Writing

I don’t like to talk about my teaching on here, because I don’t blog anonymously and I really want to keep my job. Not that I’m likely to say anything offensive, because I do love teaching—I find there’s no job so stimulating as teaching young adults, and my students are invariably engaged and engaging. But they haven’t signed up for the courses to be blogged about.

But, I feel it’s safe to start this entry with something I’ve noticed while teaching writing courses: every semester, students claim that, outside university assessment, they simply don’t write. They back down from this position when I point out that, for example, e-mail, SMS, and online instant messaging count as writing. But it prompted me to list for one class the kinds of writing that I undertake regularly, and it surprised even me.

(I’m coming back to this entry a day late, after those rants about my temperamental car, and I’ll probably be interrupted again shortly when Nick returns with dinner. But in the interim I’ve been thinking further about this.)

When I spoke to my students about the variety of types of writing that I produced regularly, I was still in the process of completing my thesis. And one of the things that I found so challenging but also so fascinating about that work was the variety of different ways of organising material that that one document contained.

It had the usual components of an Eng. Lit. thesis: chapters that varied between connecting my object of study to a broader school of thought and close analysis of the texts, sections—such as the introduction and conclusion—that served largely to impose hierarchical structure on the work, a beautifully formatted bibliography (my supervisor said to me, “I was going to say this was one of the cleanest bibliographies I’d seen—then I saw that you’d put all your full stops outside the inverted commas.” Damn.), a Literature Review.

Ah, the Literature Review. How I hated writing you. You’re boring, and depressing, and you bring with you a constant anxiety that in boiling down a hundred years of theory on nineteenth-century fiction I might, conceivably, have missed something really important. But I got through you, thanks to a Jonathan Rose article that raised as many questions for me as it answered—it focused on working-class auto-didacts, which was too narrow for my purposes, and emphasised that working-class authors mentioned Dickens more often than they mentioned G. W. M. Reynolds. Sure, they did; it’s a matter of self-representation, though, isn’t it? And Reynolds still outsold Dickens by some magnitude, so someone was reading him.

Still, Rose is a superb scholar, the article was a fantastic response to claims that nineteenth-century, working-class readers could not grasp classics such as The Iliad, and his encapsulation of the difference between “old” and “new” book history methods was the catalyst that allowed me to get a grip on my Literature Review, for which I will be forever grateful.

But I also had vital sections in my thesis that relied on forms of writing that I’d never undertaken before.

I had one appendix that reproduced the contents of a nineteenth-century album, the absolutely pivotal find in my research, which enabled me to extend the work beyond a single author to draw conclusions about the field of publishing in which she worked. Most of this appendix was made up of a series of reproduced photographs, but organising this material and writing brief but illuminating captions was a challenge.

Then there were two further appendices, both indices to fiction in nineteenth-century penny weeklies. I would never have undertaken one of these if I had realised that it would take the better part of a year. The first—a short-lived, fiction-specific journal called Fiction for Family Reading, which I’ve already mentioned in conjunction with half-naked princesses—only took three days, because the run was so brief.

I knew Bow Bells—which I indexed from 1864 to 1881: 34 volumes in total—would take longer, but a year? I didn’t anticipate that. And I had no idea how time-consuming and intricate it would be to keep this material in order. Or that it would end up adding 164 pages to my thesis. Still, scholarship on penny weeklies suffers under a lack on indexing projects, and I don’t regret doing it. I do regret the fact that it was on microfilm, and working on it therefore triggered my motion sickness, but that’s out of my control.

Then there was the gem of my thesis, in my mind, anyway—my bibliography of the works of Eliza Winstanley. I’m still feeling a little bit smug about the number of works I managed to confirm as hers. But I’d never produced a critical bibliography before, and the fun was in trying to find a format that was immediately accessible but also included as the necessary information.

(Well, no—the real fun was being able to attribute twenty-one anonymous works to her by cross-referencing the journal contents with advertisements in The Times, but I admit that that doesn’t sound like fun.)

But then, as I pointed out to my students, there are all those other, more casual forms of writing.

E-mails have to be written every day: formal ones to students and colleagues, and informal ones to family and friends.

There’s Pownce, which I joined relatively late but love as a private, convenient way to hold conversations with friends when I should be doing other things. And, speaking of Pownce, whither the Pownce, friends? Whither the Pownce? Don’t let it die.

I’ve been doing two kinds of marking, lately: informal global feedback on non-assessed work and formal feedback on assessment.

Slightly more frivolous are Facebook status updates: I do enjoy reading them, though. As a friend of mine mentioned recently, it’s like communicating by SMS, without actually having to send the messages. Of course, they’re much more fun now that we’re not restricted to “is” verb forms.

I’ve also written a book review lately, and thought about ways to write more.

I have a teaching reference for a colleague due in ten days, and am still marking—two different types of assessment for two different grades of students.

And then there’s this blog, which I thoroughly enjoy writing but can’t update every day.

I’m sure I mentioned more types, when I was talking to my students, but if so, they’ve slipped my mind. Nevertheless, given the list I’ve managed to remember so far, I think I should probably stop feeling self-conscious about saying that I write for a living.

Well, that and get on with writing (and hopefully publishing) some journal articles.