Monday, June 23, 2014

University Style

Yay! Someone asked me to write on a topic, so I'm writing on it today:

How to maintain your own style while writing in high school or university


Let me preface this by saying that I hate outlining. I really do. I don't outline anything, because it limits my creative capacity. When I was at university, I literally never wrote the outline unless it needed to be turned in (and when it needed to be turned in, I wrote the outline after I finished the paper).



Now onto the meat of the matter.

Maintaining style is something every writer wants to do. It's what we strive for in all of our work, because it's what sets us apart from everyone else.

However.

Style isn't what most professors are looking for (sadly, because this should be taught more in schools). Most teachers and professors simply want to know that you know how to write, and they want you to prove it.

They're not looking for style. Many of them, in fact, will dock points for style (I've had this happen to me, and ended up taking it to the head of the English department at UNM to get my grade revised. Oy.)

But none of this means that you shouldn't allow for your own style and word preferences to sink into whatever it is that you write.

My suggestion is this:
  1. Talk to your teacher/professor before you start writing. Make sure they're okay with you taking creative liberties before you go taking them. No matter how much you think you are, you are not entitled to do whatever you want in your classes. Trust me. 
  2. Follow the advice they give you. Whether that be to put in as much of yourself as you can or to make your paper as boring and plain jane as every other paper in the class. Do as the teacher commands.
If you have good teachers who want your creative capacity to grow, they'll allow you to take your creative liberties. Then and only then are you allowed to put yourself into your paper. 

I know, it seems counter intuitive. That's because it is.

I digress.

Once you have the okay from your teacher, feel free to start writing in your own voice. Use the dreaded pronouns sooner than everyone else, start sentences with "and" and end them with "is".

But don't take your freedom too far.

Essentially, there is no tried and true way to maintain your own style when you're writing these kinds of papers. But there are things that you'll need to keep in mind, while you're letting those juices flow:

  1. No comma splices. That's a creative liberty no professor will stand by. 
  2. No fragments, unless they're titles of segments. 
  3. No one to two sentence paragraphs. 
  4. Essentially, follow what your teacher/professor wants for your paper. 
One of my favorite papers I ever wrote was called "On the Observation Deck of the Starship Communication."

It was my favorite because my professor allowed me to do whatever I wanted to do with it, as long as I got all of the information out on the paper.

The assignment was to watch people, to view how they communicate with their behaviors, gestures, and movement, and write a research paper on what I thought all of that meant. So I wrote it like I was the Communications Officer on a Starship, and these were my findings.

The paper got extra points for creativity.

Wow this blog is long. My apologies, I'm almost done. Look, here, I'm closing:


In truth, there is no way to make sure you go into your papers, unless your professor allows it. A lot of them don't want to know about their students, they just want to get the information and go.

But those that do allow creativity should be getting the most fascinating papers of their lives, because we should be writing them like we're in Star Trek, and the world is our final frontier.

{RD}

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