My writing habit

My personal writing habits definitely resemble her process of writing food reviews: xx-ing out sentences, editing and re-editing them until frustration dawns. The bulk of what I have written in my life thus far have been academic papers, and I have adopted habits that (I believe) best suit this sort of analytical and argumentative essays. Unlike Anne, I have never written a single draft in my life. My writing process is probably as smooth as 405 during the evening commuter hours. I agonize over each and every sentence, adding prepositional phrases one after another into every nook and cranny of the sentence. It often takes me more than 5 minutes to finish one single sentence, and I usually take breaks after a few have been written in a row, feeling quite satisfied. Once a sentence is written I seldom go back. I like to think of my style of writing as an organic/vegetative process, a paper that slowly grows and matures sentence by sentence. One significant downside: reading it is an organic/vegetative process too.

I also like caffeine binging into the single-digit AM hours. Not that I feel that my mind is sharper at night, nor is it because caffeine activates my muse, but because I like the sense of martyrdom that you get from working all-nighters and because it is the only thing that can overcome unscrupulous procrastination. Due to caffeine and laziness, I like taking frequent bathroom breaks while I am writing. I also enjoy bi-directional pacing—it’s a good contemplative look in the corner of the library. Keeping an open internet connection while I am writing is also important as it gives me access to dictionaries and thesauruses and ESPN.com as well as other bits of entertainment. In sum I enjoy putting myself in peril of distractions and procrastinations when I write because despite the quality of my writing, the finished product will always be a triumphant result with that “against-all-odds” feel.