The cushion

Oh, how I pondered what the legacy of my university years would be!

I didn’t really, I just made that up to give this some context.

For the past fortnight, I’ve been writing a draft submission for a magazine and halfway through I realised that my writing was too academic. When I write for someone else, the words tense up.

That pun was unintentional, I swear.

It read like the worst kind of academic essay. Sentences that meandered, wandered back on track, then wandered off again and eventually came to a half-buried point.

It’s not that academic writing is always bad. Sometimes it’s good and occasionally it’s brilliant, but I think writing academically for years has made me anxious about expressing an opinion. It’s so much easier to faff about in an essay, to inflate paragraphs with imperious, noncommittal phrases like ‘One might wonder’ and ‘It could be argued’.

I remember only one tutor who suggested to a roomful of skeptical second-years that we shouldn’t be afraid of using ‘I’ in an essay. We eyed her warily. Who was this loon to encourage a leap into first person narrative? Everything I’d been taught from high school onwards rebelled against it.

I’m finding it hard to write sentences without feeling the need to qualify them. The difference between saying that something seems and something is. To say that something is takes practice because there’s nothing to cushion the opinion.

It’s sitting there unguarded.

This isn’t going to turn into a spiel about the public/private tension on blogs because as a former media and communications student, that topic has been covered. It is strange, though, that I’ve felt far less anxious about writing here and clicking ‘publish’.

Depending on my mood, it’s the healthiest and the riskiest thing I do.