Post #25: What Is Academic Writing?

In high school, I always wrote academic papers.  We had journal time for the first year or two, where we could just write about anything, but we were only even graded and critiqued on our academic papers; the traditional and clichéd five-paragraph essay.

It was good that we learned how to write in this way.  The five-paragraph essay gave us structure, and taught us how to organize writing so that it was argumentative and proved a point to the reader.  However, once the skill of writing organized papers is accomplished, it is okay to evolve to the more personalized, comedic, and in-depth writing that focusing on one specific blog topic can give.  It is very true; term papers are really only written to be rewarded with As, whereas with blogs, people write because, as Matt Richtel says, "they love writing for an audience, engaging with it" and "feel as if they’re actually producing something personally rewarding and valuable."  It is more fun to write something that is interesting and that people feel a connection with, and it is easier to do a good job when the task is more enjoyable.

In essence, structure and organization are basics that everyone needs to learn how to do and how to do well, but after, there is no reason why they can't break from the pattern and explore.

I can see the transition from structured and organized academic writing to more free-spirited and personal thoughts and analysis even in my blog posts over these last few months.  My first post, a reflection on the short story "First Day," and in it, I don't talk about my own thoughts or feelings at all--just what I observed in the text.  I was still in that mindset of "just analyze what is there; subjective writing is not professional."  Moving to my post about Jaja from Purple Hibiscus, I include more about what is happening in between the lines of the story, my predictions on what is going to happen, and even an image, but I don't use the word "I," because that is not professional.  But after that, I am not afraid to share my opinions in my writing, like with "Great Movies" when I discuss what it is that (I think) makes a movie great.  

I am someone who has a lot of opinions, but the more structured academic writing a always wrote in school, I never got to share that.  It is nice to be able to do, not just because I am very opinionated, but because being able to see my own thoughts helps me see connections in the text, thus analyzing them more thoroughly.  The audience started out as someone how I basically described the narrative of the text I was reading and the description of its characters to, but that someone became an audience who's purpose was to hear my opinions and ideas of the story and these characters and the connections made between them--intra-post, inter-post, or worldly.

However, I sometimes worry that all this personal yet informal writing has infiltrated the more formal writing that I still do have to do.  I often don't realize when I'm writing informally now, and so when the words "I" or "like" show up in my paper, I don't notice until it is too late.  While it's true that those words can help personalize a paper, they are definitely not professional.  

I seem to have reached both ends of the writing spectrum: the extremely structured, organized, and predictable academic writing of the five-paragraph essay, and the personalized and comedic writing of the blog.  Now, I need to find a happy medium between the two.