I have come late to the essay. When little, letter writing was common and I wrote often about daily life. When not so little I bought a portable typewriter and continued writing letters while preparing for the first novel. But secondary education intruded and the novel was postponed. Writing the high school essay was, initially, a struggle but I advanced; I enjoyed assembling a text for comment. Then came the tertiary essay and following the required format was not too much of a problem. The difficulty came with post-graduate writing; far more serious and difficult. David Foster Wallace[1] summarizes Academic English as:

… a cancer that has metastasized … to afflict scholarly writing. … Orwell, who 50 years ago had ÂE pegged as a ‘mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence” in which “it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning’.

I agree. A friend commended AC Grayling’s, Ideas that Matter: A Personal Guide for the 21st Century, which I browsed, but unable to connect the dots, re-shelved it.

Ten years of writing for the public service followed, which nurtured incomprehensibility and could have been crippling. On moving to the private sector I was puzzled that clients reading my reports rarely acted on the recommendations. It was late in this period that I realized my sound logic carefully supported by the data and written in a common-sense style, was incomprehensible. Too long and too show-offy; clients never had the time to read these carefully crafted lumps of coal. On moving into a semi-retired state, I initially wrote little, other than emails, and then last year I began blogging. I needed to write and the blog answered this need, but my text was a combination of criticisms and ill-considered comment. Blogging triggered a ‘get it out now’ process, which upon re-reading was often embarrassing. I learned and posts developed themes, were competently researched and better written. Then I awoke one morning and stopped; blogging had eased the itch.

The next exercise was Cooking at Xanadu, a compilation of recipes, food buying tips and a glossary of cooking hardware and ingredients. We have a collection of cook books; most quite good but difficult to use in our kitchen. Often falling apart, they competed with a small bench space, messy ingredients, appliances and a dash of stress; not a good mix in the kitchen. I filtered recipes from the collection, digitized them, adding or deleting ingredients to suit my requirements, and assembled the pages in a large folder, added chapters on shopping for ingredients, kitchen hardware and the glossary, and setup a web edition. The process was enjoyable and rewarding; I learned much about food and we have eaten some fine meals. Now completed, other than occasional updates, I pondered on the next prose exercise.

I took up with a journal but abandoned that structure when I discovered I was writing on my learning to write. This moved on to whatever issue took my fancy but each essay has remained an exercise in writing. They draw heavily on other people’s work to illustrate the points I am concerned with and as examples of writing which ranges from admirable to bad. Slabs of text are copied, not too confuse or as an act of laziness, but to help make a point or two.

Some long-standing shibboleths have been dissembled; often the black-white split becomes less black or less white. As I look at a contemporary issue, read more widely and begin to write a draft, there is another side, another point of view to be considered. Probably a function of age, experience and reading more widely but I continue to surprise myself by changing position.