Forgive the long delay between entries, but I’ve been busy learning how to be scholarly. I just wrote my first American Lit paper for grad school and only got a B+. Aside from the fact thatI’m a writer, there’s nothing WRONG with a B+. The problem is that it means my upcoming term paper will also be a B+ unless I figure out what I did in this one that prevents it from being an A. Stay with me here, because it also means I might be destined to write a series of sub-A papers throughout my grad school career, which hardly seems like getting the most for my money at $1000 a credit. When I graduated high school in the seventies and stumbled on to a state university the following fall, a whole year of school cost less than $4000, room and board included. I racked up a barrel of B’s back then and never lost a wink of sleep.
The problem I’m up against forty years later in grad school is that not only are my parents not paying for it, but scholarly writing is exactly the opposite of what I normally write. For the five years I’ve been a blogger, my goal has been to entertain. If I fail to do that, readers get bored, and bored readers are ex-readers. So I embellish. Creatively. Hence the term Creative Writing. Back when I wrote for a newspaper, my mission was to compel the reader to keep reading. That meant a gotcha first paragraph followed by facts cloaked in language that disguised how dry they were. Academic writing, on the other hand, couldn’t give a wet cowpie if the reader is entertained. The reader could be passed out cold and dead and the words just keep coming. This is not fun at the fair time. The point of scholarly papers on literary criticism is to INFORM the reader and CONVINCE them that the argument being presented is viable. Nothing even RHYMES with viable.
In writing to entertain, the writer presents a scenario and gives enough detail for the reader to engage. Too little information, and the writer winds up including a name like Britney or Lindsay for added punch. Too much information, and a giant question mark forms over the reader’s head that says HEY! WHAT THE HELL IS THIS, NONFICTION? This is followed by the sound of click! as the reader loads a different web page. Fortunately the blogger never actually hears the click, but it probably makes the same sound as a thousand dead poets turning over in their graves as I whisper the words Walt Whitman is boring. OMIGOD, who said that?
So I’m learning to write things like, “The visual moment of self-reflexive identity is deathly because it is the apparent ultimate moment of mastery by the narrator’s will.” I didn’t actually write that, I only ASPIRE to write that, but it doesn’t matter because you’re already gone. As for my B+ paper, I revised it, but it still isn’t showcase quality. My supporting evidence continues to ignore my request to reference the thesis. I will hand in my third effort tomorrow, and close my ears to the noise of the dead poets screaming. And then, two weeks from now, I hand in my 15-20 page term paper. I was just kidding about the boring crack, Walt, I swear. Lean over and give Emily Dickinson a nudge. She’ll tell you.
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