In talking to students about papers this semester, I’m wondering about their writing priorities. They are so obsessed with PLANNING their papers before ever committing a word to the page. They are in fact, unanimously convinced that the best way to write a paper is to write it once and then to edit it to make sure that their grammar and spelling is correct.
I’m going to provoke a fight in saying this, but the best writing method is not massive planning, outline, paper, spell and grammar check. I’m a big fan of the following: just write. And then realize that what you have written is actually terrible. So write it again better. Repeat terrible paper recognition. Repeat improvement. Repeat cycle until paper is due.
Why is this better? Because students, as of now, are not interested in revising their IDEAS because they have a phobia of ripping out parts of their papers and redoing them. ”Rewrite” is taken as a sign of failure, rather than a matter of course.
I wonder if part of the aversion to revision–and the writing method we teach students–is actually a throwback to typewriters. Stay with me here. Back when people typed papers on typewrites, mistakes in writing early drafts cost paper and ribbon. A priority was placed on doing papers in a way where you maximize getting as much right the first time as possible.
Now that we have computers, we may overvalue pressuring a quality first/only draft. The computer makes typeface the only non-perishable resource a student has in their writing process. My conjecture here is not that students shouldn’t make good outlines or do competent pre-planning. Ideally, they’d do all phases with the greatest attention and care. But given that students have papers on deadline, I wonder if we do not teach them to economize poorly because we convince them that revising is the most time-consuming part of the writing process when it is not. Writing the first draft is the most time consuming process, and we actually appear to teach students to extend that portion of the process out as agonizingly long as possible.
Another consideration. If we have students do papers the way I am suggesting, the ideas they are writing down have more time to be called into question, struggled with, etc. Rather than locking the students into a plan (outline) early that the y feel like they are committed to defend to avoid having to do more work, students would have time to see their ideas as they can now see their papers. As works in progress, subject to revision. The will also be asked to exercise skills in editorial judgment, consider how to alter plans in the middle of projects to better accomplish goals, and maybe even, develop a better appreciation for the relationship between their research and their ideas (as opposed to thinking of citations as things to stick in papers as appeals to authority or to show that one has read something carefully when they have not, or simply because it is required). I doubt my change in emphasis will revolutionize results, but I bet we would see tangible improvement, and that’s enough for my argument to be taken seriously. Better is better.
I anticipate an objection. Students write badly because they don’t care. But students who write badly because they don’t care are going to do step one of my process anyway, and nothing more. Students who don’t care don’t write careful outlines either. They just write bad first drafts. What I like to do is have multi-level paper assignments where the bad first draft is due and graded and then there is a second draft due that I expect to be substantially better (after a meeting). I believe that for many students it improves their understanding of both writing and thinking processes for those who try, and it shows more modest improvements for those who do not (which would be expected).
May 28, 2009 at 10:30 pm |
I write my papers once through after I think I’ve got an idea what I’m writing. And if I realize I don’t part way through, I look up whatever I need to, read it, then go back to writing, deleting at most a paragraph. Sometimes I get a page in and throw away what I’ve got. But mainly I’ve gotten through college on one draft.
I used to make myself retype papers as a final draft, and I would make changes but mostly I didn’t think it was worthwhile.
I’m starting to use a new process where as I’m researching or writing I write down paragraphs I hope will fit in, but I think this is mainly wishful thinking. Papers have to be written as a connected whole for me.
And rewriting doesn’t work for me because if I say the same thing over it ends up sounding stale.
May 30, 2009 at 7:33 am |
I don’t think writing style has as much to do with whether our forefathers used typewriters (some kind of vestigal literative instinct?) as much as personality type.
I’m pretty much the oppostie of you as a writer. I find myself to be a perfectionist, much more than I’d like to be or is good for me. If I try to write my first draft as sort of a stream of consciousness (as you more or less suggest), I get very frustrated and annoyed with the quality. Instead I trod slowly, fixing mistakes as I go, probably to my peril as a writer. Even as I’m writing this I’m constantly going back to make sure it sounds okay.
One of the reasons I don’t write as often as I’d like is that I find it such a frustrating experience. I’m like an angry golfer (awesome metaphor alert!): I miss a shot, I make a shot, regardless, I’m never really “happy” with my performance afterwards. I think more about all the mistakes that I couldn’t fix than the general quality of my writing or any happiness it might bring me.
May 31, 2009 at 7:45 am |
I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot since we discussed it Friday. It seems to me that there are three separate skills involved in college-level writing, and that different students will struggle with different skills. I think of it in terms of fluency, criticality, and humility.
One is simply mastering a vocabulary specific to the discipline in a way that produces fluent sentence-level constructions in law or philosophy or political science. This is very tough for some students, and these are the students who benefit best from an outline and full research, as they are, by analogy, staring at a dictionary and sounding out the words. “Rights”, “substance”, “epistemic”, etc.
Then there are students who can understand the language of the discipline but don’t know how to think critically. These students will often leave gaping holes in their arguments. For instance, they will authoritatively assert propositions in need of substantiation, or fail to consider obvious counter-arguments. These are students who need to write and write and write, and then get enough distance to view their work product as an alien thing that makes no sense, which they then revise and make more thoughtful.
Finally, there are students who are hubristic. They are already hooked, and are starting to understand the problems of the discipline, starting to understand its breadth and the real demands of making a substantial contribution. These are the students who have the most trouble, because what they need to do is write a ten page paper, but what they want to do is write a book. so the skill they need to learn is partly organizational and partly emotional: they need to break the big problems down into discrete chunks, and they need to recognize their own limits, in time and in knowledge.
Frankly, I feel like I’m still learning humility, myself, or at least that I’m constantly forgetting it and having to be reminded, so skills-building is a pretty long-term project.