Another technical writing class? Well, my program said so, and so here I am.

Given that I’m coming into this class with quite a lot of writing experience, I’m not expecting a whole lot of new material here. Of course, I won’t presume that I can’t learn anything from this course. At the very least, there’s no such thing as too much practice for a writer, and I’m quite positive that I can add a technique or two on the margins.

Now, this probably does come across as more than a little arrogant. Honestly, it’s supposed to. One of my eternal frustrations as an academic writer is that, despite the claims otherwise, clear writers are outshone by Calvins.

I know this from personal experience; professors in particular have always seemed to reward my lesser efforts, in which I dismiss my assertions as nonsensical even as I write them. In spite of these clear incentives, I find this style distasteful. Prosaic elegance is not only much more entertaining to write than impenetrable nonsense, but it is most certainly more enjoyable to read. It consistently surprises me that there are elements of society that reward the mere appearance of quality over the thing itself.

This may appear to be an irrelevant claim when considering the ostensible purpose of this post. It is not. I don’t particularly want to be a poor writer, but neither am I thrilled by the possibility of having my work dismissed because my work ignores the expected conventions of scholarly and professional work. Rather, this post is the first of many of its kind: those which test the boundary between artistic integrity and conventional acceptability. What I hope to discover through this course is the boundary between the two, such that my personal goals and my professional ones can be intertwined.