The evolution of writing

 

Academic writing is painful. I discovered this the first time I had to face writing an essay as a 4^th year undergrad on exchange in London. Outside of the English speaking world, the academic essay is mostly an esoteric art form that is the domain of researchers and academic hipsters. I had never seen anything like it.

There was all this hassle of keeping your paragraphs as tight conceptual units within the greater scope of your argument, with their own internal structure, then having to back up anything you said with what other people had said before and this absolute obsession with not using someone else’s words without attribution. Pile up on top of this dealing with the formatting, keeping to the strict word length, and writing in “the language of science” and you can see it was not an easy year. But I learned the system, and became a better writer and a better communicator because of it. [...]

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(Guest post on The Literary Platform)