Son, boyfriend,
college student, teenager, future engineer are most the ways I describe myself
when I think of who I am. And out of the
other ways that I would define myself that are not listed there, writer would not
be in there, or it would be way at the bottom being crushed by everything
else. Writing is not a strong suit of
mine, and it never really was. I was
always one of those students who hated English classes because I felt that they
were teaching me things that I already knew.
During high school, my teachers would always, in my opinion, over
analyze something in the text we were reading.
I found this annoying because while the book said that the curtain was
blue; my English teacher would give a 15 minute speech about how the blue
symbolizes depression and that the author was going through a tough time
because it was rumored that their dog had died 2 days prior to them writing
this chapter.
The over
analytical teacher fueled my dislike of English even more. This led me to give little to no effort in
class. I knew that I could write a 5
page paper about how to increase the horsepower of a riding lawnmower engine so
that you can make a drag racer in your back yard, so I saw no need for me to
have to learn what the proper use of a semicolon, dash or any other less common
form of punctuation. I just accepted
that my creative writing skills would always be below the expectation for my
grade level.
As I said, I could
talk all day about technical engineering jargon but fell short of academic
writing. I figured since I wanted to
major in engineering I would never need to use academic writing. I took engineering and shop classes all
throughout high school so my technical writing skills grew. I fueled that part because I felt that I
would never be good enough for academic writing nor would I ever use it.
My writing is very
straight forward and gets to the point.
I often start out with introducing the topic in a formal way and then
give my opinion about it. I would
probably then give you a metaphor or example as to my line of thinking. And if
all goes like it does every time then I will have fallen short of the minimum
length for that particular assignment. I
will reread my explanation and add as much bullshit as I can into it so that it
meets the minimum requirements. My creative papers tend to be more on the short
side but I also try to condense sentences where possible. I was taught that if I can say something in
one page them why write three pages explaining more than I have to. In my experience people tend to get lost or
become uninterested in what you are talking about the longer you go on for.
As well as being
straight to the point, I understand that my writing probably does not follow a
ordinary thought path. I think more in
pictures than I do in words. I have a
hard time explaining how something works so I normally use a diagram or an
object as a representation of whatever it is I am explaining. I know I need lots of revisions on my
papers. I tend to write whatever comes
to my mind while I am typing and I know that is not always a good thing.
I try to separate
my technical writing from my creative writing.
I do this by ignoring the inner critic that we talked about but this is
difficult because my inner critic does not tell me that I am not good enough to
write this but rather it tells me that English is stupid and you should just
write this paper to get it over with. I
find myself taking more time to carefully choose my words and revise my work when
it does not have to do with English. For
example, I know that I am going to get to the third page of this Word document
and think “it’s finally over”. I’m not
quite sure how to break this. It occurs to me that as I get closer to the end
of a paper, I revisit my thoughts and reword them in fancy ways to make it
sound like I know what I am talking about.
While I was a kid, I would always listen to other people’s
conversations, mostly because I am not a very social person. This helps me out a lot now because if I have
no idea what someone is talking about or if I zone out during the conversation
then I can still play it off like I know what they said.
I know that I am a
good technical writer with the ability to give concise instructions on how to
do something. There are lots of ways to
get your idea across to someone but there are fewer ways to do in an
entertaining and informative way. I try
to give you the highlights of something so that I do not waste my time or your
time explaining something that you do not care about or do not understand. Another reason why I am so brief, is that I
want to be able to prove to myself that I know something. I believe it was Albert Einstein that said
“if you cannot explain something simple enough, then you do not understand it
well enough”. If I can explain the
concepts of physics to you in two sentences that you and I both understand,
then why take unnecessary ways of getting there. Three rights make a left so why not make a
left turn to being with.
Overall, I
understand that I am a technical writer at heart with a deep seeded animosity
towards academic writing and all the teachers who criticized my writing to no
end. I know that I could probably
improve my writing overall but as long as I keep getting the point across then
I really feel no need to change. I write
papers to get a grade and nothing more.
If you gave me the exact same assignment in a social science class verse
an English class, I will have put more effort into the social science paper
than the English paper. With that being
said, I do not hate English nor do I
hate reading or writing papers, but there is always that little voice telling
me to just get it done and over with so you can turn it in and get a grade. I am just trying to be honest to my teacher
and, more importantly, to myself.
Since you value short writing, Josh, I'll be brief. :-)
ReplyDelete1) In teaching, technical writing falls under the umbrella of academic writing. I'm an academic. I study technical writing. ISU is known for their technical writing prowess. In our field we call it TechComm, and grad students come here from all over to study and teach it. Talk to me more about this...and if we're talking, we have to define things. For starters, what is academic writing? Who is its audience? Why does it exist? What purpose does it accomplish? Does it exist in any field?
2) It is great that you use diagrams and pictures when you write. It fits your field. I would encourage you to incorporate visuals into your blog. Go for it! It's far more fun to read writing with visuals anyway.
3) Twice you said that you automatically put more effort and care into papers that are not for English. I've never heard that before. It's intriguing! Can you tell me more about that?
1) I always had the idea that academic writing was technical in nature simply because they have to describe in extreme detail what they did. I think of technical writing, as it applies to me, as more to the point type of writing. Where you use as little words as possible to get your point across. I know the audience is more of higher academics and peers. I guess my line of thinking is somewhat strange in that I think academic writing is long whereas the writing that I have to do for my engineering classes is shorter. Although its shorter, I think it could still overlaps with academic writing a little.
ReplyDelete2) I would love to do this more but I never think of it when writing. My brain turns on the english teacher and forgets that I can use other methods to display ideas.
3) I never was a fan of english, even back in 2nd grade. Growing up in elementary school I always did horrible in english. It took me so long just to know what parts of speech were what. Up until freshman year of high school, I didn't know the difference between a preposition and and article, nor could I figure out where they were in a sentence. I always knew how to speak proper english so that was good enough for me. I guess I became bitter at a young age towards English as a subject because I always did horrible at it. Once we got away from the parts of speech and and went towards more just write about this topic it got better. But that animosity is still there. Junior year of high school, in english, we were practicing writing for the ACT. I wrote whatever came to my head and when I went back to reread it, it didn't find that much wrong in my opinion. I took a practice ACT and my writing score was way below the average. I thought my writing was good. I had good points and used counter arguments but it never seemed good enough for anyone grading my writing. I'm not sure where something went wrong but all i know is that is how I came to despise English classes. (Hopefully no offense was taken in anything I said towards English teachers or classes)
First, no offense is ever taken here. I started off class saying that I wanted to be genuine and talk about issues in writing, and I'd rather you debate me than parrot me, so, no, this is good stuff!
DeleteI've been debating your question a lot about the difference between academic writing and technical writing. I wasn't sure exactly where the line was, or how to explain it, but I think it is super important--because you want to know about it. So I sat down with a professor here that is good at explaining such things. His name is Greg Wilson. If you ever get a chance to take a class from him, you won't be disappointed. Anyway, what he said was so good I couldn't summarize it without losing pieces of it, so here it is. I'm curious what you think. (And feel free to disagree with him here too!)
"I would say that when we are doing technical writing we are often describing things that we understand really well and we are trying to explain those things clearly. We are documenting. There things that are hard and easy about that problem.
I think that when we do "academic writing" we are often writing to discover explanations for ourselves and the reader about things that we don't completely understand. Things we find problematic. We are doing research instead of documenting.
WIth technical writing, we are thinking a lot about the expertise level of the audience and trying to match our explanation to their needs: why, where, when, how they are going to use the information. Cook books have a different different context of use than instructions on how to quickly clear a jam in a 50 caliber machine gun.
We often think about technical writing taking place in a workplace setting.
Both types of writing involve different types of argumentation. Some might mistake technical writing as being a-rhetorical, but it is hard for a chemist to convince her colleagues that she has discovered a new element for the periodic table. She has to marshal evidence and have the right ethos.
Both types of writing are valuable skills of citizenship. Academic writing prepares us to be good university students and ultimately citizens of a democracy. Technical communication helps us understand how to be a professional citizen, facing the professional challenges of communicating effectively within organizations and helping us know how to communicate about the moral quandaries technology stirs up (cloning, frakking, drones, GMOs, pink slime, etc.)."