Long time no blog!
Daniel and I tossed a £ about a month ago to decide who should break the silence. It was on him. A month later however, I am gracefully taking the initiative, and will kindly ask you to pretend he had already posted his “breaking the silence” entry. It will only put more pressure on him to actually write it and save me some time making up excuses. Good.
Now, I have been out of college since early summer and waiting to start work for the past couple of months (courtesy of the bad cops at the Border Agency, UK). Bumming around in London while most of my friends are enjoying their final year of college, or even better, planning for grad school, or, my favorite, writing clever papers in grad school (nod to Mia: send that minimalist thing along, mujer!!), has made me miss and reminisce about school. To the extent of buying myself a GRE book. Of course I bought the wrong book, the one without the actual preparation materials and just several practice tests.. That and the fact that I will actually have to work for a couple of years helped me come up with a creative method to fight my school-cravings.
It’s very simple really; remembering the aspects of college work which I didn’t like so much. And for me, there is one uncontested winner; having to write conclusions to my papers.
I hate writing conclusions with a passion. I hate it so much that I would rarely (dis)grace my college papers with conclusions. The surprising thing (and one that led me to appreciate how cool my profs were) is that professors never gave me a hard time about it (this talk is about humanities papers btw, I did abandon my principles for econ). Actually, the only time a prof remarked that the last paragraph of my paper was, errrm, not conclusive, it only took confessing I am an anti-conclusionist for him to admit that he got furious every time he had to write one. YES!!
Below are just a couple of improvised reasons why conclusions are a very dated concept
- It’s disrespectful to the reader! It is, I swear. Most conclusions do little more than summarize the “main” points of an argument. I find this quite condescending to dear reader. They have already read your fantastically complex thoughts and don’t need to have everything conveniently chewed and spat out at the end. For one thing, it doesn’t encourage creativity...
- it is inhumane to the writer. I know I can’t speak for writers, but for me writing papers was a painfully and exhilaratingly dramatic process. By the time I had assembled the jigsaw puzzle of the argument my mental powers had suffered a considerable blow.. You don’t get interesting conclusions like that…
So, what do you say? Are you a conclusionist or did I overkill it ;)
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5 comments:
You overkilled it. :D
Conclusions are hard, no doubt about it--but they can add this pinch of spiciness that no other writing section has. They are like a gently curved comma, closing one thought and leaving space for the next.
That's a very poetic way to put it, Maggie ;)
And I do agree that they have the potential to spice up a paper, but as far as most the academic papers I've read go, this potential has not been realized.
Btw, the rare times when i have been grateful for conclusions is when I hadn't done my reading properly and had about 10mins before class to skim through a paper :)
Welcome back, Diana! Conclusions are not the worst. What about having an opinion on every single topic on the toefl list? That was the worst part. Sometimes I really don't have an opinion. I'm tired of having an opinion on everything. No matter what is going on. Especially in this internet era. I wanted to write a post about Roman Polansky in my blog. But I really don't know whether he's supposed to be in jail or not. Yordanova would disapprove on me.
Yo, Mira, I think your opinion musings merit a whole new post. please?
as for Polanski, come on, he committed a crime and should be held responsible just like any other person. i don't think that's debatable..
Of course it is debatable. Thirty something years have already passed. The victim does not want him in jail. He is too old and probably will die in jail, which is not the proper way to treat the geniuses of our epoch, who are not too much at all. And OK, I know raping is not the proper way to treat the 13 year-old girls, but... ogh I have to write about this in my blog, in Bulgarian. I'm sure I will sound more convincing..
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