#is there subway surfers discourse about this

[alien-enjoyer]

can someone explain to me in the simplest terms possible the subway surfers scoring system/community (is top run actually real?? does it only have other players if youre signed in with facebook?? is that still a thing?? and what counts as a good score? is it all obsolete anyway, because of items like score boosters and hoverboards, or are they balanced enough to be ok? what about revives? i understand paying real money for keys but i’ve never payed for in app purchases on subway surfers, all my keys were earned by completing missions but it still feels kinda broken to me?)

[moonlit-aura]

This is pretty long, I'm really sorry, but I felt the need to write this as an academic who capital-S Struggled with writing in that mode. Maybe it'll help someone else with similar struggles. If it makes it better, it's a bit of a story time. Would put in Subway Surfers somewhere here if I could.

After I wrote my BA thesis, I wasn't happy with it. Yes, mostly because I procrastinated way too much and had like three weeks to write an incredibly dense academic text at least 30 pages long on academic discourse, mass media, Hegelian dialectics, Marxism and the timeline of the OceanGate incident - here's a tip, guys, don't leave things crucial to your degree for the nebulous later.

But here's the thing. I also wasn't happy because the parts I understood well, I felt like I had to obfuscate, make the language describing them more dense to be acceptable. It is what our Writing class entailed - making sure your text has all the important beats, what it says in that many arguments with that many points in each, in this specific way.

As a person who's dipped more than not into academic writing but also writes regular old creative writing-adjacent prose, it was pretty devastating for me to not like this stupid thesis that ended up being 70 pages long. I love writing and express myself through it but I kind of hated what I put so much effort into. My thesis statement was long. My title - even longer. I wanted to sigh every time I told someone what it is and they reacted with a 'geez' or a 'god' - because yes, I'll be the first to admit that 'Linguistic Image of Class Conflict in the Context of Reactions in Contemporary Mass Media to the OceanGate Titan Submersible Incident' is not the handiest of titles, but c'mon, it's about something interesting that can say a lot about many fields of study and our society as a whole. And it's not like I had a choice, since my thesis supervisor basically sat with me and polished it into this form, one of the only few contributions he actually made to help me.

When I started my MA, during our first thesis seminar class, my professor told us to forget everything we were told about academic writing - the proper, ivory towers one. She told us that our writing is by no means supposed to be flowery and descriptive like creative writing but that it's not meant to be mind-boggling to anyone not in-the-know, either - and maybe the ones in-the-know, too.

"When you write," she told us. "think of why you're doing this. You're not trying to show you know things. The goal of writing, and specifically of academic writing, is to convey information. We all agree on that, you know this."

This was true. Most of us studied English at the same university beforehand to get our BAs, which means that unless we took a gap year, we most likely would've attended her General Linguistics lectures during our first year. It was the only exam I approached with no fear because she was that good of a professor that I just remembered all those different facts even though I went to university to study English translation, not straight up linguistics. (I wasn't aware how closely related the two were at the time.)

Eventually, we all came to the conclusion that if the brain categorizes a text as something to decipher, it will focus on that instead of taking in any new information within it. We then went slide by slide through paragraphs of awfully dense academic writing and, using the list she familiarized us with, pointed out ways to improve it not by making it more fancy or complex, but by simplifying it - technically subtracting, but not taking away from it. It felt freeing, in a way - like tearing through every sentence in my stupid BA thesis that I want to be proud of but know no one would ever read for fun, that not even my thesis supervisor felt like looking through and helping me fix; like throwing to the ground all the arbitrary rules you're not allowed to break because BA students are meant to follow, not innovate but that make most give up by the time they get their BA; like tearing to shreds the fact that we were told by so many professors of the subject that there are simply too many essays to check closely, especially when it comes to exams, so they're just skimmed for all the important elements and fitting words, and proper word count. It was, overall, extremely cathartic.

Then my professor summed up the whole thing this class was leading up to.

"You get the privilege of being humanities students - language students." She didn't say translation students but she didn't really have to. We were used to the idea of having to adapt things from one mode to another and adjusting its tone appropriately, enough to pass the entrance exam anyway. "So you learn about this. Most disciplines don't. Medical academic writing is awful to read and that approach is seen as something you're supposed to do. Almost no one tells STEM students all this."

(She'd probably know, now that i think about it - a few months after that we'd uncover insane lore about her husband who is apparently a quantum physicist or something. A published one too.)

We discussed this. Most of it could be boiled down to classism and ostracism. Of perpetuating the attempts to keep your circle of expertise small, an elite. Some other parts of it to the fact that some discourse connected to specific fields - medical, legal, scientific - is way easier to twist like that with all of the vocabulary that's all big and important, and how it feels fitting to change verbs like 'mutating' to respective nouns like 'mutation', or have sentences do loop-de-loops and say the same thing three times in different words. How big scary chemicals or small but equally scary particles, and vaguely regular-sized body parts and the illnesses connected to them in very, very scary Latin make it really easy to make your writing veer into the area of incomprehensibility. Every single 'now say that in English' joke has its source here.

So here's a rule I thought of, for myself - would what I'm currently writing, my MA thesis, be understandable to my self from a few years ago, from when I started university, from when I was convinced you can translate without getting all messy with linguistics? Would she get what I'm trying to convey? Would she want to read it? I think that things like explaining the meaning of the word 'hypoalgesic' that I have to leave in because it's a part of a citation from the nefarious Stephens et al. 2009: 1056 and not leaving it unexplained because I'm soooo smart and know what it means but you - the recipient - don't (it means 'pain-relieving', by the way), or that the still a bit chunky title is softened by adding on "Double whammy:" at the beginning of it would help a lot.

Write something you can be seriously proud of. Write something you don't sigh about whenever you think about it. Remember why exactly you're doing it, for whom and for what. Think about explaining it to your family, or friends, or someone you care about, and write it like that. Understandable, not scary. Approachable. Maybe with a curve of understanding but isn't explaining why the sky is blue to a child the same? When you write a paper, you are, first and foremost, a guide weaving a story.

Remember: humanity invented written language to tell stories, and that's still what we're doing.