Clever Title

I suppose it is prudent to begin this blog with a confession: I haven’t always been such a great writer. Yes, it is true. At the beginning of my time as a university student, way back when I was an English 1010 student and, oddly enough, a Business Administration major, I had no idea of how to write. So I did what many other beginning writers do when they get stuck in their writing; I copied other writers’ styles, crammed essays to the hilt with clichés, and tried to sound as smart as possible. These strategies, of course, didn’t work. Instead of sounding authentic in the discourse of the university, I came across as pretentious, presumptuous, and half-baked.

Then one day I read a magical essay that changed my life as a writer forever. That essay was Eric Blair’s, “Politics of the English Language.” In this essay the author describes the ways that the English language has been abused and neglected by politicians and writers who try to make themselves sound intelligent, or who intentionally try to write discourse in a wordy, confusing “legalese” style. Blair gives examples of words that have been overexploited to the point of having no real meaning such as, “fascism,” “hate,” and, “love.” After this he writes what I consider the most important piece of writing advice ever given:

“Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”

After I read this simple, sensible piece of advice my perspective on writing changed considerably. I realized that what I had been writing was insincere, garbled garbage. I knew that by trying to sound intelligent I was really exposing my lack of knowledge to professors and long-suffering writing center tutors. Blair had shown me all of these things through his essay and now I was ready to start writing with sincerity.

Perfection didn’t come easy. For awhile I went through a process of relapsing into old clichés and often used words that I didn’t really know the meanings of. I was beginning to learn how to write to suit the academic discourse, but I was still uncertain of when to put this knowledge into practice. The format became increasingly clear, but the application remained vague. At this point I received the second most important bit of advice when somebody told me, “don’t ever use a word if it is not ‘your own,’” meaning that if you do not normally use a word in your speech or writing, then it is not “yours.”

This last piece of advice helped me to avoid using the presumptuously didactic tone that Bartholomae assigns to his “basic writers.” When my written style and vocabulary became my own, I started to be increasingly able to approach academic discourse in a more effective and natural manner. These new abilities, combined with time and practice, have helped me to fit more closely into the discourse of the university.