I’m feeling disenfranchised with academic writing. Perhaps this is an organisational thing, but it feels as though there is very little point to what I’m doing. The research and discovery that it has prompted me to do have expanded my knowledge of subjects that I’m interested in and have refined my field of study, but going through the motions of writing a few pages on the sources that I’ve used (when mostly I’ve just been finding sources that support my opinions or confirm existing knowledge) seems contrived and slightly pointless.
Most of my sources are online articles on specific things, interviews in video or written form, or the websites of synth builders. How do I talk meaningfully about these sources?
“This article taught me XYZ on this subject, and it enabled me to write about it in my essay because I now have a source for it.”
“These websites set up by synth designers display all of their products alongside descriptions of how they work, often a manifesto, and are designed to make you want to purchase something from them.”
“These interviews lent me insight into the design process of certain bits of equipment, and taught me about how this person thinks about circuit design. I will now detail how this person talks about synth design.”
The three above sentences sum up my source use very well, in a concise manner, and I feel that going more in depth than an extra 100-200 words on each seems to be a celebration of fillibustering. I’m going through the motions of academic writing without being in any way attatched to the process, especially that of finishing the essay. I’m unsure about how many sources I need to use, how much I can say without using sources, and on top of all of this, it feels as though my essay is almost entirely pointless in the grand scheme of things. I’m referencing things so that my facts can easily be verified, but I’m not saying anything new. Nothing in my essay is new, it is all simply regurgitation of things that I have found, and this is disheartening. Many of the concepts that I’m exploring seem to have already been explored to their logical conclusion before I was born, and maybe that’s why I’m so interested in them in the first place. But I can’t shake the feeling that the literature review is almost the same as the essay – the essay uses the data gained from the literature to package and present facts in a digestible and concise manner, and the literature review talks about the data that I got from the sources. These feel like two sides of the same coin – I will be presenting the same information using a different word order. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood the point of the literature review – I haven’t attended too many lectures recently and was too busy working on external audio projects to attend my 1-on-1 tutorials.
My problems are certainly organisational issues. Massive deja vu here, this happens every assignment. But it feels like essay writing gets in the way of my practical explorations, and that frustrates me. Today, I’ve spent my morning at my workbench working on a tremolo unit that needs to be finished before I can start playing around with my polyrhythmic drum machine design, but I keep having to slap myself on the wrist and get back to writing this literature review and finishing the referencing for my essay. I enjoy the practical work. It makes me very happy, I feel that I am working hard and getting results out of it. I feel as though it will benifit my life, progress my artistic potential and massively boost my skillset, as well as setting me up for the future. My essay writing seems to be more akin to ticking a box and jumping through hoops. I definitely think that this is a childish, immature, hedonistic way to think about things, but its a feeling that I cannot shake. These feelings are what the blog is for, I suppose? Perhaps this is too conversational for university and I will be marked down for it.
This bears a striking resembelance to me not attending university lectures over the past ~2 weeks because I’ve had so much work to do regarding this essay. Can’t attend uni because of uni; very very amusing predicament. Can’t do any circuit design because I must write about doing circuit design. All of these issues stem from my lack of organisation, but despite my best efforts I always seem to fall into the same problems. It’s making me think that university life isn’t for me; my brain is not wired to be an academic because the past two years has proved that I’m incapable of doing anything unless it’s up against deadline. Or maybe, university life is perfect for me because I will learn better and better ways of managing my time so that this doesn’t happen next year with my dissertation. Glass half empty, glass half full. I’d like to think I’m not stuck in my ways, as stagnation and inflexibility is a heinous crime that signifies the death of the mind. But look at this wall of text above, I’ve written just under a thousand words in 10 or 15 minutes, with plenty of potential future essay topics contained within – the psychology of procrastinaors, practise vs research, what is the purpose of academic writing, pessimists within the education system, hedonism and the short-term biological reward system within a modern long-term goal orientated society.
Maybe uni is indeed for me.