Essays

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So I was talking to my advisor yesterday. I mentioned that I wanted to take only one essay-heavy course at a time. She suggested that I check out the writing center for help with writing. I explained that I have a book published and that I do technical reviews for publishers and that it's not a matter of skills.

The way I write essays is very tactile - I gather a lot of different bits and pieces of info in my head (and in a text file) and kind of move them around like puzzle pieces until they fit, and then start writing.

But - I can't do that with more than one essay at a time cuz the pieces would like, smush together, and interference waves would be set up and ....

I can't explain that to her. I just said I couldn't focus properly on more than one essay at a time.

But - does anyone else here do essays this way?

I grok.

My college had just past a rule (this was 1993) when I got there where every
class you had to do writing! Yes I did papers in swim class, aerobic walking, chemistry, Physic it was crazy.
Oh and if you take too many science classes like I did you will find the lab for
each science class is infact just like taking a second class!

I have trouble with writing essays, but I do mean well.

I think it has something to do with the inability in us to use words.

Have you taken the new SAT with the essay section? I thought that was bunk. They expect you to write an essay in 20 minutes. I did great on every other part of the test except for that.

If I ever plan an essay I get the bare essentials onto paper then just write as it comes. Not a wonderful way because I deviate waaay too much and repeat myself and reword stuff in order to find the best way of expressing myself. Then I have to redraft it millions of times over ... I love essays if I'm allowed to ramble but if not then bleh. So I guess I can see what you're saying but don't quite do that myself.

If I remember correctly, AP World History test expected you to write three essays in about an hour, with fifteen minutes planning time. Frankly, I'm not too worried.

I don't mind essays; if I've got time I write out an outline, but if I'm just writing it straight onto paper I can usually keep my arguments nice and straight in my head.

I forgot to mention, I took the PSAT test before, and I did not have very much fun with it.

I always found the linear narrative form very difficult to write, whether in an essay or a short story, or any other written work. I struggle with linear learning paths for all subjects. I don't often have a sense of working things out, or thinking through what things might mean, or/and working through and figuring out a problem in a linear way. In my experience I learn all at once, seemingly instantaneously. I just "know" what to say and how to write it right away, without much deep thought at all. An entire paragraph will just appear in my mind. In fact, thinking through a problem and then trying to determine how to create the text word by word is very difficult for me. I either "get it" complete or I don't "get it" at all. For some reason I haven't quite put into words yet, I find my own "nonlinear" process very satisfying. I get a real kick out of it. The downside is when I don't "get" something, and then I often don't ever "get it" at all.


I really enjoy the feeling of having these words appear in my mind, writing them down, and then trying to decipher what the words mean and how my disparate paragraphs are connected to one another. I find this process to be a pleasurable experience. And it does work very well when I am given enough time and the resources to work through my process. When I was an undergraduate I co-wrote a paper that was published in an academic journal. I am not incapable, but I do think my process is somewhat different than the norm.

I'm not saying that I am a savant or a genius. Far from it. In fact, I've known many normals who seem much more capable than I am at writing or speaking about things. I WISH this process made me smarter or more capable. It doesn't necessarily make me any better than anyone else, but this process is how I learn and write. I guess it's just part of my struggle to do all things in a NT kind of way.

Anna, as I posted above, I can relate to your difficulty writing papers. I've now done a bit of research into this issue. I have read that aspies often have difficulties with constructing a coherent narrative and that this can be attributed to the aspie traits of having weak central coherence and poor narrative organization. But there's some good news along with that negative appraisal of our abilities.

I found a fascinating academic paper that talks about how the aspie mind constructs narratives. The paper was presented at a conference that was held by The Society for Critical Exchange in 2005. The SCE appears to be a critical theory think tank associated with a large American university. In 2005 the Society hosted a conference called "Representing Autism: Writing, Cognition, Disability."

You can find the website here: http://www.case.edu/affil/sce/Represent ... utism.html

There are many fascinating papers on the conference's website that explore aspie consciousness.

One of the papers is entitled: "Human, but more So: What the Autistic Brain Tells Us about the Process of Narrative."

According to this expert, all humans, autistic and non-autistic alike, have a human impulse to construct narratives from the otherwise chaotic and fragmentary nature of their experience. According to this expert, austic people often have a much more difficult time constructing narratives because we have weak central coherence and poor narrative organization. The good news is that, according to this expert, we have an abnormally intense drive to create order and meaning from the fragmentary nature of our perceptual abilities. That is, our "abnormal" drive to create order from the chaotic can result in "abnormally" deep insights.

The paper describes almost exactly the difficulties that I have had creating coherent papers. I start with fragments or bits of information and sensory impressions, and from there I find that I must work very hard to write these pieces of information into a coherent narrative. My insights into fragments of data and my analysis of text can be excellent, but I often fail to be able to put those insights into a coherent argument. I fail, not because of inability, but because I am not often given enough time or the resources to put my "abnormally deep" insights into a coherent or even readable form. Whether my insights are all that "deep' is something to be debated, but this paper does describe some difficulties with process and also the difficulties and successes that I have had writing papers.

What an awesome paper! Thank you for the pointer. This all makes so much sense to me. I especially loved the comment:
From a genetic perspective as well as from behavioural and neurophysiological perspectives, autism seems an extreme case of normality.

Anna

Yes, I caught that too. Just when I've learned to reclaim and take pride in being an oddball some expert comes along to say my real problem is that I'm too normal!

I had no trouble writing essays or research papers. Besides, in college you have to type everything. It's the law, almost. There is truly no handwriting involved. In fact, hand-written assignments aren't even accepted. So, that should be a major factor in helping many of us achieve. I used to think faster than I write, and I wrote extremely fast. I wrote so fast by hand as thoughts poured out of my head, that I started scrambling everything. And my hand would get tired. So, I am surely glad everything was typed.

I am good with grammar and exceptional in English, so writing was never a problem for me. It was book reports that were such a problem, but those are virtually nonexistent in college, unless you're taking literature or something.

I guess the only problem I could say I had was integrating research information with my own words. It was sort of strange, really, but I used to research information first and base my own words from what I researched. I always had the quotations at hand long before I added my own words to anything. I just fit them all in like a puzzle. It may have caused me a lower score at times, but it was nothing of a major problem.

- Ray M -

Other than the somewhat boastful exception above, I find it wonderful to finally see a thread about this. I've been in writing intensive courses for the past 5 years of college, which is an odd direction taken given that D'd my way through Intro English. WIth experience I soon found a way to move away from the incoherent jumbling I started with. (Side note: Grammar has never been a problem, and I don't think it's really relevant to a discussion about composition difficulties.)

I do, however, still have almost crippling problems with composition and writing speed. My writing process is a fragmentary affair. I can't just sit down and bang a paper out. My brain seems to tire or "fall off the train" quickly when I attempt writing that way. The way I've managed through the years is a schedule with regular breaks and spreading out the chore over as many days as possible. Even then, I procrastinate throughout the process. Another issue is that I only type 30-40 wpm, which really hurts given my already painfully slow mental composition rate. I've gotten a lot of A's this way, but I'll probably crash and burn when I can't work by my own schedule "in the real world" of an office job. Still, I love that this topic is being discussed, and I look forward to flicking my eye over those papers.

Edit: I forgot to note that I certainly wouldn't have made it into (a good) college if I had to face the SAT essay section. I scored 5.5 on the GRE analytical section, but back then I didn't stand a chance.