Hitching Post

[queer_scribbling]

What was supposed to be the week of July 3rd to July 10th [2020]:

AroAce Community - Repost AUREA - Calling Aros of Color.

AroAce Community - Repost Call for Submissions: Carnival of Aros, July 2020. Theme: Music. Hosted by @zazzmaster5000 (tumblr).


Comments:

PC - A vent post about reading academic texts [comment].

Dishonorable mention to the feverish, disjointed mess that happened on Siggy's Hamilton reaction post [comment].

This is why this week's hitching post is so early.

I don't really remember writing some of the stuff in my comments... I had to double check his fort to even remember Siggy's name for this post... Unfortunately, nothing about this is happening because I mistakenly thought I knew Siggy well enough to talk about this with him. I'm just on enough OTC meds to keep me from being unconscious 24/7 that I was under the impression I could string words together. Trust me, I was very wrong.

Potentially of interest:

~vela/J. - He's got a book about pronouns 'beyond he and she' that starts with the 1770s.

~thewanderingfire - Keeping trolls out of a forum with a point system based on positive interaction.

Comments

[queer_scribbling]

I'm honestly not sure what's going on with the AroAce community posts, but they probably aren't viewable (as of posting this comment).

~PC's vent post is view-locked, but my comment is:

Reading academic texts is sorta like reading Shakespeare.

(All 'you's are general.) You might not know what the fuck that old pop culture reference means anymore (in-group jargon), you might not be familiar with translating long speeches into a concise summary to follow the basic steps of what's happening in a scene (sorta like needing to get familiar with the structure of a text), you might not be following the basic plot (the argument or thesis of the text might not make sense), you might not be familiar with the play / genre / Shakespeare (you're not starting out with the same foundational context or you don't already recognize certain ideas), and you might not really have to know, or worry about, the specifics to get by if this isn't your area of concentration (you don't have to become a one-person expert on everything per se).

I know this is a bit of an imperfect comparison because loads of people are forced into exposure to Shakespeare (to the point that hating a certain play or all of Shakespeare's works is a thing), so it's not quite the same as recreational reading into an academic text, but there's a bit of a technique to it. Figuring out how to summarize the sections of an academic text, identify what you need further research on (even if it's a list of terms to google that are so common to the field there's no definitions provided), following the thread of thought, and sometimes admitting you need the equivalent of No Fear Shakespeare (or text posts) for the topic.

Pretty sure I had a better point to end on, but yeah, you don't have to beat yourself up about not having the mental bandwidth to read academic texts.