“Mastering Academic Discourse”

I never paid much attention to “academic discourse.” From what I remember of the freshman comp class that I took at the junior college back so many years ago, I didn’t seem like I really had a problem with academic language. At that time I was focused much more on choosing good topics and writing my ideas clearly. I do remember talking to the instructor after class one day when he was saying that some students in the class were having trouble with writing in an academic style (I don’t remember how he described it at the time), so I was aware that some people had difficulties with it.  I suppose I was one of the lucky lower-middle class white kids whose dialect was fairly similar to that of academic English.

Then again, I should mention that I read like crazy all through my junior high, high school, and community college years.  I’m sure that had an effect on my writing at that age.

It was not until I went to grad school that I was really aware of academic writing. I was studying linguistics, and had to slog through papers that were (sometimes) badly written by brilliant, brilliant people.  When I got feedback from my professors about my first major assignment, one of the comments I got was that my writing was good and easy to follow.

My biggest challenge with respect to academic writing is the anxiety that it causes me.  It seems that I have to spend some time before I start writing just stressing out about it, staring at a blank page and freaking out about why I am not writing.  The amount of time that I spend seems to be proportional to the amount that I have to write.  The longest thing that I have written in a long time was the final paper for English 700—it was about 14 pages long, and I spent two full days (after doing research and taking notes, even writing outlines) just pulling my hair out trying to find a way to get started. Some of the literature we read last semester was actually helpful to me in the end. I figured out a way to lower the stakes of each imperfect word that I wrote, just so that I could start writing some words down. After a couple of pages, my anxiety had reduced to  a point that I could write and even find some enjoyment in it. That was a nice feeling of accomplishment, the feeling that I had overcome my own anxiety and perfectionism for a long enough moment to be able to produce something.