I Can’t Write Papers Anymore

I have not written any sort of essay, paper, or thesis since April 2010. To top that off, I have been (intensively) studying nothing but Mandarin Chinese since September. So, let’s imagine for a second what happened when I tried to write my term paper proposal for my only English class this semester, Chinese Media Studies.

If you guessed that it sucked, that’s a very, very kind guess.

I can’t seem to string together a coherent argument anymore. My sentences have become repetitive, identically structured, and lack the power of persuasion an argumentative research paper is meant to contain. A lot of this is probably because I’m simply out of practice at writing papers, but I think I’m also out of practice with using the English language in a formal context. Or in any context, really. Yesterday, it took a friend and I five minutes to come up with the correct English definition of the Chinese word “矛盾” (textbook definition is contradiction or contradictory, but I find a more accurate definition is conflict or conflicted). It wasn’t that we didn’t know how to use the word in Chinese, we just couldn’t think of how to explain the meaning in English!

Right now, I have a (very) rough term paper proposal written up. Every time I read it over in an attempt to fix the many things wrong with my writing, I cringe. I’m a communications major; writing is my passion. I’m good at it, dammit. But now my writing reads like English isn’t my native language. The writing in my proposal has a slight awkwardness and stilted feeling to it – and that has never, ever happened to me before, no matter what type of writing.

I guess it’s nice that my professor’s first language isn’t English, so maybe he’ll look kindly at my much-left-to-be-desired essay writing, at least for this proposal. But now I’m worried about how I’m going to cope with my classes senior year, when I’m taking the last couple course requirements for my comm major…

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.