A Quick Rant

As somebody who has always enjoyed writing and considered it to be a strength of mine, it has been extremely eye-opening to leave the academic writing world and enter the professional (somewhat) writing world. In school I wrote dozens and dozens of term papers, and received high marks for the most part. I would spend weeks writing outlines and constructing sentences and paragraphs that were exactly what I wanted them to be, and then would have them returned to me with a few scribbles in the margins, sometimes a much appreciated comment on the last page, and a big red letter that was, usually, the one I was hoping to see.

Nowadays, I don't get the indulgence of my comfy desk in my quiet home and a due date months in the future. I don't even get the luxury of writing in my own voice. Instead, I have a little cubicle in the midst of organized (to be generous) chaos, an assignment with a deadline that most often is in the next several hours, and the task of writing about something I don't know about in a voice that sounds like somebody else's.

The result? A lot of editing, and a transformation of the words I crafted into other words entirely. My editor gives me an assignment - more often than not it is about a topic I know absolutely zero about - and I research as quickly as I can before writing the exact number of words she requested. I give it to her, and wait to receive a new copy of it that is completely unrecognizable. Words crossed out, words added in, and sometimes no sign at all that the words I'm now reading have been rewritten in their entirety. Often, it's pretty diheartening to see that somebody else didn't love your work as much as you did. And to sit back down and rework a piece that you have reread to death already can be quite draining.

Thank goodness for my own little blog that allows me to toss my destroyed assignemnt to the side for ten minutes so that I can let my thoughts flow as they come, with nobody to then take this from me and make it sound like an ominous anonymous voice. I can write the first thing that comes to mind and just leave it there, knowing that nobody else can touch it. How refreshing!

But now, because that deadline really is looming, I have to get back to work. This quick rant makes that task seem a lot less daunting.