Reflective Essay about Academic Writing

I’ve been interacting with academic writing, primarily in a scientific context, for the majority of my life. I was a precocious child and not sociable in the slightest; as a result, I turned to books as my source of pseudo-human interaction. When I started reading, I was definitely more drawn to fiction; as I grew older and got more exposure to academic writing, I discovered that I actually quite enjoy flipping through a scientific journal or even a textbook. I love it so much I made it my career; I am a research scientist, and so I spend the majority of my days reading academic writing. The area of academic writing I struggle with most is without a doubt opinion pieces. I find that I naturally communicate much more effectively face-to-face than through written word. When I’m face to face, I can identify points of confusion in real time and go back to clarify those things. I struggle to communicate most effectively “out of the gate”, if you will. My writing skills have grown tremendously as of late due to my job; I have had to write at a very technical level consistently; I cannot recall the last week I haven’t been working on a paper of some sort. In addition, this has massively boosted my revision skills; one presentation that me and a coworker of mine created went through 52 versions before it was actually presented. Even with this experience, I still have to say that my most impactful lesson I’ve learned about writing happened in my high school AP English Composition class. My teacher, Mrs. Jones, said something to the effect of “you can justify almost every writing decision with a knowledge of literary devices. I don’t want cookie cutter essays. I want original thought”. That really expanded my mind to write in new styles into which I had not previously been bold enough to venture. 

The first point that stuck out to me most about the lecture video was how the writing process is often not linear. It was a source of frustration for me in high school that when we had to do research projects, coming up with the thesis often came before the research portion. I am one who prefers to formulate their opinions after I’m educated and not before. It seemed as if they were just encouraging us to be wrong for the sake of it. It is interesting to sit in a class where the writing process isn’t a linear progression, it is a set of steps that all have to be completed to create quality academic writing. In addition, thinking about writing as a circular process is still currently bending the way that I think about writing as I write this. I don’t know why its never occurred to me to think about writing this way, but it really resonated with me. I specifically think of the context that every research paper I’ve ever read has had sources, and those sources drew their information from other sources, ad infinitum since even before the beginning of written history, where the only secondary source was word of mouth. Thinking about writing as this cycle has really expanded my mental scope of significance that I assign to writing, as well as put me in a quite existential mood. My “tried and true” that I saw in this video was the significance of knowing your audience. I spend much of my planning time seeking to understand the background of them to whom I’m writing. This mostly comes from the writing of scientific papers; I need to know how much there is to explain. I can give fifteen pages of background, but if my reader is already familiar with the subject, it adds no tangible value to my report. 

I want to improve at the process of creating first drafts. I oftentimes get stuck on an idea or sentence when I write my first drafts and it completely stonewalls my progress. For my scientific writing, I can avoid this by just working on another section; however, when I attempt this in writing persuasive essays, it always creates this nonlinearity of thought between the skipped section that I struggle to gloss over with transitions, and usually end up going back and rewriting both sections anyway. This creates a problem, as I don’t want to prematurely commit to the reality that I will have to rewrite a section, and just further stymies any flow state I had previously achieved. By the end of the course, I am hoping that I will be able to write just one paragraph of a persuasive piece without a major roadblock. Eventually, I hope to be able to write the whole essay without being stopped by minor inconveniences in my writing. In addition, I want to get better at balancing emotional appeals with logical appeals. I personally respond more to the logical appeal, and so knowing the context where emotional appeal is more appropriate and/or effective is a skill I would like to acquire by the end of this course.