Feb 22, 2007

Papers and reasearch and typing, oh my!

Boy I really hate having to write stuff. I've got a six-page draft of a paper due tomorrow, and it's at 2 3/4, generously speaking. And I don't want to touch it. Yuck.


In other news, as part of the "I don't expect a readership" thing, my posting will not be anything like regular. I may post several long-winded rambles (is that a noun?) one day, then nothing for weeks, maybe.

If you're reading this, check out The Hunger Site and its friends. For practically no effort at all, make a difference for someone, even if it's just for your own satisfaction about being charitable. Maybe make one your homepage or -heck- set all of them to open when you start Firefox or Opera (or IE?).

Feb 21, 2007

It was a bright cold day in April...1

Well, here goes - this blog is the result of two ideas coming together:
1. I occasionally desire to share cool stuff I find, learn, think, etc. (and some uncool, probably).
2. I have a lot of trouble writing.

"So," you say to your monitor, not realizing that probably makes you look a little kooky, "why does being bad at writing mean one should have a blog, which tends to require just that?"
Um, good question. It makes sense in my head, lessee if I can get it on (figurative/virtual) paper:
See, that's the trouble with my writing: it's not low quality, it's just tough to do. I understand concepts, have ideas, and such, but I have all kinds of trouble writing it out. I chalk this up mostly to my perfectionism which tends to require that I completely work out in my head whatever I'm going to write before I ever put pen/key to paper/doc. Hence, I tend to spend a lot of time staring at a blank paper (I'm going to stop distinguishing between real paper and a computer. You, whoever you are(n't), are smart enough to sort out that.) If I can just get something on the page, it gets easier after that. It's not easy, but the first hurdle is past.

Anyway, (I'm getting close to tying this into a point) my Mom suggested a while ago that I try The Artist's Way, which as far as I can tell consists of forcing yourself to write anything at all for 15 minutes or half an hour every day. Mom figured that this would help me with being able to "just get something on the page." It probably would have, but as you probably gathered, I never cracked open the book, so it didn't help me much. It just seemed like it would be boring at best, frustratingly stressful at worst to try to force myself to write about nothing in particular for a specific length of time.
Hence, (actual point alert!), blogging might be a workable way for me to practice writing because:
1. The lack of grading, and of an audience in general, relieves some of the perfectionism pressure.
2. Idea 1 from above, combined withcontradictorilythe perception of an audience,2 gives me some motivation to write about something without it seeming futile.

So that's me on my writing - the first installment at least - I'll talk about procrastination later.


1 This is the first line of the first post, and I had nothing clever to say here, so I borrowed some of the best-ever opening-line wit from George Orwell.
2 While having a readership would be amusing and rather flattering, I don't expect it. I'm writing first and foremost (and only, really) for my own benefit, so there'll likely be a lot of rambling, as I tend to do that.
3 I used to use a lot of postscripts. They're great for adding info without disrupting the structure and flow of the writing (more on how my brain works in later posts), but somewhere around P.P.P.P.P.S., it starts looking a little cheesy. Also, when typing in a text editor, one can't really say they forgot to include something in the middle, and so had to tack it on the end. So I recently discovered that footnotes and endnotes serve the same purpose as postscripts, but... they're classy! Even when one uses a lot of them, it just shouts sophistication, intelligence, and well-informednesss louder. (No, there isn't a 3 in the text at all.)