Huzzah! I just finished and turned in the first draft of my first paper for my Master’s Degree in Communications and Leadership.
It is the draft of my Personal Philosophy of Communication paper.
Before starting the course I didn’t know I needed a philosophy of communication. Wasn’t hard for me. I’m always having a philosophy about things.
All 25 of us in the class are supposed to put our draft papers out on the class discussion board (it is an online degree and course), and then read each other’s papers and make comments on the material. After getting a good start trying to be critical in editing my draft paper, I found it dangerously easy to want to pull out my metaphorical editing pencil when reading the other student’s papers. Once an editor, always an editor.
Some of the papers I read I found good — the editing pencil wanted to come out and knock off the occasional word to tighten things up Other papers are so vaguely dense with passive tense and corporate jargon-speak that trying to find out what is being said is a chore. I felt tempted to quote Chesterton from Orthodoxy:
Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought… Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable… The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn” tan in the word “degeneration.”
The paper was to be 2-3 pages long. I felt I was keeping it short, and it ended up being 4 pages. I do have a lot of short paragraphs and tabs for bullet points, so it isn’t text heavy. Some of the others had very long paragraphs. Long paragraphs don’t read well on computers.
Anyway, finished, filed, and reading done. Time to rest.
At The Rainbow 