I had to reject yet another article for publication. And I feel bad because I used to write exactly like this author. “The characters are forced to realize that the forced labor that they are forced to perform…” I wrote like this, and it feels like rejecting myself, version circa 2007.
Terrible, terrible writing. It goes on like this for 28 excruciating pages, with “in this article I will analyze” repeated on every single bloody page from 1 to 12.
Exactly. Everybody is a terrible writer in the first draft. Do people not know that they are supposed to re-read and edit?
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Lots of people do seem to expect to write well off the bat, that may be connected to a lack of re-reading and editing.
My advice for students who are struggling to get started with writing assignments is to do it with pen and paper, ideally on scrap paper, the scrappier and more worthless the better. Writing on paper that is one step from garbage removes all anxiety about quality and so the ideas get written down. And once things are written down, they can be edited and fixed. Several students have told me that they have found this method to be very helpful.
I also recommend doing at least one pass through a text reading it out loud. That’s great for catching convoluted sentences, missing words, and things like the “forced labor they are forced to perform”.
I really love this idea. I’ll definitely try it.
What has helped me a lot when I have writing block is to open a “new post” window on this blog and start writing as if it were a blog post and not the piece I’m actually writing. I think it’s similar in spirit to what you do because it removes the anxiety of “I’m writing a scholarly article”.
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Had to read one like that in college. Ruth Bettina Bern and some other guy, writing critical essays about Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”. They seemed to have a legit point in their essays, but after reading some variation of the word “perpetrate” for the ten thousandth time, I was like “f**k it, I don’t care anymore.” and ended up writing the assigned paper about how terrible academic writing actively gets in the way of fighting for truth. Like if you really cared, you’d write it in English, and not in that weird academic pseudo-language that’s so painful to read, that everybody puts the book down after ten pages, reads the summary online, and then pretends they actually read the whole thing.
This author used the expression “this idea needs to be unpacked” twice. What does he think he is, the White House press secretary? Reasonably intelligent people don’t “unpack ideas” and “circle back on issues”. Nobody speaks like that unless they specifically want to be known as people of below-average intelligence.
But all the cool kids these days unpack ideas, right?
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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