Four years ago, I decided to seek a college degree. At the time, I wasn’t really sure about what I wanted to do after school; I just knew that I needed out of the job I had at the time. Since I was homeschooled through my middle school and high school years, I had not been prepared for choosing a future career. When I needed to pick a subject to major in, I chose psychology because it was something that I found interesting. I still find psychology interesting, but after my first year, I realized that I wasn’t interested in working in that field. I bounced around for a while trying to decide on what I liked enough to major in. I thought about majoring in chemistry or biology. I considered anthropology. In the end, I decided on an English major, partly because I liked studying literature and partly because it gave me the ability to incorporate all the other subjects I like in some way. When I transferred from community college to a university, I added a philosophy major. Philosophy is my passion, but I love literature and writing. I decided to double major in both literature and philosophy since I couldn’t choose one over the other.
So a year ago I was all set to head to a new school. I was excited to take more in depth classes. To spend more time with students who weren’t just taking these classes to fulfill their Arts and Letters requirement but were actually majoring in the same subject. I was ready to attend a school with a greater academic rigor and eventually go on to grad school. However, a year later, I find myself conflicted about education in general and mostly annoyed with the “Lit Lovers”.
My annoyance with “Lit Lovers” is most of the reasoning for dropping to a single major, philosophy. Let me explain what I mean by “Lit Lovers”. These are the people who claim that they love literature and the English language. Most of them want to be writers, hate Twitter, and see themselves as “deeper” than the average reader. They claim to love English but will give you a long rant about how such and such group is ruining it, or they hate a certain phrase/word, or they can’t stand maximum page limits on writing assignments. As I see it, these people don’t love literature and creative writing; they just love it when it is done “correctly”, which basically means it conforms to their individual taste.
I formerly thought I wanted to be a writer. Technically, I still do. I mean, I’m not going to stop writing. It’s something I do to organize my thoughts, to share my opinions, to express myself. But I have given up on wanting to be perceived as a writer. I don’t need to sound deep. I choose to love the language for all that it’s capable of. I don’t want to conform to anyone’s standard of writing; I want to write so that whoever reads understands the idea I’m try to convey (or feels something, in the case of my poetry). Sadly, I’ve learned that in the academic world of literature there is no place for people like me. Every professor want you to write their way but pays lip-service to creativity. It’s not creativity if I’m copying your standard!
And this is why I chose philosophy over literature (when it comes to majors, in life I’ll still love both of them). When I write a philosophy paper, I’m graded on how well I express and defend my argument. The comments I get from professors focus on parts of the argument that are weak or unclear, not about how I should write this way or that way. I don’t have to sit through rants about how they “hate the word ‘interesting'”. I don’t get a 5 page assignment instruction packet that only 1 page worth is actual explanation of the assignment requirements and the other 4 pages are a length opinion article about the “proper” writing process.
It’s not just the world of academia where these people exist. Every friend (past or present) that I know who wants to be a writer feels the same way. I know that there are probably published authors out there who don’t submit to this smug attitude, but it seems like the overwhelming majority fall into the elitist group.
And I don’t want to be one of them. I’m realistic. I know that my writing will probably not be remembered after I’m dead. I know that the chances that I’ll produce something that gains any sort of major recognition are pretty slim. Luckily, that’s not why I write. I will always see language as a changing entity. Some of the changes are tougher to accept than others, but that doesn’t make them bad. I may not like every style of writing, but I still appreciate them. And I’ll continue to write for myself because anyone else enjoying my writing is just a bonus.
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Some Things are Random 