College

Hello one, hello all,

How have you all been?  Have you been able to keep up with writing as school starts?

Me, I'm doing fairly well, considering I have a 7:45 A.M. college class two days out of the week this semester.  (Thankfully, it's probably the easiest class that exists at the college I'm attending.  I feel like the college took all the dual-enrolling students and stuffed them into the same class along with a teacher professor [ugh, title differences] who was a former elementary school teacher.  Needless to say, it's looking like a high school class so far, i.e. cake.  ^.^)

Anyway, I know I normally blog about fictional stories, and I know I've mentioned school and writing before.  However, because I've solely been writing college application essays, an audio-essay competition submission, and some lab reports, I've come to realize how utterly vital it is that authors learn, not only how to write professionally, but how to write professionally in various voices.

Here's what I mean:

In my college applications, I was instructed to write with a strong personality and with extreme conciseness.  While this may not seem apparent, those two conditions are strict opposites.  .-.  I can't be terse, because that's rude, but I also can't be expressive, because that's not brief.  Then, they tell you that it's also good to throw in some subtle and intelligent humor, but to still be earnest and humble at the same time.  I mean, this is legitimately my college application essay life:

I'm not kidding, folks.

Then, in speech essays, especially if your speech is more of a toast than a debate, you've got to learn to write professionally with a full, rich vocabulary and strong sentence variations while still writing flowery, as if you were writing poetry or description.  You've got to use grand allusions and expanded anecdotes, but you have to tie everything back to a main thesis.  It's like...writing a research paper using story-writing technique with elements of both all jammed together.  I mean, come onnn.  We're not all Aragorn:

Bla bla, whatever, show off.

As a polar opposite to speech essays, lab reports demand that you never use the active voice or try to be creative in the slightest.  Every sentence must be "the temperature of the mixture was taken" and never "I took the temperature of the mixture".  In fact, everything that you learned in English class is defenestrated by Lab class.  You never vary your sentence openers, and all of your creative juices are channeled into you, figuring out how to write as briefly as is humanly possible.

Ah, anyway, as you can see, right now, the challenge of professional writing voices is still a conundrum to me.  When (or...if, hehe) I get through this semester and submit all of my papers, I'll do my best to write a follow-up post on what I found specifically helpful.  In the meanwhile, if you have any advice, the comment box will thirstily drink up aid.  And, as always...

Write on - hopefully not on tedious, paradoxical projects like me!
Clove