The most recent thing I had read was an actual source I’m thinking of using for my Writer’s Evolution. Is this cheating?
I wrote a blog post 3 years ago. Someone commented on it with a question, and I think my comment in response was (looking back) pretty stupid, so that’s why I want to include it. But here is my ad hoc from yesterday anyways:
Annotating my own blog comment about phenomenology.
- This comment is in direct relation to the question posed by one of my classmates. I didn’t look at the question he asked – I just remember this comment as being particularly hard to get through. The intent of the posted comment, therefore, was simply to answer his question, and to further the ideas in the original blog post, which was something about phenomenological theory as it relates to book history & the purposes of studying book history.
- My comment, however, does a rather poor job of answering the question. I can tell without even looking at the question because my own words are over-complex and hinder the understanding of the actual ideas. There is one point where I wrote the same idea in two differently worded sentences, both overly complex – instead of going for simple language to convey my ideas in a way that was easily digestible, I went for complex language, hard to disentangle and very hard to digest. It’s also annoying to read.
- I could use this as a demonstration of my writing process when I’m self-editing while I write – the sensation of censoring my words even before I put the words on a page. It could be used as a good demonstration of my writing process, in which my own fears/anxieties inhibit my ability to write anything coherent at all. It is also a good example of being afraid of others’ perceptions of me (effect of a public forum for writing), and feeling intimidated by the older students in my class to such an extent that I had to use over-inflated language. It is useful in that, in a form that others would argue is very low-stakes (blog comments are not exactly known for their literary astuteness), I was still unable to let myself relax. I could also use this to inform the fact that, at the time of my writing this, I thought I was being really smart; now I have come to a better understanding of myself as a writer enough to know my mistakes, but still unable to fix them. Perhaps I could bolster this idea with evidence further in my paper – and later, chronologically – about how identifying my unhealthy habits is not enough to fix them.