doruk balcı

reclaiming my writing

I gotta be honest with you: working in academia, especially in a STEM field such as computer science is changing how I write and I need to do something about it. When so much of your writing is evaluated and critiqued based on how rigorous and clear it is you find yourself building scaffolding around everything you write. You pretext everything you want to say by trying to guess different ways it can be critiqued. You might also lose the sharpness, boldness or the weirdness of your writing. This is not something I am willing to lose.

Another thing that might happen is that you might find yourself comfortable writing about things you have domain expertise over, finding and situating yourself into more specific niches. This is okay, these specific niches are something I love, but also they are not things I want to be ruled over. It might have been okay if academic writing was the only thing I cared about, but it is not.

It is so easy to lose a part of your writing, how you express yourself through language when so much of your practice needs to work through a bunch of systemic conditions like this (which I think is relevant to more than academia). In computer science, so much of writing is about communicating results, and resembles report writing. This is something I can do, but it is not something I want to bleed so much into how I express myself, how I make meaning in my inner world.

Adding to this that my first language isn’t english, meaning that how I express myself in english is already more detached than how I express myself in turkish (my native language), I sometimes feel in the risk of losing my genuinity in language, being stuck in expressing myself mechanically.

To remedy this situation, I have decided to give more time into different kinds of writing which I do not have to feel the same constraints. I already journal and write for myself in english quite a lot too but there are different processes that come to the surface when you are writing with an audience in mind.

Secondly: I am also going to make big claims, mega arguments, generalizing theories about things I care about. I think there should be a place where I can just say things without necessarily thinking what Reviewer 2 would think about it. For this post specifically, I want to give a list of what I think Life is About, completely subjective, un-scientific, not supported by anything besides what I feel.

I love having little projects. I love having little gardens in the back of my head which I can keep feeding, make time for, let them grow and make me grow in the process too. They are beautiful things to get excited about, things which take up their own lives. Projects that do not necessarily carry a sense of urgency or high stakes, but which are there only because we want them there, because they make life more interesting.

Work sends many projects in our way which we often do not participate in intentionally anyway. When we feel like we are losing agency regarding what we can give our attention and energy to, it feels good to have spaces which we can come back and feed intentionally.

I will write more about the projects I’m working on at my monthly review post. Until then here are some other things I think life is about to get in the mood of making Big Claims.

Rest of these are not elaborated, do with them what you will. Take care.