Dear Writing Fellow Selection Committee,
When I applied to be a Writing Fellow during the spring semester of my freshman year, I remember having some trouble with part B. Simply put, I hadn’t done enough college writing yet. After a spending much of that fall and winter holed away in Barus and Holley, MacMillan, and the BioMed Center, I didn’t have a large stable of essays that satisfied the application’s injunction against submitting writing samples from high school. And it surely didn’t help that I thought “discuss the paper’s strengths and weaknesses” actually meant that I should summarize my essays and tell your predecessors why they were good.
Knowing all of that, I’m sure you’re not surprised that I wasn’t chosen.
Now that I’ve spent much (most?) of the last two years writing, I have plenty of essays to choose from. But there have been more important evolutions in my writing and thinking about writing since my last letter. It feels like my writing has taken me on a broad tour of Brown; during my three years here I’ve visited MCM seminar rooms, experimental physics laboratories, philosophy lecture halls, the Brown Daily Herald newsroom, and the Indy’s flannel-filled quarters in Faunce. I feel lucky to have both written explanations of theoretical physics concepts for science TAs with limited English and shared the BDH Op-Ed page with Sean Quigley. I’ve even tried my hand at a writing seminar.
Switching back and forth from these different disciplines has done more than just give me a long list of places to flip open my laptop. It has, I hope, kept my writing fresh. By continually moving from one mode to another, I’ve been forced to keep thinking about my writing. And it’s not just about keeping track of which jargon word box I’m working with at that moment; everything about the writing process from the ways sentences should flow, and what formal structures to deploy, to how quickly my fingers move across the keyboard changes from one day - or hour - to the next. When I’m able to successfully resist the turbulence of all these confusing shifts in style, I end up spending more time than I realize thinking about such writerly concerns as audience, tone, and pacing.
Through it all, I would like to think that I’ve developed a much more nuanced and thoughtful approach to writing for each of these venues. Most importantly, all of this academic agitation has, I hope, prevented my prose from getting stuck in a particular style. In my lines of work - epistemology, physics, post-structural theory - this would be a real danger, since the pressures of rigor can stultify writing just as easily as gently settled silt can turn to rock.
I don’t blame the selection committee for turning me away a few years ago. It was as much the right decision for me as it was for the program. That said, I think that my writing has grown almost as much as I have in the interim, and I’d love to be a Writing Fellow next year. I’d like to think that I might be able to add something, even if it’s only my own productive confusion.
Sincerely,
Nick
One Comment
It’s frightening how much your writing sounds like mine in this piece. Is it that you are writing about writing and about how you think, topics I’ve written about myself many times over the years? Or is it that without the philosophical stylings of much of your recent work, your cadences resemble mine?
What’s even stranger is that I also hear echoes of my mother’s writing in yours. I suppose it’s not so odd for family resemblances to emerge among writers from the same family. I’d just never noticed those resemblances so clearly before.