I unabashedly love academia. I love the fact that you are rewarded for knowing things, that the emphasis isn’t all on production. The bureaucracy is annoying, but it is the system that supports the freedom to learn.
But… I just can’t seem to wrap my head around academic writing. It seems deliberately obtuse. A lot of the time, papers seem like they could be written to be about half the length and 10x as entertaining. Why is that? It’s really too bad, because a lot of the time the papers are really interesting, but you have to work so hard to get at their meaning that you want to give up.
Maybe I’m just not smart enough. But I think that can be a strength, depending on what I go into. Can I take some of these ideas and translate them for a wider audience? I think it might be a good thing that I’m not so entrenched in academia. I don’t know if I want to be so entrenched that I will subvert writing for a large audience to the goal of pleasing academia. It seems overly self congratulatory and… well, just dumb.
I don’t know where that leaves me. The options are to find a place in academia where the restrictions aren’t as severe- I think that where I am at now is somewhat like that. I can work in a corporation and try to bring the spirit of academia to a company. I prefer that to the idea of trying to bring the corporate model to academia- where we start to value efficiency above all else. That’s not very productive either.
In short, I don’t know what I want. I hope that by keeping these things in mind as I go through school and keep my eyes and ears open, I might be able to find a job that truly fits me.
I think I can field this one actually. I have a friend Elizabeth who delights in language, grammar, syntax, she loves the rules and form and flow of words. Anyone can write a paragraph, but writing it so that it follows the rules, takes skill and possibly even innate talent. It’s like art…anyone can paint a smiley-face, and it reaches a lot more people than an abstract painting might and even makes a lot more sense sometimes, but it’s the fact that anyone can do it that makes it “low” art. Anyway that’s my take on it. :)