1500-word essays: a cursed blessing

A blog detailing my experiences with the Laidlaw Research summer and having to deal with research where I have the agency to explore what academically interests me with freedom.
1500-word essays: a cursed blessing
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 What superpower would you have? Albeit a slightly cliché question to stir up conversation amongst a bored friend group, it always fascinated me. And from relatively early on, I was sure of my answer: to be able to experience life exactly as someone else could. I don’t just mean to have the same experiences as someone else, but to literally act as a remote viewer inside the head and experience the thought processes of someone and to live their life genuinely through their perspective. This concept always fascinated me, it was interesting enough for me to turn down superspeed and flight.

 

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” “I haven’t the faintest idea… probably just study?” This was how most of my exchanges from well meaning adults was for me growing up. All I knew was that I liked to study. It was something I happened to be good at and enjoyed doing on the whole. Academic essays tended to be the main means of expression for me to show what I had studied and how I had understood what I had learned. Saying that, I have generally had a very love/hate relationship with the school essay form.

 

As a younger child, the thought of being given a text to write a literary essay on seemed like a truly free experience. At the time it seemed that I was given no limits to express my ideas about a given topic and to share how I saw that text and to help people understand how I experienced things, and how I think they could experience them too. This sentiment lasted for a while, that was until I suddenly had more things to say than just 1500 words or 45 minutes’ worth of writing in an English exam.

 

Enter my hate of the school essay form. Throughout later secondary school and my first fledgling years at university this hate continued as I could never seem to be concise enough, or have my ideas be streamlined enough for what I needed to do. Or, even worse, I would have to completely ignore a whole train of thought and analysis that seemed just as interesting as what I wasn’t cutting from my essay. My mind almost turned writing essays into a sort of game, where I had to optimise exactly what I was trying to say to the fewest words possible. It is from this state of affairs that I resolved before even starting my undergraduate degree that I was going to do a dissertation in English Literature, even though because of the nature of my degree this was unnecessary.

 

Now enter the Laidlaw foundation. Here was an opportunity for me to conduct research, that I get paid for, that I can have a large amount of agency over and where I will be supported during the summer where otherwise I would have been reading or playing one of the many video games in back catalogue. I had read a really interesting research brief of a pre-defined project on what shaped children/young adults’ habits of visualising war which briefly mentioned that textual analysis of popular media like comics. Literary analysis of comics has been a long-term academic interest of mine, and the chance now to be able to shape my own project around that was very promising.

 

After getting in touch with the professor who wrote the brief and following several meetings, I had made my own self defined project looking at popular children and young adults’ animated show/anime and comics/manga and how they could shape habits of visualising war. However, it was as I was starting to move from the interesting premise of the project to actual research that I suddenly started to miss those 1500 words. I started looking at the wider scholarship around war and peace, and what and how their representations could affect how one visualises war and peace. This was the first couple weeks of my research summer. The more I read, the more I went down rabbit holes. The more I felt underequipped to say anything about this. Then it came to actually reading and analysing one of the texts I was going to do my research on. I started with one that I was unfamiliar with, Shingeki no Kyojin (English translation: Attack on Titan).

 

Attack on Titan is a 139-chapter (each chapter being roughly 45-50 pages long) epic which is genuinely one of the most dense and confusing texts I have ever read… and I am an English literature student. I genuinely spent a week and a half of my research summer just reading, re-reading, watching video essays about it, reading summaries to begin to wrap my head around it. In terms of what I could talk about, there was a lot. There were so many avenues that I could go down to analyse with my project I felt l was drowning. To add to this, this was an area that my supervisor couldn’t necessarily help me with since they haven’t read the manga, nor was there much in the way of academic literature about the manga. Eventually I managed to have a sort of argument that I could put into words that my supervisor agreed made sense and was promising. But this was after weeks and weeks of stress and feelings of inadequacy.

 

In a situation where I had all the agency to share how I experienced this text, one that I think is worth discussing in an academic environment where comics are not discussed I would argue nearly enough; I couldn’t seem to do that. Each week the random bits of writing I had about my research just kept growing. 10, 100, 1500, 2400, 4000, 8000 words. It is through this experience that I think I have gained one of the most useful lessons from my Laidlaw experience thus far. Even with all the scope in the world, those who read your research still need to understand what is going on. I don’t have the ability to let others live in my brain and experience what I did when I was doing my research and just ‘get’ what I have researched because they have understood it from my perspective.   

 

Ultimately, after having gone through the worst of it, I feel I must alter my opinions about those 1500 words. I think what I have learned is that yes, at times, depending on how well my thoughts can translate into actual words, I may feel stifled by that pest that is the word count. But at other times I too will feel that I may go down one too many rabbit holes that ultimately is more trouble than its worth. Regardless, at the end of the day, my purpose is the same in writing these research outputs to share my snapshot of a perspective of what is always a much larger and complex thing. I think that how I have changed my approach to thinking about doing such work can be summarised in a piece of advice from one of my fellow Laidlaw 2022 scholars. Essentially, they said “designate yourself a couple of days to just explore and go down rabbit holes. But at the end of those two days pull yourself out of that hole and take stock. Just keep doing that until you’ve written the final full stop of your conclusion.” All I can do is make my words ‘good enough’ for others to understand, it is an imperfect solution (I am very aware of that fact) but assuming I have something interesting to say (which I very much hope I do) then that is all I can do. The rest of the feelings of inadequacy and fear of failure is the result of living in a world where we can’t just choose our superpowers to have.  

I’d like to thank my supervisor Dr Alice König for their support throughout my Laidlaw project from its inception, their experience and guidance has been invaluable to me for making my project what it is today. I would also like to thank the Laidlaw foundation for their support in facilitating my research and allowing me to share my experiences in such a constructive manner. Also, I would like to thank the Laidlaw team at the University of St Andrews and my fellow scholars for all the help and company over the past research summer.

Poster Image Reference: Isayama, Hajime. Shingeki no Kyojin.  Tokyo: Kodansha. 2009. Inkr. Chapter 1, p. 47. https://inkr.com/title/409-attack-on-titan. [Subscription needed] [date accessed 03/08/2022] 

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