My Battle with Academic Writing

Even I am surprised that despite not blogging for so long I didn't go into depression. But I have been constantly unhappy and experienced mood swings that weren't part of me before. The irony is, writing kept me away from writing. It occurred to me that all writings are not same. Some writings can actually make you feel completely jobless. They call it serious writing, but I found it extremely funny. Perhaps I am never designed to write anything so seriously funny.

I have been writing academic pieces for past many months, knowing fairly well that no one other than my tutors will ever read such craps, but at least they will read word by word. Those pieces are basically thousands of words put together to beat loudly about the bush that can be simply communicated in less than 200 words for better human consumption.

In every paragraph I have to prove that I am completely incapable of thinking on my own, therefore even if I have written something I have to cleverly find someone who has said that and say he said so. At the end if there is any indication that I have tried to think at all, then I have to revise and subdue the last whisper of my voice. I have to operate exactly like a search algorithm that puts together everything related to the keyword written by anybody born before me.

To push you at your wit's end, those thousands of words should be like soldiers marching, with an inch wide margin, font size 12, a running head that's caps and that's not caps, single space here, first line indent there, this title bold and that centred. Because people who are going to read our paper are specially challenged. That's just one formate among many. There seems to be many people and institutions that have all the time and intelligence to work on such nuisance.

In the age of Twitter triggering revolution with just 140 characters if we still think that someone will read our 10,000 words research papers, then there is something wrong in the research that said so. Only few research papers make it to some filthy rich journals and others just become references to future academic writings. Great ideas don't need 10,000 words to make sense, it will remain great even if written on a piece of toilet paper. And great ideas don't need a journal to approve them, it's age of Facebook and Blogs. After all, the greatest inventions were result of human action and creativity not sea of mere words and reproduction of ideas.

All the research writing classes, at best, made me so insecure about my own writings but I am coping to overcome and remember my blog in my conscious moments. I hope I will survive to write stories that matter, and I hope I will never torture my readers beyond 500 words.

I am trying to make sense though, to go with the crowd, and if there is someone who can not only convince me but also make me a good research writer then I will be most happy, because so many theories are not helping as of now for a man who hasn't seen much across the border and much above a general maths degree.