2026/03/01
i've been stuck on this idea I read that you should (essentially) always synthesize your personal notes. it's so productivity mindset based. which, yeah, i know. maybe it comes with the profession. knowing exactly what someone says is pretty important for me. i want the rhythm they pronounced it to me with. the resonance of the key. uhms and buts are animal prints for my journey. what voice does a person have if i take their words away and substitute for my own? am i still giving life to their will?
sidebar: i’m well aware of what i would sit down and tell myself.
well yeah, part of being a good writer is being able to capture the same meaning without directly quoting a source***
how i hate to argue with myself. what if i got too enamored with the paraphrase? have i myself been stripping people’s own connections out of my work by merely giving them a sentence summary? why must we be taught to carefully place quotes within an over structure of a sentence to appear skilled at writing? am i quieting voices?
i fear i forgot the power of voice. i am hyper focused on the end and not the means. this simply will not do. i embrace the chaotic tangles of unclean narratives and hanging quotes and orphan quotes and i will never ever give up my oxford fucking comma and i will use footnotes for my inane commentary and it’ll feel like Dave Eggers in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and you won’t know where up is down and all around. i must unlearn the rote writing i was programmed to perform. what else do i have, if not voice? what else can i do but preserve the voice of others? syntax is all about the illustration of voice. you can feel it on words alone. how delightful is that?
to learn to be a good writer is to throw everything you were taught about writing in a pit and picking out which pieces work for you and chucking them in a blender and making a style smoothie. my writing must become a practice of unlearning the limited expressive form of academia.
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