Writing

I've been working on (read: currently avoiding) a paper for my public health law class for about a month or so. It's short, by most grad-level-academia standards - anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 words (I'm at around 4,000 now and expect to come in somewhere between 4,500 and 5,000). I've been working on it for about a month because I'm more than a little rusty and writing has become a bit like pulling teeth. I used to do this sort of thing a lot - I was an English minor once upon a time. But it's been years since I had to write more than a few pages without the assistance of tables and graphs and results to interpret and I'm finding that things like sentence structure and transitions and a narrative line are challenging. Mostly in a good way. It feels a little like yoga for the other side of my brain. I'm hoping that in the end this will better prepare me for the Real Thing (aka The Dissertation) but for now I'm just really tired of flailing around with a particularly horrible paragraph. It's got good facts in it, but man it's just painful to read. And I've been sitting here reading it over and over, trying to figure out how to fix it, taking a break, reading blogs, refilling on coffee, coming back and hoping fresh eyes will clue me in to some way to improve things...so far, no luck. Sigh.