Self-as-writer

Here is.... the writing that I wrote about my writing.
Title: Self-as-Writer
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Personally, I have thought writing has several powers. The first is the power of cure. When I were struggling with something (e.g., unsolved problems, relationship problem etc.) and having really difficult time, writing was the only tool that I can use for taking care of myself. It helped me track my thoughts and reflect my behaviors so truly understand myself. Sometimes it helped understand others by looking the situation where they were, thinking their characteristics, and recalling what they said to me. The second is the power as communication method. Writing is one of outputs. It is different from the speech. One can choose the time and place to write and naturally feel comfortable when writing. Consequently one can make more thoughtful expression and always edit and make changes. Writing as the unique communication way, it makes possible to communicate with the person at a distance or the person who lived long time ago or who will be in the future. Thus, it is natural that writing is a record of history. The third power must be learning. Through writing, one can learn something effectively. As a simple example of my experience, when I have to memorize something, I just write the something on my notebook. Not only for memorizing, wiring helps better understand something. It is an important tool to show what is learned. For these reasons described above, I love writing. Although I am not sure that I am a good writer, I have loved writing and my dream in my childhood was an excellent writer whatever it is novelist or columnist.

Currently, my goal is to be a good researcher. Consequently, my hope is to be a good academic writer as I keep pursuing my profession as a researcher. Actually the reason that I decided to be a researcher was that I found myself as a good analyst. I have been working as an instructional designer and a consultant in the company for three years. What I usually heard from other colleagues is that I am good at analyzing the phenomena. I think I had some skills to categorize things and compare and contrast them. In addition, designing the messages (e.g., texts, image, diagram, graphs, etc.) was the part of my job. This strength helps me write in logical and organized way. Above all, I like to build a conceptual framework as a big picture. Thus, once I build a framework to view things, I can easily write by describing the big picture, adding the detail of it, and explaining the relations among the components of it. For example, scholarly papers that I was able to publish with the assistance of my former advisor introduced emerging technologies in education with an organized table. Also, when I was involved in a project to evaluate an online tutorial, I was illustrating an evaluation framework and writing the literature review based on the framework.

As my weakness of writing, I often overlook the grammar mistakes. This became a serious problem when I work and study as a non-native English writer. Since English is not my native language, I have to admit that I have many limitations to express something and find exactly appropriate words. The most feedback that I received from my writing reviewers are about unclearness of several sentences. I also know this is why my writing tends to have many long sentences. In addition, I tend to include unnecessary information and it leads reader get lose from the major direction. In my writing experience, I know readers like simpler sentences and shorter paper. In borrowing my advisor’s quotation, Mark Twain said “If I had more time, I would write a shorter story.” I still think I am not confident to make my papers in brief way. This is even true when I write an e-mail. While others send the note with two sentences with essential way, I tend to send notes with lots of repetitions and unnecessary messages. I guess I like to write everything that I want to speak without the consideration of readers. This might be similar to the person who just speaks without the consideration of interlocutor’s feeling and needs.

In looking back to the past of my writing experience, the reason that I had the bad habit (just writing up what I want to write) is from my journal writing. I have written my journal since 1999 when I developed my webpage for the first time. I was uploading daily thoughts (named “today’s thought) at the first page of my website. Although I was just writing my daily thoughts, people loved my writing and thoughts. However, since the pages were my own place, I wrote whatever I wanted to write. As I mentioned at the beginning, I mostly used the space with my writing as the purpose of “cure”. I just wrote what I felt in a certain situation and mostly I wrote my reflection on my experience. Since I used to write everything that I come up with from the top of my head, this habit tend to be applied into my academic writing. What I have forgotten must the fact that academic writer must write things in the perspective of scholarly and very busy reader.