“That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
I ran into a silly pin on Pinterest (which, if you have been living under a rock, is the greatest thing to happen to the internet since The Facebook). The pin says "I pick my teeth with five paragraph essays."
The pin hit me just right. I had just been thinking about the struggle it was to write my first 10 page paper in high school. It was nuts! It couldn't be done! But after several evenings in front of the computer--writing more on AIM than in my actual paper--I eventually knocked out an essay that would probably make me cringe if I read it today.
I had really excellent high school English teachers who, through a series of humiliating exercises, shamed us into becoming better writers. When I got to my public (read: low standards) college, papers were a breeze. I never got a B on a paper. Never. It was probably bad for me in the same sense that eating nothing but candy will make you fat. Glowing from my effortless triumph in college, I approached legal writing with gusto.
Unfortunately for young Me, legal writing is a completely different, hellish, counter-intuitive system that more closely resembles a geometry proof than the essays of my past. Once again, it was the length that was so difficult--only this time, it was "how do I make this SHORT enough?"
I remember dreading my "substantial writing" project required to graduate law school. Like any good law student would, I wrote about something that didn't interest me at all, but would confirm the professor's cherished beliefs so I could get a decent grade. I think that bad boy was 43 pages of writing about a specific federal tax code. And he LOVED it. Jealous?
Something about these experiences has put a sort of fearlessness into me. Along with my improved writing skills, I've become somewhat of a speed reader. You can tell me to read a stack of legal documents 5 inches thick and report on its content, and I can hand you my brief before 3:00. High school me is very impressed with myself right now.
It makes me sort of wish that someone would ask me to write a 10 page paper again, just because now I know I can.
In what ways would your current abilities impress the high school you?
2 comments:
Pretty much the same stuff. I wrote 16 pages in the last two days. They are crappy and need to be rewritten, but I wrote them. No tears. I can speed read. I have absolutely no qualms about public speaking or teaching, even when I don't know anything about the subject. Past me would be awe-struck. Past me would be less impressed with how slowly I duff along and call it running.
I think my high school self would be aghast at my current unorthodoxy and young married status (seemingly contradictory, I know).
But I might be impressed with my scholastic accomplishments. I remember learning in high school that you can't get anywhere in academia unless you publish stuff. That seemed so nasty and unfair at the time. Why would they make people do such a horrible thing? What if you never get published? I'm getting two publications out of my undergrad alone. Cake.
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