Did I Write This?

We had to make some space in our storage room last weekend, so I rummaged through stacks of old college notes I had saved, pitching most of them, but I stopped to reread some papers I wrote for some rhetoric classes. Having been employed as a technical writer for 11 years now, I assumed my college writing would look immature by comparison, but I was surprised at how much better it seemed than what I write now.

My favorite paper from the pile was a critique of cartoonist Bill Watterson's treatment of television in his strip Calvin & Hobbes. (Yes, it does sound like a topic I'd choose.) The paper contained several strips (a copyright violation I won't repeat here, as much as I want to), with commentaries on the themes presented in each. My introduction read:

Cartoonist Bill Watterson, in his popular and now retired strip "Calvin & Hobbes," made few overt statements about technology as a whole, but took frequent opportunities to bash television for its detrimental effects on children. In the sensationalist mind of the boy Calvin, television is not merely a means of entertainment, but a living thing. To Watterson, it is an instrument of willful indoctrination whose most profound fruits are passivity, mediocrity, and hyperactivity.

The setting of "Calvin & Hobbes" is the world of a child's imagination, so it's not surprising that the cartoonist would depict television as hostile toward creativity. After all, why should a child squander afternoons and Saturday mornings watching mass-produced, poorly-conceived cartoons when he could be playing, living out more original adventures fabricated spontaneously out of his own imagination. This appears to be Watterson's platform and one of the most consistent messages conveyed in the strip.

I know, the tone of academic writing is almost always dry. Dave Barry once commented on finding highlighted sentences in old college textbooks like, "Structuralized functionalism represents both a continuation of, and a departure from, functionalized structuralism," and remembering a time when you had whole portions of your brain dedicated to things like this.

But I thought my old Calvin & Hobbes paper was pretty interesting, especially since I wrote it before I had children, and the things then I said about television and imagination I still agree with. (Incidentally, we limit not only our son's exposure to TV, but to Calvin & Hobbes. He's just a little too Calvinlike at present.)

But the thing that really struck me was that I think my writing has gotten worse since leaving college, and writing itself is more of a struggle now than it was then. When I was in college, I wrote papers every week. And those papers really weren't bad because I was writing every day and was in the habit.

It may be that technical writing itself is just not much of a creative outlet (ya think?) and it's strongly governed by conventions and things like the implications of choosing the wrong preposition. I've learned to agonize over every sentence, revising endlessly. I try to say as much as possible in as few words as possible, but in getting hung up over this, I begin to fear writing. I also spend about 30 hours researching for every 1 hour of writing. I consider it a good day if I wrote three clear paragraphs, and in this business, that can be better than three pages of unfocused brain dump.

Nevertheless, I've picked up some bad habits and I clearly need to do a little more regular brain dumping somewhere, just to get exercise. So I'm going to try to post more often. I don't expect anyone to read my posts, or even to read what I'm writing now. It doesn't matter. I could journal privately, but that won't help me improve as much as writing in public view. If only for my own sake, I'm going to try to post something every week. If anyone notices, hooray. Maybe in time it will get more interesting than my old college papers.