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Tuesday, 6 March 2012

"I thought I could write until I came here"

There is deep irony in this title.

I'm struggling with my writing at the moment. I'm frustrated and irritated by the lack of writing progress I'm making because I can't find the words, expressions, sentence structures to say the hell what I mean. So I'll easily sit for an hour to write a single paragraph or even two or three sentences. Then I'll read over what I've written, say maybe 6-8 pages and take another 1-2 hours to correct what I've written. And so it goes on. Maybe this is all in my head and this is just what it means to write - but it certainly is a new experience for me. To be fair I'm write my analysis - trying to construct an external logic to a deeply localised, contextual body of data. I guess I'm making what is familiar and obvious to the participants and to me, explicit in a completely unambiguous and almost de-contextualise way. I have to make my explanations of deeply specific activities, practices and norms - generalised using language and explanations that anyone, without any understanding of the context, can understand. I don't know how to break this impasse and worry that this is going to become the norm for me. I'm I being overtly sensitive to the norms, conventions expected of my writing in this context or responding to the negative sanctioning on my writing style or is something else at play?

At the moment my response is to simply keep at it - even if it means I spend an hour staring at a piece of data wondering how to explain what I'm seeing or what I understand it to mean or I sit for hour constructing a few sentences.

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