My writing tends to be distinctly excessive; a few blog posts ago I talked about self identifying with my own sociability and the ecstatic joy that comes from abusing the terminally obese human language, mixing obscure, pompous words with modern day slang to create a collage of linguistic contradictions. My curiosity lies, this time, in how much of this Wodehousian dialect I can use in my academic writing. Removing the ‘I’ from my writing was a challenge, but opened up a lot of doors when it comes to expressing sentences that would’ve had an ‘I then…’ or ‘this led me to…’ but instead require a measured dose of ‘consequently, the musings of _____ crest the horizon above the landscape of ____s writing, framing their ideas within a golden glow of pshychogeographical meandering’. I feel that I found room for lexical fun in my essay, although my time management left much to be desired in making sense of the tangled mess of ideas that I was tying to convey. The language may be interesting, but I fear that the essay itself is shrouded in ambiguity birthed from my (seemingly) genetic disposition to ignore deadlines until T-minus-C, ‘C’ in this equation referring to the minimum number of hours it would take to complete the assignment, and T referring to 3pm on a Thursday; the universal hand-in time for all work.
Monthly Archives: May 2021
Musings on essay structure and conclusions
The conclusion is really the most important part of an essay, although ones conclusion should be apparent from the outset. Treating ones academic writing like a murder mystery novel is an erroneous undertaking, withholding the enlightening statement until the final paragraph to be unveiled with a “and I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids” is immature and unprofessional. But then how, I ask, am I to plan my essay so thoroughly that I know where I will end up before I get there? Writing, for me, is a transformative process in which my ideas, by being committed to the page, arrange themselves to sit alongside each other. I feel that links and connections between ideas occur on a macro level, employing specific, delicate wordings and lexical leaps of faith to convey the gossamer threads of intrigue and internal discovery that make an essay worth reading. I hope sincerely that the conclusion to my essay will make itself apparent sooner or later. The lack of an initial question within the title leaves the conclusion in a slightly ambiguous place. I am confident that I will triumph over the conclusion.
//written on paper 6 days prior to this post//
Architecture, water, and where assignments split ways
On a visit back to my parents house to grab some speaker cones for a DIY project, I found myself talking to my father about my daydreams on liminality. His immediate first reaction to hearing about it was to talk about water; about how for the ancients water was the supreme liminal substance, a barrier between this world and the next. The river Styx, throwing coins into wells, the lady of the lake passing on Excalibur to King Arthur. The first obvious connection is the Thames; the core of London, providing it with commerce and wealth for almost its’ entire history, but upon further investigation I remembered hearing something familiar….
A few streets away from my parents’ house on a wide, suburban corner in the middle of the road, is a manhole. When walking past this manhole, one can hear the fierce, rushing current of water below. I’ve heard it my entire life, and it always earns itself a small mental note whenever I pass by. This linked back to another point of interest that I have had over the years – the lost rivers/canals/tributaries of London. Waterways that were once our ancestors’ lifeline have slowly been build over, neglected to tunnels and passageways underneath our feet. Their frantic flow sounds on deaf ears. These flowing bodies of water are echoes from the past; the Fleet, the Effra, the Tyburn. All names that we no longer recognise, but to the past peoples of London they were as familiar as Oxford Street is to us.
My decision to link the topics of my two assignments to one another means that somewhere along the line I will have to decide which aspects fit into the academic side of things and which aspects will fit into the artistic side of things. Psycho-geography (coined by Guy Debord) seems to be a main linking factor within my essay-based musings, the idea being that exploring London through its’ links to the past can be another playful way to explore how it makes you feel. Trying to catch a glimpse of how the ancients saw our city by understanding that which brought them all together; water.
In terms of my audio assignment, I want to focus on my own experience with water. There is a water processing facility within sight from the back side of my parents house, and it’s always been interesting to me. The manhole cover, liminality, hearing things that we can’t see, listening to the past. These are all linked points in my thoughts about creating an audio piece from my research.
On liminality, and making sense of my own mental spaghetti.
This is the first blog post in which I am documenting the journey of writing an academic essay. The word cap (1,500 words, I’m also presuming a ±20% discrepancy that goes along with that) feels short. I’ve previously (in college) written a 2,000 word essay which was too short to fully explore my ideas, and I ended up with plenty of loose ends and a hollow, unsatisfying final paragraph in which I scrambled to do all of the tying-together that was missing in the main body.
The problem was a thematically vast, half baked idea that really had no true conclusion, and I eventually drowned in the tangles of mental spaghetti that I was summoning up from the depths of my own brain. I’d advise all readers of this blog post to avoid embarking on such fruitless endeavours – they all end in catastrophic disaster and are probably best conducted by crash test dummies whose expertise in moments of crashing and burning are unparalleled the world over, or so I’ve heard.
This essay I wanted to do something different.
So I have spent a large proportion of my allotted working time for this assignment doing nothing.
Fear not, this is a productive form of nothing. I did nothing (and continue, in earnest, to do so) in order for my mind to breathe, and for the yarn of ideas to become unspooled across the floor in front of me; ripe for the picking. I want my avenues of exploration to be a bit more tangible this time round, and I figured that with the word count I can focus on three discrete threads within my overarching topic. And so: onto the topic.
I have recently developed an interest in the word ‘Liminal’. It refers to the in-between, a boundary zone, a no-zone. Somewhere that is neither here nor there, transition and change, after the rejection of old values but before the adoption of a brand new set of values. This all began with an internet phenomenal that I’ve observed, in which users are sharing images of ‘Liminal Spaces’ to forums. A liminal space is defined as somewhere (often indoors) that is normally bustling or busy, but is in a state of unusual calmness. The spaces themselves are often liminal in nature – waiting rooms, car parks, malls, corridors or stairwells are all common subject areas. People never feature in these photos and flora is also often excluded, it’s the lack of (human) context that gives the certain uncanny, eerie feeling evoked by these images.
I’d like to explore liminality within my essay, and also within my upcoming sound piece assignment. I want both assignments to feed into one-another, and to inform the process of each other. Perhaps I’ll talk about how we deal with spaces whose purpose is no longer required, perhaps about the psychology of the uncanny, perhaps about how we make spaces primarily for people, but they are all destined to be empty someday. I’m pulling on lots of threats, but I have yet to find a concrete question to ask.