I hate academic writing. I loathe it. I'm in love with the colloquial. I like swearing for effect. That's a good way to get university teachers to hate you. Don't get me wrong - I love academic theory, and I'm a huge nerd. I just hate the writing. Why, oh why, must good theory be tainted by practices like using twenty billion words where one would suffice?
Of course, I also hate academic writing because I'm not very good at it. When I'm forced to do it enough, I find myself developing new and interesting writing problems to overcome. For example, a strong inclination towards the practice of utilizing an egregious number of unintelligibly lengthy phrases to - oh dear, there I go again. I meant to say, I find myself using too many words to explain things. Hell, I've done that on this very blog. I'm probably doing it now!
I just wrote two 30-page papers on a couple subjects I find fascinating: a senior thesis on nontraditional stories in contemporary graphic novels ('comics', if you will), and how queer sexuality is dealt with in fantasy fiction. I keep looking them over and thinking about how much more I'd like them if I'd written them as blog posts. True, there's no way I would've spent hours, days, weeks on research on a blog post, but still...
On a side note, I've discovered the Blogger saves all your drafts. All of them. Ever. Which means that I officially love Blogger, because I'm constantly doing about 500 things at once, and often can't just sit down and write a journal post all in one go. Problem solved! Maybe.
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