20131130.0627

I am happy to have managed to make a post to this blog every day this month.  It does not equal the accomplishment of those who have successfully completed NaNoWriMo, certainly, but it is a far cry from where I have been in my own writing.  It gives me the hope that I might someday be able to do another extended writing project--which is good since, as a scholar in the humanities, I am expected to do quite a few such projects throughout the next forty or fifty years (if I should live so long).

I have been aiming at prose pieces of approximately 500 words in this blog (along with a sprinkling of amateur poetry of varying length).  I know that I have not always succeeded at providing so much; a couple posts in the middle of the month fell far short of my expectation.  Some of my posts, however, have been a fair bit longer; I tend to run off at the mouth with things about which I am passionate, and the tendency follows me into writing.  Still, I think I came out somewhere near 500 words on average (I have not done the word counts to be sure), so I am content with the performance.

Writing is a skill set, and, like any such thing, it requires practice to develop proficiency and, perhaps, excellence.  Part of what I have been trying to do in this blog is habituate myself to the practice of writing.  My current pace is a good one, I think; it is worth maintaining for a time, until it becomes easy to do (it is not terribly difficult now).  Once it does, I will see about increasing my rate of production; 750 words seems a good next benchmark.

Advancement by 250 words will seem familiar to some; writing assignments typically operate in such numbers.  It has to do with typewriters, I think, whose text did tend to yield 250 words to the page.  Another 250 words meant another page or so, and offered an easy means of assessment; insufficient pages, insufficient content, no need to bother.  Things have changed, of course; "regular" formatting for work usually yields something like 325 words to the page.  But the older assessment patterns still persist (sometimes to the detriment of the students, who follow word count rather than page length and so suffer for not following directions).

That I appear ready to follow them as I advance in my writing marks me as embedded in the older practices, another way in which I can be argued as participating in structures of oppression (because, of course, as one of those pointy-headed folks, I am concerned with the indoctrination of the youth); the Zawacki bit comes to mind once again for some reason.  I try to transmit better and more consistent information to my students, certainly, but I still follow the basic patterns.  And I discuss them fairly frequently here, as I will probably continue to do as I continue to work on how well and how diligently I write.