etc.

Sick of Comic Sans MS? You’re not alone.

I have this disarming habit I fall into whenever I am working on a piece of writing, be it an essay/assignment for school, a report for work, a handout/webpage for a class I’m teaching or, now, this article. I tend to read and research and take notes and check references and read and research some more, all the while filling myself with a level of anxiety that builds to maddening proportions as the deadline fast approaches. You’d think that 7.5 years of post-secondary education would have, at the very least, taught me to recognise my own patterns, to understand that research begets research, that there comes a time when you have to place all your madly highlighted secondary sources into a pile, arrange all your pages and pages of brilliant ideas scribbled less brilliantly, open up that word processor and just start writing because no matter how many times you fine-tune your 28-point outline, you will be no closer to filling that gaping hole of fretfulness that is growing daily in the pit of your stomach. Reading various research and PhD. blogs has partly reinforced what I’ve known all along, that I am not the first and last human being to have fallen prey to such a disquieting pattern, which has made me feel better, but mostly it just takes time away from doing what I really should be doing.

So I started writing today.