Last blog post! Until… next term, that is. Dr. McNeill suggested in class that we could do a term-long reflection for our final post, and that’s what I’m going to do. What kind of reflection? The scholarly kind! Obviously! Getting a little overly casual here so let’s break it down. What does a scholarly reflection mean? Reflections in the traditional sense are just feelings, and as we have learned in ASTU feeling aren’t really what scholars are aiming for. As we have been told many, many, many times in class but I still often manage to forget, scholarly writing is supposed to be both “relevant” and “productive”  (see Academic Writing or Laurie for more info). If I were to summarize (which we learned how to do) the gist (we also learned that) of the knowledge I have gained in ASTU this term, I would say it boils down to that. Scholars have different expectations for writing than high school teachers do, and much of that has to do with what kind of knowledge is expected to be included in a paper. Of course there are also stylistic genre expectations for scholarly writing, but I’ll be talking about content because that is much more interesting to me.

I was apprehensive about coming to University, as I knew I would be required to write in styles that I was unfamiliar with. What I didn’t realize was how much less structure is often required from academic writing. It’s not a report, it can be a journey (to use a truly exhausted metaphor). A report is a collection of knowledge, to be sure, but it often falls short of really synthesizing the information it presents. Much of my high school writing could hardly be considered “productive” in any substantive sense of the word. Perhaps a reader might learn something new from one of my papers, but I doubt I produced many conclusions that would count as new knowledge in any field. That part of academia is exciting to me– that even as a first year (where I’m from, freshman), we are all capable of participating in and adding to a scholarly discussion, even if it’s in a small way. It’s possible we are coming up with ideas that no one has articulated before– and although nothing I write this year is going to be published anyway, it makes writing a little easier when I feel like I have something to contribute. Now that I think about it, much of my frustration with high school writing came from the lack of relevance or productivity that was expected from me. I didn’t feel like what I was writing was interesting or important, and the “so what” of my papers was “because I was told to do this.” There was no examining why it was helpful or significant to be examining my paper topics, which is an integral part of the academic process. And* it makes sense! Why do something if you don’t have a good reason?

Good luck on all your final papers, and I will see you next term! Er, at our midterms.

*I know I shouldn’t start a sentence with “and”… sorry, Laurie.