Moving Past Being a Bad Writer

I wanted to follow up my previous post about audience by unpacking this idea of pushing aside the things that prevent you from getting words on the page, and look at some ways to move past those things.

At some point in our lives, many of us experience the trauma of getting back a paper that we worked really hard on, and finding a sea of red marks. Our eyes swiftly skim the lines looking for the fatal flaw in our work — there must be some reason for all this symbolic blood on our papers. Unfortunately, many students come to internalize these marks and comments, which were usually written with the best intentions, but are still a puzzling teaching practice. All of a sudden, by attempting to help these students become better writers, these teachers have succeeded in doing the exact opposite. They’ve branded these students as “bad writers.”

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this time and again on this blog, but I don’t actually believe that bad writers exist. Writing is a practice, and given the right tools, an appropriate length of time, and ample support, practically anyone can produce a “good” piece of writing.

The trick here is eliminating all the reasons for not getting words on the page, and making sure that you allow yourself time for revision once you’ve gotten words on the page.

Writing Problem #1 — Maybe you’re terrified to write even a short paragraph. Being asked to write 300 words seems like an impossible task for you.

Solving this kind of problem happens through forcing yourself to write frequently about things that you care about in extremely low stakes settings. Perhaps you keep a journal where you write about your life. Maybe you aim to write 300 words worth of facebook statuses a day. The point here is that you hold yourself accountable for practicing putting words out there. The more you do this, the better you’re going to get.

Once you’ve gotten comfortable with this, you raise the stakes and begin figuring out ways to edit and improve upon what you’re writing. You begin exploring sentence revision, organization, and other concerns.

Writing Problem # 2 — You have no problem getting words on the page. You can free-write the shit out of just about anything, but somehow you still get D’s on almost every paper you turn in.

The trick here, my friends, is learning the art of revision. This was one of the hardest lessons for me to learn. I was brilliant, and I knew that anything I produced would be brilliant, too. I had no idea what anyone was talking about when they asked me to revise what I’d written. Regardless of whatever high horse I was on at the time, you do actually have to learn how to move past the free-writing phase in order to grow as a writer. Once you get the basics down, revision can actually be a really fun process. It can sometimes feel like working a puzzle.

I’m definitely going to follow up with strategies for revision, mainly because it’s fun for me. 🙂

Thoughts on Audience

As a writer, I’m suppose I’ve always been aware that at some point my work will be read by an audience. In a traditional school setting, that audience is usually a teacher or professor who has handed out an assignment that will be seen by them, and only them. Eventually, most people who write do so beyond the boundaries of the education system, and they then have to take into consideration that their audience is going to be wider than just a teacher or a professor. Most good writing teachers will recognize this, and provide opportunities for students to practice and master writing for different audiences. This is a process that I’ve seen happen for many years now, both as a student, and as a writing TA, but I had never considered when the audience should be considered in any given project.

In last week’s class, we spoke about the intricacies of considering audience in our writing, and I’d previously assumed that I just instinctively knew the “right” time to begin focusing on the needs of my audience when I sat down to write. I figured that I’d been aware of who would be reading my work the entire time, and had written with them in mind from the first sentence. Then I read Peter Elbow’s article, “Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience.” In this article, Elbow claims that in the first few drafts of a project, writers should ignore the audience, and simply focus on getting all of their thoughts down on paper. This was the moment when I realized that I’ve spent much of my writing career doing just that.

When I begin any kind of writing project, I always have a notebook with me that I use to write down all of my thoughts. This is a kind of free-writing strategy that I’ve found helpful over the years. The practice of getting all of my thoughts on the page before I actually begin the paper has become such a part of my process that I no longer think about it. In reality, what I’m producing here is draft 1 (and sometimes 2, 3, and 4). This is the space where I find myself ignoring the audience.

In our class discussion, it was clear that many people find writing for a particular audience to be restricting. Some even found it to be the cause of great anxiety, especially if they’re writing for certain professors, or if they’ve got negative voices in their heads while they’re trying to write. In these cases, ignoring the audience becomes a way to open the floodgates and allow writing to actually happen. While this is easier said than done, sometimes just acknowledging that these roadblocks can make it easier to navigate around them.

Why We Revise

For years, I was one of those students who wanted to write an essay, get to the required word count, and then hand the pages in without ever looking at any of it, ever again. This, of course, led to frustration not only from me (what do you mean I have a better thesis at the end of essay? Is that really a C, or did you have some kind of stroke while grading my paper?), but also to all the teachers who tried so hard to get me to understand the importance of revision. I’m proud to say that I have since trained myself to resist the temptation to hand in my first draft of a paper, and I now engage in many rounds of drafting, rewriting, and moving things around until I’m mostly satisfied with the outcome.

The writing process, in general, is supposed to be extremely messy. It doesn’t matter if you’re a good writer. It doesn’t even matter if you’re a regular Joan Didion; you’re still going to have to sift through the mess in order to find what you need. Anne Lamott examines the messiness of the writing process in “Shitty First Drafts” from her book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. As a teaching tool, I adore the language that Lamott uses in this selection; it is accessible, informative, and entertaining. This article offers an excellent approach to the writing process (one that I use often) that involves the first few drafts consisting “word vomit.” That is to say, you would write everything that came to mind without self-editing, or worrying about making it pretty. From there, you take all of that “shit,” and you look for connections and begin polishing and shaping your paper.

I often find myself discussing the messiness of the writing process with students. In fact, with the students in the GSTR 110 class I work with, we always force them to write using a process very similar to the one that Lamott discusses. In their first drafts of their first papers, we create a PowerPoint with a series of guided questions that they are asked to answer in a Word document. These questions are intended to get them generating words while thinking about arguments they might make, sources they might use, connects they might see, and so fourth. They are given about a minute per question, and the main rule of this exercise is that they may not self-edit and they may not hit the delete button. If they are stuck on a sentence, or want to change directions, they simply hit the Enter key and keep writing. The reading from Lamott would work well as a kind of justification for this exercise, which forces these students to do some serious revision.

At this point in my life as a writer, I’ve stopped wondering if I’m a good writer or not. I’ve come to the conclusion that I have the ability to be either. I have, within my grasp, the skills needed to produce papers that are well written, well argued, and that satisfy the expectations set by my professors and myself. In order to get to that point, I have to put in the work to revise, to rethink, and rewrite. For the most part, that’s all it comes down to.

Using Twitter in the Classroom

A few years back, the professor I work with ambitiously decided to begin using Twitter in the classroom as a way to bring social media into our class in a productive way that would get students thinking about how they interact with social media, and as a bonus it gave us a way to talk about films as we were watching with without actually having to press the pause button and have a typical class discussion.

Our use of Twitter in the classroom has evolved since then. We’ve been experimenting with different ways in which to use Twitter in the three years that I’ve worked with this program, and this year we decided to bring it up a few notches. At some point over the summer one of us had the crazy idea to use Twitter in place of traditional exit tickets. For those who don’t know, exit tickets are widely used in education as a way to check in with students and assess their progress before they walk out of class at the end of a period. We use our “Exit Tweets” in much of the same way. We’ve set up a class hashtag that the students use to tweet as a class. We typically ask students to do things like tweet their “takeaways” from a lesson, or to tells us about a source they’re planning to use in a paper. Keep in mind that they only have 140 characters in which to complete this task, and the hashtag takes up twelve of those characters, giving them 128 character left. This allows students to practice the art of being concise. They must choose their words carefully and say exactly what they mean with very little fluff.

Our Exit Tweeting has worked surprisingly well. Students are engaged, they’re sharing valuable information about their experiences as a freshmen, and they’re writing! Don’t forget that writing on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr all count as actual writing — you are producing actual words for an actual audience, after all.

We do still live tweet the films we watch, and that’s always fun, but adding exit tweets as a regular part of our class is allowing us to have more meaningful discussions than we’ve had in previous years. If you’re in education, I highly recommend that you do some research, set some guidelines, and then give tweeting for the classroom a try.

All-Nighters

All-nighters are a frequent occurrence in the life of many college students. As I type this, my roommate is planning on holding one of her very own this evening. While I lecture her about the importance of getting enough sleep, and how her immune system is going to take a major hit, she rolls her eyes and places her headphones back in her ears. Seriously though, allow me to provide you with some tips on avoiding staying up all night to get homework done:

1. Examine your schedule — Most people have schedules that allow them at least a few minutes of downtime between activities. Maybe you have five or ten minutes before or after a class. You may find that you have more small pockets of time than you expected.

2. Use your time wisely — Those tiny pockets of time you’ve found in your schedule can and should be put to use. You could be spending that time on Facebook or Instagram, or you could be reading a page or two of homework. You could spend that time writing a paragraph.

3. Plan out your time — Keeping a planner and managing out your time will help you come up with space to work on certain projects and papers. Make sure to schedule in things like eating and sleeping!

4. Remember that not sleeping will literally drive you insane — If you don’t sleep, you will eventually go crazy, and it may be sooner than you think. Not sleeping for a night or two in a row is especially hard on your body and your brain, but it’s just as bad when you make a habit of not getting enough sleep. Your processing will be slower, and your decision making skills will go out the window.

5. Not Sleeping will screw up your memory — If you’re staying up all night to study for a test, you need to rethink your study habits. Memory is the first thing to go when you’re sleep deprived. This means that even if you stay up all night working on something, you may not remember it the next morning. I’ve found this to be true with my own studying, so I try to avoid reading and studying late at night.

If you’re having trouble sleeping due to stress, or some kind of physiological condition, make sure to consult a doctor to discuss your options.

Now, everybody get some sleep! 😉

-MB

Moving Away from Five Paragraph Essays

In most high schools (at least in the United States), students learn to write essays by using a formula that begins with a introduction paragraph, a thesis statement at the end of the introduction, three body paragraphs with one piece of evidence per paragraph, and a conclusion. This formula leaves you with the infamous five paragraph essay.

These kinds of essays are acceptable in high school, and even expected on things like SATs and AP exams, but in college essays, topics and arguments are often too complicated for the five paragraph essay to do them justice. Professors and TAs work hard to get students to move on from the five paragraph essay as early as possible. There is no magic number of paragraphs. The best practice is to simply write your essay without worrying about paragraph count. Of course, if there is a page count, or a word count requirement, you should focus on those things, but very few professors are going to notice your number of paragraphs; unless, of course, you’re following the five paragraph formula.

The takeaway message here is that you should use however many paragraphs you need to sufficiently prove your argument and address counter-claims.

No matter how many paragraphs you end up with, they should all be well-developed and relate back to your original argument. This means that most of your paragraphs will probably end up being at least half-a-page long (double-spaced, of course).

Transitioning from the five paragraph format can be a complex process, so I’ll likely have more blogs on the subject in the future.

Integrating Quotes

In most college essays, you’re going to need to incorporate quotes into your writing. Quotes can be great things that help you prove your arguments in really specific and precise ways, but you need to learn how to use them properly in your writing. First, let’s look at some common mistakes that people make when trying to bring in quotations: 

#1 Dropped Quotes: these are quotes that get inserted into writing without being introduced or setup in any way. “Mac and cheese is yummy.” And then your reader becomes completely lost. Even though mac and cheese is yummy, we don’t know who said, or why it is significant to the discussion on dropped quotes. 

Avoiding dropped quotes: Make sure to introduce your quotes by telling the reader who is speaking, and provide some context for what is being said, for instance: My friend, Julia, said “mac and cheese is yummy!” when she saw the Kraft commercial on TV. 

The next step here, in any good writing, would be to provide the reader with some insight into why the quote is significant. Perhaps Julia is being sarcastic here, and she actually hates mac and cheese. Or maybe she’s defending Kraft’s choice to use the yellow coloring agent. Whatever the case may be, here is your chance to tie your quote back into your argument. 

#2 Not relating your quotes back to your argument: failing to relate your quotations back to your argument can be a major problem. Every quote you use should have some significance to the point you’re trying to make. If, for some reason, your quotes doesn’t have anything to do with your thesis, don’t use it. 

#3 Retelling what your quote says: The reason you use a quote is bring someone else’s words into your work so that you can work with them in some way. It’s like a conversation — there’s no need to repeat back to the speaker what they already said. If a speaker says, “the sky is blue,” there’s no need to quote the speaker saying “the sky is blue,” and then tell your reader that the speaker is explaining that the sky is blue. It’s already been said. Instead, provide your reader with some kind of insight that supports your argument. Why does it matter that the sky is blue? 

 

Office Hours

Over the past few years, I’ve worked with several cohorts of students, and with each cohort I attempted to hold office hours. The idea here was that students needed to know where to find me at certain times during the week so that they can ask questions, or get help with their papers, or just have someone that they can sit and do homework with. In theory, it’s an excellent, but in practice I rarely see students during my office hours. 

I’ve tried setting several combinations of hours, including daytime and nighttime hours: both with little success. The idea behind the nighttime hours is that I can be available when the professor is not on campus, and while students seem to understand this concept, they often only make an appearance right before their papers are due. I thought daytime hours might provide students the opportunity to drop in for quick questions between classes, or during lunch, but no one seems to show up to those either. 

I’ve created flyers, and sent out emails with details of when and where I’ll be at various times throughout the week, and still I find myself sitting alone night after night when I know that students could benefit from stopping in for a visit. 

My colleagues and I have tried casual settings, such as the coffee shop across from campus, as well as more formal settings such as the library. 

So, if any of my fellow TAs have ideas for making office hours productive, please let me know! 

PS– I have a rather long list of topics to discuss in future blog entries, so stay tuned!