The pains of being an intellectual 😊

​

I don’t know if it is only me or other peers in academia can relate. I find academic writing as the most challenging task. I used to use “jigsaw puzzle” with thousands of pieces as analogy to describe my experience of writing an academic piece. However, it is more difficult than that. The pieces of puzzle are at least ready. All we have to do is to fit them together to get the final image. With academic writing, when I read an article, the authors’ writing styles get stuck in my head especially if it is a larger piece. Or in some specialized pieces of work, certain terminologies are used. In many cases we can find a rather simpler and easier synonym for these jargons that is more familiar to a wider audience. But it requires a lot of thinking and time. It is like hearing 100s of different voices and transforming them into one single voice – your voice. So academic writing takes both creating and solving the puzzle without having a clear image of the final product.