"I find your lack of faith disturbing"
Feb. 27th, 2006 04:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phoenixastraeaWell, here I am at 4:42pm on a very busy Monday. It's been a good day, I think; keeping busy has that effect on a day.
I finally made some deadlines for myself (and my thesis advisor) for when I have some serious chunks of writing done for my thesis. Right now, I've scheduled for 20 solid pages due after spring break (on the 14th, I think). That sucks for my holiday but crunch time is here and I cannot dilly-dally any longer. I guess I'm more maschochistic than I thought because the thought of hard deadlines excites me. Perhaps I should have been a reporter!...Nah, modern media does nothing but depress me. Knowing myself, I would be the one reporter attempting to go against the grain by reporting GOOD things rather than stories about how a mother sliced off her infants arms or how a verdict convicting a mother who murdered her five children was OVERTURNED because of false forensic testimony about a LAW AND ORDER EPISODE!!!! I SH*T you not. I seriously read that today on MSNBC. Go to the Crime and Punishment Section and find the article on Yates. Re-f*cking-diculous.
But I digress. The deadlines will help my motivation for researching and writing ten-fold. I wish my mind worked differently, but every single one of my colleagues (and I've talked to many who are thesis-ing this year) feels the same way. So...is this something wrong with us as students or is it something wrong with the establishment? Do we NEED more hands-on experience when it comes to writing something of this scope? I would argue that we do; my advisor has really worked to keep me on target, and MAN would I have been lost without her help.
I think of this and it makes me really wonder about how colleges prepare and guide burgeoning academics as writers. Because I body-slammed my English AP exam, I didn't have to take any of the English writing classes that they offer here. As proud as I am of my skills, I wonder if that was a poor idea on the part of the university. There are DEFINITE differences between writing an AP paper and writing a serious college essay. While I had an EXCELLENT background thanks to Mrs. Lloyd, I didn't have any concrete idea about how to construct a cogent thesis with the claims, background, and evidence that UVA requires of its essays. The result was that the first paper I wrote as a student here received a B- but with the comments of a D paper. Needless to say, this former 4.97 high school student went home and cried like the arrogant weakling I was back then. I learned quickly through trial by fire, but the closest I ever came to any lessons on grammar usage and sentence structure came in the form of a lecture from a teacher more concerned with flaying us alive and reveling in his clear superiority than with teaching us. None of my subsequent English classes went over the nitty gritty of how to write an outstanding paper beyond the comments and feedback my teachers gave me on subsequent papers; they just..expected us to know how to write papers. Now that I'm writing this thesis, I find that I regret not having professors that put pressure on the nuts and bolts of writing. Not that I haven't adapted or have disliked my classes, but how well do we learn to write like the pros when all we learn in class is content and verbal analysis?
Well, its closing time. More griping later I'm sure!
I finally made some deadlines for myself (and my thesis advisor) for when I have some serious chunks of writing done for my thesis. Right now, I've scheduled for 20 solid pages due after spring break (on the 14th, I think). That sucks for my holiday but crunch time is here and I cannot dilly-dally any longer. I guess I'm more maschochistic than I thought because the thought of hard deadlines excites me. Perhaps I should have been a reporter!...Nah, modern media does nothing but depress me. Knowing myself, I would be the one reporter attempting to go against the grain by reporting GOOD things rather than stories about how a mother sliced off her infants arms or how a verdict convicting a mother who murdered her five children was OVERTURNED because of false forensic testimony about a LAW AND ORDER EPISODE!!!! I SH*T you not. I seriously read that today on MSNBC. Go to the Crime and Punishment Section and find the article on Yates. Re-f*cking-diculous.
But I digress. The deadlines will help my motivation for researching and writing ten-fold. I wish my mind worked differently, but every single one of my colleagues (and I've talked to many who are thesis-ing this year) feels the same way. So...is this something wrong with us as students or is it something wrong with the establishment? Do we NEED more hands-on experience when it comes to writing something of this scope? I would argue that we do; my advisor has really worked to keep me on target, and MAN would I have been lost without her help.
I think of this and it makes me really wonder about how colleges prepare and guide burgeoning academics as writers. Because I body-slammed my English AP exam, I didn't have to take any of the English writing classes that they offer here. As proud as I am of my skills, I wonder if that was a poor idea on the part of the university. There are DEFINITE differences between writing an AP paper and writing a serious college essay. While I had an EXCELLENT background thanks to Mrs. Lloyd, I didn't have any concrete idea about how to construct a cogent thesis with the claims, background, and evidence that UVA requires of its essays. The result was that the first paper I wrote as a student here received a B- but with the comments of a D paper. Needless to say, this former 4.97 high school student went home and cried like the arrogant weakling I was back then. I learned quickly through trial by fire, but the closest I ever came to any lessons on grammar usage and sentence structure came in the form of a lecture from a teacher more concerned with flaying us alive and reveling in his clear superiority than with teaching us. None of my subsequent English classes went over the nitty gritty of how to write an outstanding paper beyond the comments and feedback my teachers gave me on subsequent papers; they just..expected us to know how to write papers. Now that I'm writing this thesis, I find that I regret not having professors that put pressure on the nuts and bolts of writing. Not that I haven't adapted or have disliked my classes, but how well do we learn to write like the pros when all we learn in class is content and verbal analysis?
Well, its closing time. More griping later I'm sure!
