Writing and rewriting

I just edited the post below... it's good to get things going here in my blog by posting directly online, but I can't help but want to correct the mistakes and make the language better (e.g. I had mispelled at least one word and the last paragraph had the word "back" four times - ugly!).

This is one of my problems with writing - I really hate rewriting, reviewing, correcting (not grammar, but structure). I'm lazy. So I keep wondering how in the world I am going to finish writing my dissertation. Someday. Well, this "journal" is good practice because I have to at least make some sort of sense, and that leads me to the very thing I loathe - reviewing and rewriting - and here I do it happily, since it's not the same as rewriting an academic paper.

On a side note I should say I was quite upset 2 weeks ago (I was still in Brazil) when I learned that a paper I had submitted for publication in the scholarly journal Children's Literature (a special issue on Louisa May Alcott) was rejected. The reviewers' comments were very good, but I just don't feel motivated to rewrite everything based on their detailed criticisms and suggestions - it took so much effort just to try to get the paper ready for publication...

Lately I have felt keenly that I don't belong in academia at all, I just don't fit in. The fact that I got my undergraduate degree in Brazil doesn't help much, because I was not trained to write the way academics write here in the US. 6 years of graduate school helped, of course, but you know what helped most of all? Grading papers and teaching (or trying to teach) my students to write good papers.

Well, if practice makes perfect then I still need tons of it. So I should post everyday, right?