Last night we went to a casino. I’m a very occasional gambler. This means that every five years or so I go to a casino and spend $20 playing 25-pence slot machines. I never hope to win anything. It’s the process that I enjoy.

N had never been to a casino so he was eager to go. He was completely disappointed, though. As a huge fan of Dostoyevski, he expected a mysterious environment where long-haired gamblers lurk in the penumbra and ladies in moth-eaten boas hold lorgnettes in shaking fingers as they bet their last gold rouble.

Since there was nothing of the kind at this brightly-lit resort casino, N became instantly disillusioned with the entire concept of gambling

So here are the rules of good academic writing that I use:

1. Avoid announcing your intentions. Often people start a 3-page essay with “In this essay, I will explore. . .” What’s the point of wasting space on these declarations? Just go and explore whatever you want to explore already. Jonathan Mayhew, a literary critic whose style I admire, suggests that this signposting can be avoided even in books, let alone essays or articles. Here is a great post he wrote on the subject.

2. Avoid being verbose. Why hide your ideas behind a mountain of circumlocutions and endless introductory statements? The best kind of writing is direct and clear. I have a natural tendency to be verbose which means that I have to pare down my first drafts heavily. If your sentences tend to run on for half a page, there might be a verbosity problem.

3. Avoid choppiness. Writing in choppy sentences is not a good alternative to verbosity. When you create something like “Bildungsroman is an important genre. It has produced many works of literature”, try to combine the two sentences into one (These are very stupid sentences, I know. I’m just trying to give an example here.)

4. Be careful with the passive voice. There is nothing inherently evil about the passive voice. “This novel was published in 2012” is a perfectly legitimate sentence. However, often the passive voice conceals the author’s ignorance. If you keep saying that “Bildungsroman is considered to be an important genre” and “this issue is believed to be crucial”, you might need to stop and ask yourself whether both you and your readers can easily name the person or people who do the considering and believing.

5. Avoid generalizations. I can’t tell you how annoying it is to read essays that start with “everybody knows that. . .” and “it is obvious to everybody that. . .” First of all, if it’s so obvious, then why waste space saying it? Often, people hide their own very questionable opinions in such statements. Let’s avoid talking about everybody and everything and limit ourselves to the specific and provable.

6. Avoid stating the painfully obvious. Unless your reader is a 5-year-old, there is no need to say things like, “Spain is a country in Europe.” It sounds extremely condescending and makes your reader think that you are just padding your piece with platitudes because you have nothing to say.

7. Avoid providing dictionary definitions of simple words. See above for reasons why.

8. Avoid silly puns and broken down words. By broken down words I mean annoying constructions like “(under)-STAND-ing fem(in)ism.” Brrr, this is so eighties!

9. Don’t use terminology unless you are completely sure what the term you are using means. A metaphor, an alliteration and a hyperbole refer to completely different things and cannot be used interchangeably.

[To be continued. . .]

Please consider the following paragraph:

I am going to proceed based on the assumption that although the different identity groups that I analyze in my research, as well as many others, undoubtedly exist in the objective reality, any attempt to define them in terms of a shared characteristics that are assumed to be applicable to any member of the group allows to speak of these groups as ‘imagined communities.’ Now, the question arises regarding the reasons of why I consider that literary texts, and specifically novels of the above-mentioned period, will be particularly helpful in working out a definition of a term that seems to belong more to social sciences, especially given the fact that sociologists do not seem to be able to provide a clearer definition of this concept.

How do you feel about it? Now imagine reading an entire article or a book written this way. Scary, huh?

I’m almost too ashamed to confess that this is my writing. I wrote this eight years ago and felt uncommonly proud of my writing style. If you know anything about my personality, you probably realize why people were terrified of telling me how much my writing sucked. Finally, a brave friend downed a few drinks and found the courage to tell me that my writing was bad. The poor guy’s hands were literally shaking and he was speaking in a small, terrified voice.

At first, I thought he was simply being mean. Then, however, I stopped to think about it. Was it possible that my writing wasn’t as amazing as I believed it to be? In order to lay these doubts to rest, I asked another friend whose writing style everybody praised for its elegance to show me her work. She refused for a while because, as I now understand, she didn’t want to hurt my feelings. Finally, she gave in, and I got a chance to read her work.

I might have been a sucky writer but I was a good reader. This is why I immediately realized that my friend’s writing was vastly superior to mine. As a result, I embarked on a journey to find out what it meant to write well in English and develop my own writing style.

In the second installment of this post I will share the principles of good writing that I have established for myself. Please understand that it is normal for people to have different approaches to good writing, so none of these rules need to be set in stone. As long as people love reading your stuff, you are fine. My problem was that nobody wanted to read the crap I wrote precisely because it was crap.

I’ve been taking sugar substitutes (Splenda, etc.) for many years. The reason why I abandoned sugar for their sake is that they melt much faster in the cup. Now I’m starting to feel that it was kind of stupid to get so attached to these sugar substitutes. Does anybody know if they are bad for one’s health?

Of course, the answer to this would be “but our religion is right and theirs is wrong, so there is no similarity.” Which makes teh situation even funnier.

My pedometer tells me that it takes 3754 steps to cross this resort from one end to another. This is a very short distance,in my opinion. Yet almost everybody uses small vehicles to be driven from one restaurant to another. It’s great that the vehicles are available for the elderly and the disabled. I feel immense joy when I see that people in wheelchairs have access everywhere, can travel, and not be excluded. But why do the young and healthy people avoid walking?

The grounds are fenomenally beautiful. They are like botanical gardens with little plaques explaining where the plants come from. There are peacocks and pink flamingos. There are shaded walkways, so you don’t have to walk in the sun. In the evenings, there is a cool breeze. Yet people choose the vehicles.

Mind you, these tourists are not Americans. There are barely any Americans here. Most people are from Europe. There are crowds of Spaniards, many Russians and Germans, quite a few Dutch. Also, there are some Argentinians. I’ve seen a couple of Quebecois families.

As a fanatic of walking, I find this very strange.

I know everybody must be bored to tears with my post on Russian television, so I will make this brief. I watched a segment on Israel last night and the commentator said, “The Jews came to the desert and turned it into a garden.” That’s a big thing for a Russian channel, so I was glad.

On a vaguely related note, a Dominican waiter said to me, “I knew you were either Russian or Ukrainian but I didn’t dare to venture a guess because Russians and Ukrainians hate to be confused with each other.”

N and I act like the typical representatives of our cultures here. I’m chatty, expansive and friendly, while he is silent, mysterious, and sombre. I’m just so hugely happy to be among Spanish speakers that I’ve become super sociable. Speaking Spanish just feels so good, it’s like a physiological pleasure.

I’m reading Gillian Flynn’s new novel Gone Girl (which, by the way, is a perfect beach read) and there is the following passage in it:

Being a Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth while somehow maintaining size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry ; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind,  I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl.

Now, a question : do you think there are really women who do all this to get men? And if so then, why? Who needs such a man around? Is it that hard to make a living? I mean, OK, it’s hard, but maintaining this fake persona is an insanely difficult task. Unless the guy in question is a billionaire, I don’t see what return one gets on all this effort. Especially in the US, where there is such a shortage of women willing to put up with men on any sort of a serious basis, that a woman only needs to have a pulse to get suitors lining up.

Then again maybe I’m so relaxed here on the beach that I’ve started taking trashy beach reads too seriously. In all probability this Cool Girl is just the author’s invention. Right?

I found a great question on a blog I follow:

When did you first realize you were an adult? And what were some of the major growing pains in becoming an adult?

I feel kind of embarrassed. . . OK, hugely embarrassed to answer this question. But I can’t conceal this shameful truth from my readers. My answer is in May. Of 2012.

N. and I were staying at the Millenium hotel in St. Louis (you can see the hotel in the photo) to celebrate N.’s birthday. In the afternoon, he was at work and I went shopping to my favorite stores. Then I had lunch at an Indian buffet and walked over to the hotel for a Skype session with my analyst. I also kept publishing posts about all of this. As I was walking, I suddenly stopped in the middle of the street.

“Oh, shit,” I thought. “I have a job, a husband, a blog, and an analyst. I’m an adult! When did that happen?”

The Millenium hotel has this revolving restaurant on the top floor which is where N. and I went later in the day. Of course, I shared my discovery with him.

“Have you realized that you and I are adults?” I announced happily. “We can do anything we want!”

We giggled for an hour, thinking of all the things we could do as adults. (Eat only ice-cream for a week! Sleep all day long on Sunday! Spend money any way we wanted!)

I think the graduate studies delay one’s adulthood a lot. The grad school lifestyle makes it extremely hard to feel grown up and responsible for one’s own life. Grad students are too dependent and their lives are too scripted for that.

What about you? When did you first realize you were an adult?

I have discovered that I can blog while lying on the beach. This takes my definition of happiness to a completely different level.