On Accademic Writing

As I never went through high-school, I was never formally trained to write in anything other than an academic context; my education focused on reading almost to the exclusion of writing up until CEGEP, at which point teachers both guided and constrained us with repeated explanations, drills, and work sessions that emphasized the universality and inflexibility of the essay format. Prior to entering university, I found that I had rarely enjoyed the writing process, largely due to the regimented structure of the four paragraph essay.

As I progressed through my undergraduate and graduate degrees, however, I came to appreciate the academic essay as the principal method of communication in my field, capable of expressing a level of vitality in form and prose that I never would have anticipated based on my prior studies. Though the process – and, indeed, the liberty – of composing academic work became pleasurable, the changes that I observed in the form of written discourse also brought with them new frustrations. Postmodernist discourse dominated much of material that I was responsible for reading and some of the responses that were expected to that material. Were I to offer a particularly uncharitable assessment of the experience, I would say that for some time it seemed as if the fundamental purpose of writing seemed to become lost – like many readers – in a sea of deliberate obscurantism.