I forgot my lunch in the car yesterday. It’s taken me ten years to avert a near mental breakdown, filled with anger, despair, depression, and self-deprecation, whenever an event like this occurs in my life. Yesterday, I exhaled the temptation to curse this oversight, and dealt with the fact that I would have a less-than-relaxing lunch. Damage control was more important than the oversight itself.
However, I was still the casualty of a simple mid-morning task — I believe my supervisor overheard me cursing for the first time at work. Yes, I regret those muttered frustrations beneath my breath. This was a frustration-kind-of-cursing; I managed to skirt and avoid disciplined, detail-oriented work – the kind I have to squint and furrow my brow in order to complete – for most of these last three semesters. When I struggled through the simple math, fine print of college per-diem rates, and line-by-line exactness and logic of three very simple travel request forms, fifteen years of failure in the Detail Department reared their ugly heads and began to feed upon my ego, pride, and ultimately, my self-control.
I don’t remember what I cursed, but I do remember my supervisor politely asking me to take a break when I came to a good stopping point.
That’s when I realized I was lazy and undisciplined in my thought. And no amount of justification (i.e., attention deficit disorder, “this-is-who-I-am,” or, “I need more sleep”), could curtail this reality.
The shame I felt was a good thing. It made me humble, and further illuminated the truth at the core of my work as a consultant at the Loudoun Campus Writing Center.
Undisciplined thought leads to undisciplined writing.
In an article by Philip Atkinson, “Language is Understanding,” he uses a very clever citation from the Report of the Departmental Committee on the Teaching of English in England in 1921:
“What a man cannot state he does not perfectly know, and conversely the inability to put his thoughts into words sets a boundary to his thought… . English is not merely the medium of our thought; it is the very stuff and process of it.”
I have enclosed the link to the entire article, and Atkinson’s points, here. I am indebted to one of my co-workers for introducing the Writing Center theme his thoughts. I have them posted on my bulletin board at home as a reminder. The article should be required reading for everyone: educators, students, parents, or general “users” of the English language. We have fallen out of the graces of good writing, and according to this article by Atkinson, good writing is a direct byproduct of good thinking. Or, in other words, disciplined thinking.
I worked very hard for seven years to be able to write under any circumstance. I placed myself in busy cafes, wrote late at night, early in the morning, with or without exuberant amounts of caffeine (and sometimes other aids), and made a habit of being able to spew out my thoughts in a somewhat orderly fashion. While they may have sounded correct, and were often sprinkled with flowery turns-of-phrase, they were nonetheless the ejaculations of a mind too lazy to really think things through. The essence and spirit of thought were all there in my writing, in whatever form I chose – whether poetry, non-fiction, fiction, or song – but the discipline, the math, the very rationale of the whole thinking, was not.
Thus, I see the reason for my cursing at having to read fine print – or what I unfairly call, “boring print”. I was reminded of Atkinson’s article later in the afternoon, when I felt my day-dreaming more a transfixed reality, and understood it was a good topic for this blog. Because I am a student, and because you are students, we can never forget the importance of disciplined thinking.
So, in the spirit of Atkinson’s article, use plain English, and think in plain English. And to be fair, I’ll count myself among you. Next time, I’ll double-check the fine print and remember my lunch.