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blergh
again with a tutorial that went a lot better than i thought i had any right to expect. i'd written an essay that i genuinely consider to be among the bottom-three worst papers i've ever written (description to Homegirl L and Son of a Preacher Man: 'no, seriously, it blew solid chunks'), and the professor said it was a generally fine essay that could just have benefitted from some more examples.
this is approximately the same thing the morphology prof said yesterday, only he framed it the other way: 'you come along to tutorials,' he said, 'and you say really interesting things and make really good points, but they don't ever find their way into your essays. you could be the most brilliant student in the university, and nobody would know it because you're not writing any of it down.' he said i should, in my essays, ask more questions. i said i think i might have a sort of subconscious sense of not wanting to raise a question i can't answer in the same essay. he said that may indeed be it, but i should get over it and stat.
fair enough. so i need to give more examples and not be afraid to demonstrate that i don't actually know anything, and that will be better.
le sigh. first: a nap.
this is approximately the same thing the morphology prof said yesterday, only he framed it the other way: 'you come along to tutorials,' he said, 'and you say really interesting things and make really good points, but they don't ever find their way into your essays. you could be the most brilliant student in the university, and nobody would know it because you're not writing any of it down.' he said i should, in my essays, ask more questions. i said i think i might have a sort of subconscious sense of not wanting to raise a question i can't answer in the same essay. he said that may indeed be it, but i should get over it and stat.
fair enough. so i need to give more examples and not be afraid to demonstrate that i don't actually know anything, and that will be better.
le sigh. first: a nap.
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Raising a question that you don't directly and immediately answer is not evidence of not knowing anything, it is evidence of not knowing everything, and that is an entirely different issue.
Particularly with essays and journal articles, the form is limiting. You are stuck with a finite amount of space in which to deal with a given topic as best you can. It is absolutely cricket for questions to arise that cannot be answered in that amount of space. If you go on waiting for a space big enough to answer them all in, you'll never ever answer any of them -- because, as I can tell you from almost 700 pages into what is for all intents and purposes a very large monograph, there is never enough room for all of them.
And that's okay. You need to leave other people in the field something to do. ;)
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