Life Sentence: My Uncertainty Principle

This piece is about the inevitable uncertainty in the experience of writing. It analyzes different styles and describes the difficulty of being clear without cancelling out complexity or hiding the holes to be found in all arguments. The author describes her own writing history as a dyslexic child and her own continuing struggles to write well; she then offers examples from other writers. Though unclear academic writing gets some criticism here, it is recognized that sometimes what becomes jargon originated as oppositional language, an effort to name new ideas and break with old categories. All writers encounter ignorance as they write and uncertainty is always somewhere in the prose. However, writing is a reach for coherence; it puts power and powerlessness together.