately.

This necessity has been driven home several times over the last few months. Just the other day, I read about paper written by physicists about magic (it's for an article on technology and magic in medieval literature, and in all fairness, it was about quantum physics). Now, granted, all the primary researchers were located in Spain, so English may not have been a language they could use comfortably. But even with that in mind, there were so many hyperbolic lines of the "since the dawn of time" kind, that I cringed over and over again.

In addition, several months ago I was working with a document created by engineering professionals, designed to act as a training manual. We were to convert the content of the paper version to an elearning program.

Usually, when I work with material from an SME (subject matter expert), my biggest concern is translating written text into the visual and audible forms that perform better on the web. But this time, I spent a huge amount of time rewriting the content. There were problems in the document that were so fundamental that I despaired of repairing them even.

Some sentences were so garbled that I had no idea what it was meant to convey. There were lots of sentence fragments, and some sentences that just left off mid-sentence, as if it was cut-off (though it wasn't!) Faulty parallelisms were rampant, and the document showed little evidence of editing since the topics seemed to be arranged in the order that they occurred to the writer rather than any logical arrangement.

I've always believed that comma use was highly individualistic and variable, but this document used commas in ways that were utterly baffling, as if the writer knew there were rules to using commas and they needed to be followed, but had forgotten the rules and just made them up as he/she went along.

All in all, developing the content for this elearning program was one of the most painful tasks I'd ever undertaken for this company.

In all the time I stood in front of classrooms of engineers, lecturing on the importance of good writing, my motivation was primarily to get them producing things by the end of the term that I could read without cringing. But now that I've seen the result of poor writing skills, I've got even more motivation to teach them (and other writers) how to write clearly, because after reading this training manual, I feel sorry for all the people who tried to learn from it!

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

The Future of the Professoriate - Extinction?

The Chronicle forum, Faculty of the Future: Leaner, Meaner, More Collaborative, Less Secure is a depressing read. Don't let the title fool you - the positive element "more collaborative" isn't a good thing - it's a survival tactic. Overall, most of the writers take a very bleak vision of the future. It's telling that the only positive view of the academy 20 years from now comes from an administrator, not faculty.

Monday, July 06, 2009

Sometimes it feels like a room of one's own can be a prison when you've got a deadline hanging over your head.

Friday, July 03, 2009

The worst part of writing?

I hate writing plot summaries.

It's a strange but true observation. I get nailed every time a reader comments on my writing that I don't provide enough plot summary of primary sources before diving into the analysis.

Gee, that's probably because I hate writing plot summaries.

Which is really bizarre, considering they really are so terribly simple. While they might not be as simple as I'm suggesting, they really are just a catalogue of important events in the narrative of the novel. And yet, I detest writing them. My drafts always have these little starred lines in them with a note to "insert plot summary here" scattered throughout them.

Why do I detest writing them? I don't know.

Sometimes I suspect it's because they seem so easy. And then I think if they're so easy, they're not very sophisticated. And perhaps I don't want to do them because I don't want to admit I can write so simply? Bizarre logic, but there you go. I just hate writing them.

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Starting over... again

I really don't understand why it is so terribly hard to get a handle on each new chapter when I start it. Even in revision, I'm having trouble concentrating on the new chapter that I'm starting to edit today.

Perhaps it just has something to do with the holiday and BBQ yesterday?