I'm sitting at my desk at the OU with a cup of tea, having just 'submitted' a very rough draft for, discussion at, my next supervision meeting on Thursday. Its a piece on the characteristics of the academic literacies perspective and on assumptions about writing in HE. All through the writing process of this piece I kept thinking 'I should do a little meta-narrative of how the hell I'm feeling as I write this piece' - it would capture all the complexity associated with issues of power, identity, authority and language that the academic literacy theorists so elequently discuss in their papers. Thats irony for you, I think - I AM the academic literacies idealized student, while being a scholar of the work. One of the first papers one of my supervisors wrote was "I thought I could write until I came here" - sums me up exactly. I cant remember being so 'scared' of writing before! Anyway writing is important to me - I really do think I process my thoughts and ideas through the act of writing - but psychologically its such a difficult and increasingly messy process. I want everything to be perfect, I want to use fancy, elequent words, I want my grammar to be perfect, I want to sound like the experts, I want to sound intelligent and like I actually understand what I'm saying and of course have an opinion about it.
I dont really understand the full complexity of the academic literacies view on writing in higher education - the piece I've written is like a little gateway or window into the area - a start that I need to build on. I've decided I need to review the whole area prior to my meeting on Thursday, in the hope that if I didnt sound intelligent in the piece maybe I can make up, by sounding mildly intelligent during the supervision meeting.
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