summer in the city

It's a line from a Regina Spektor song - I just thought of it now and the tune is playing in my head. I used to listen to her all the time, when I still could, on Spotify - the song is filled with melancholy, rather ironic when singing about summer I think! But I'm in a rather ironic kind of mood.

I've taken encouragement from a fellow blogger's advice about academic writing, but of course the moment I wrote about it and posted the entry a thought struck me...hey, what she is presenting here is a formulaic, decontextualised 'script' - do these ten things and if you do you'll publish in a year, you'll get a PhD and a life and if you do these things and still don't get the the  suggested outcomes...then hell there must be something wrong with you! My Academic Literacies warning lights flashing like crazy, but I'm also feeling a bit guilty because I found the advice so good, practical, I admit I was taken in by it, I still feel taken in by it - so what does that say about my Academic Literacies credentials?

I think it's important to manage this kind of 'skills/socialisation' type message with the more fundamental and critical 'writing as social practice' message. And to see this kind of message for what it is! Writing, academic writing is freaking hard work, it's a confusing and difficult process to pin down, underscored by issues of power and inequality (all writing and all writers aren't equal) and there certain isn't one textbook method that can be applied to everyone. Having said all of this, and declaring that my critical Ac Lits antenna are clearly working - I've been making sure that I write for at least two hours each day (most days its more - come on I'm getting paid to write 6-8 hours a day at the moment) even on the weekend and not feeling so despondent and super critical about my seemingly lack of progress. So there is some method in the madness, some method that at a particular level makes sense to me. Maybe one day I'll become like the blogger in question, offering advice about writing from an Ac Lits perspective...on second thought, a quick second thought, no! I don't think so because it would just reify whatever I was saying into something that it isn't. The irony continues...