Help I think Grad School Ruined my Ability to Write

I just finished a graduate program in English, and while I think the experience was worthwhile, my writing has become horrible, or I've become a lot more self-conscious about my writing.

I used to feel that what I wrote was concise and to the point, but now it is circuitous and over-complicated. Even worse, I don't feel like I can order my thoughts coherently anymore.

I ready way too much Derrida and Walter Benjamin, and I seem to have only picked up the worst attributes of both of them as habits of my own.

What should I do now? It's gotten to the point that it's stressful to even shitpost around here. Should I start reading more novels and less theory again, perhaps writers with concise and simple prose? Are there any good writing practices to help you jump out of obscurantist lit-crit writing mode and back into something coherent?

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bbc.com/capital/story/20161028-native-english-speakers-are-the-worlds-worst-communicators
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>Should I start reading more novels and less theory again, perhaps writers with concise and simple prose? Are there any good writing practices to help you jump out of obscurantist lit-crit writing mode and back into something coherent?

plz answer if you're truly Veeky Forums

>I read way too much Derrida and Walter Benjamin
So you gave the academic system jews have destroyed tens of thousands of dollars so you could read the writing of jews pretending to be western philosophers, and now you're surprised everything you write is jewish gobbledygook? Serves you right.

Seriously though, I wasted plenty of time pretending to "get" that hebraic nonsense in my younger years before I understood the jewish problem. You'll get over it.

>Was into Baudrillard last week.
>Is into Kevin MacDonald this week.
>Will be into Jordan Peterson next week.

10/10, m8, please just kill me now.

OP, I'm also in grad school, I try to tell myself not to write like how my peers write. Some good advice, too, is to read the classics (like, the Greeks.) They're as satisfying as you found Derrida and Benjamin, but they also have the benefit of 1) not being Derrida and Benjamin, and 2) writing in a clear style.

Does one go from MacDonald to Peterson? I don't know anything about Peterson but was under the impression that he was for people not yet willing to entertain the jewish question.

>I ready way too much Derrida and Walter Benjamin

I can now personally understand: "ignorance is bliss"

holy fuck please leave. reading greeks will not help you with daily correspondence. you are fucking moronic.

>The clear prose of Xenophon does not help one view the world manfully and without illusions.
>The inquiries of Herodotus do not give wonder and meaning to life.
>Aeschylus' and Sophocles' plays don't help one face both the demand for justice and the manifold injustice of living in society.

The only bad ones are Aristotle and Euripides desu.

OP, you should try journaling and allowing yourself to write as tersely or as purple-y as you want. Try out other prose styles besides the thick meat pie of academic writing. Journaling will also help you organize your thoughts without the compulsive need to cite every last claim that academia instills.

o, hey look at all dees rebbit spacing it-a make me dink, o do it makin' me dink, that maydee dis b ribbit hangout nowdays no me sayin ya see

like-a

dis 'ere

I mean I got paid to go. It was pretty fun actually.

I mean, it's tough. I went to grad school because of how much I enjoyed literary criticism. The puzzle of deciphering dense continental-philosophy was really fun, but it has kind of stunted my ability to enjoy literature. I'm having a hard time re-teaching myself to just read for pleasure and contemplation without looking for a cool angle to analyze a text.

Anyway, I kind of suspect I'm just better equipped to criticize my own writing habits and style. I was probably just as bad before or nearly as bad, but it doesn't make it any less frustrating.

The worst part was I definitely got too detail oriented in my writing. I spent most of my thesis picking apart Benjamin and Derrida, and not enough talking about the literature I was looking at. It was pretty much just all resisting them and not saying much new about the works I discussed to the point that if I were to redo it, I would probably just avoid talking about Benjamin and Derrida altogether. It was a great learning experience, but I have no confidence in myself to go on to a PhD program until I fix my bad writing habits.

Aw shucks, I really like Euripides a lot.

This has been the biggest advantage I've seen for creative-writing track students. They feel more comfortable writing and also have an innate sense of writing style. I agree that writing in other contexts will probably be helpful. I've been planning on writing some plays, but they're so different in format that I don't think it will help as much as writing something with more narrative prose. Journaling does sound like a good idea.

Yo dawg; I absolutely feel your struggle, man. I did a 155-page Masters Thesis in Digital Composition, and everything afterward was straight-up robot talk. I don't even know how not to perform a rhetorical analysis of what I'm consuming anymore... I've gone full Hofstadter with the levels of meta I reflexively apply. This can be a curse.

However, eventually, you resolve the issue by embracing the inevitable ego-death that comes with deconstruction of the society and self, and read the zeitgeist itself to arrive at the conclusion that it really isn't ever about finding "your" voice - nor has it ever been, for anyone. It's about finding the *right* voice for the moment. And every moment is different. You learn to break the patterns and think about what should be said - what the most necessary, crucial, fundamental assumption is that, once addressed and properly contextualized, might resolve the disparity that stands at the center of the issue.

Ethos is a bitch, though - we live in a culture where we are so early and often trained to look first at the identity of the speaker that we have forgotten to read the fucking message itself. I swear, sometimes I think people would argue anything, no matter how fundamental or central an axiom it may seem to be, based solely on the mouth from which it came. This is toxicity. This is the cancer. We need to break through.

Anonymity is the solution to this, of course. Why is street art so powerful? Because we still can't prove who Banksy is. It's just there. It's a fucking force of nature, and we can do no more than read it for what it is, an authorless missive into the cold, gray night. It's fucking beautiful.

This may have gone off-point a bit, OP. I guess I'm saying that you should just write. Write in as many voices as you can imagine, and do it often and with reckless abandon. Do it here. Do it on walls. Do it on trains.

Write.

You never wrote anything valuable, but now you are able to recognize it, that's all.

Writing is its most coherent when it is least immediately comprehensible. 'concise' and 'simple' prose are American memes that reduces prose to something merely descriptive.

I'm not OP, but this post is exactly what I needed. Thanks.

bbc.com/capital/story/20161028-native-english-speakers-are-the-worlds-worst-communicators

>In a room full of non-native speakers, ‘there isn’t any chance of understanding’. It might be their language, but the message is often lost.

>“A lot of native speakers are happy that English has become the world’s global language. They feel they don’t have to spend time learning another language,” says Chong. “But… often you have a boardroom full of people from different countries communicating in English and all understanding each other and then suddenly the American or Brit walks into the room and nobody can understand them.”

>The non-native speakers, it turns out, speak more purposefully and carefully, typical of someone speaking a second or third language. Anglophones, on the other hand, often talk too fast for others to follow, and use jokes, slang and references specific to their own culture, says Chong. In emails, they use baffling abbreviations such as ‘OOO’, instead of simply saying that they will be out of the office.

>“The native English speaker… is the only one who might not feel the need to accommodate or adapt to the others,” she adds.

Your post reads fine enough. But be wary that that's the entire point of modern English programs, to melt the minds of otherwise prospective intellectuals so they can no longer do productive work. Stop reading postmodern bullshit.

>I mean I got paid to go. It was pretty fun actually.
If you aren't paying for the product then you are the product. Did you produce anything of value under conditions not even worthy of the average wageslave? No? Then you were another victim of Jewish academia. I admire your bravery for going under the knife but you must realize that you just suffered an intellectual lobotomy.

>The only bad ones are Aristotle and Euripides desu.
i wish we were friends irl

read some tabucchi, bro. he writes effortlessly, simple and comfy. get 'indian nocturne' or something

I'm in grad school too. The writers I use to preserve some sense of style amidst the absurd polysyllabic grad student jargon are Montaigne and Orwell. Essays are really the key. I'm sure you've read Orwell's Politics and the English Language. I re-read it every few months so I don't end up sounding like my peers.

You might also check out Steven Pinker's recent book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Whatever you think of the guy, he's an undeniably clear writer.

And holy shit writing a dissertation on Derrida in 2017. Literally no one is going to read that. I wish you luck on the job market.

What was the topic of your Masters Thesis? I want to hear more from you wise one.

In the near future, (((((((((((((((((((they)))))))))))))))))) will spearhead a social movement to neuter the English language of any nuance or character. Not only is the English used by native speakers inefficient for business, but it's also biased against immigrants and third worlders. Slang, jokes, and cultural references are bad and unintelligent because they make it harder for brown people to create wealth.

This is why President Michelle Obama will institute mandatory word per minute speeds to ensure that anglophones don't speak at a rate incomprehensible to Indian call center technicians. Discussions in public spheres will have quotas for non-native speakers so that racist native English speakers don't dominate discussions. Poetry, sarcasm, and polysyllabic words will be outlawed, and retard anglophones will be mocked on late night television talk shows if they use slang

I'd agree. OP from another device here. My non-native English speaking girlfriend has proofread some of my writing before, and she always does a better job than I do by a lot. I feel kind of bad because most of what I've taught her about the English language is how to speak poorly like people from my part of America, how to smush words together and use improper grammar convincingly like a native speaker.

I'm actually reading Homage to Catalonia right now. It's sort of calming.

Yeah it was only a thesis, not a dissertation, and I have other more polished and diverse writing samples for PhD program applications, so I'll be fine. Luckily, the thesis was just a department requirement, so it wasn't even published. Also, it mostly focused on Walter Benjamin and only cited Derrida tangentially to talk about his citations of Benjamin for what it's worth (not a lot).

It was a good learning opportunity. I'm going to wait a few years before applying for doctorate programs. I need to find a better focus that will actually be marketable if I'm going to go back. I'm also thinking about avoiding an English department if I can. I'd love to do the MFA in dramaturgy at Yale. They have a solid faculty, and their graduates tend to go on to have success in both the academy and outside of it (Writer of Moonlight graduated from there for instance), but I'd hate to spend three years in a program while still needing to go through a PhD program somewhere else to get a tenure track position (and even then, the odds would be super low). I'm also thinking about comp lit departments and theory departments (if getting a job is my goal, I recognize the irony).

we're talking about clear and concise writing.

greek translations have completely diff style and meter you assfuck. kill yourself, even if you're memeing.

nobody's talking about world view or philosophy. how stupid are you?

would love to hear more about grad school

god please dont let this happen

It is just simply what the School of Resentment has morphed into over time my students. Please! Hurry! There is still hope for us all!

I foresee a Koine English being spoken internationally, but High English will continue to be spoken in important areas.

>retard anglophones will be mocked on late night television talk shows if they use slang

That already does happen, look at the cash me outside girl. But the truth is, we understood her, but someone from Kenya wouldn't. Shakespeare wrote in slang.

lmao, if only Veeky Forums knew how true this actually was

>tfw I'm a Cortázar and Bolaño scholar at a LATAM uni
>have written multiple essays on both
>kinda hate both because of it
>can't read Hopscotch like I used to because I have simply prostituted what once was my favorite book too much

The problem with making a living out of literature, especially when it comes to analyzing texts in a semi-respectable manner, is that what was once fun is now just your job.

>What should I do know?
Read fiction. No supplementary texts, nothing. Leave index cards, notebooks, your cellphone, memo pads, anything out of your room and just read the book.

write a concept album about it

You sound interesting.

Like, you're sort of ignoring the fact that essentially the entire tradition of "Academia" stems from the uniquely Talmudic tradition of annotating and carrying on discussion through threaded textual analysis, and it may represent the first instance of lexical conversation across the span of centuries. Scholarship begins with this tradition, and the tradition, once disentangled from specifically religious affiliation, provided a framework for basically the foundation of "Western Thought" (as it spread from the Middle East throughout the surrounding areas). Or, maybe you're not and this is the exegesis of your wry commentary that is so unlikely to be understood by the average browser that you didn't have the heart to elucidate. Not sure.