Writing is Revising

So, I'm not going to name names or anything, but I bet a lot of y'all think of writing this way:

You open up a blank word document.
You stare at it.
You go get some Cheetos.
You stare at it some more.
Around 2AM, you frantically write something down.
You turn it in the next day.

This is not how real writers write.

Yes, we use word documents. Yes, we stare at them. Yes we work at 2AM and we eat Cheetos. The difference is, we don't expect to get anything but crap out of ourselves this way.

And there's nothing wrong with producing crap. (See the previous post about giving yourself permission to suck.) But what is really vital is to embrace the fact that writing does not end here.

Will I know how much revising you're doing? Maybe. Maybe not. Will I know if you turn in a paper that you wrote at 2AM the night before? I might know you've turned in a crappy paper, but I won't know the specifics of how it got that way. Does it matter what I know or don't know? Not really.

What I care about is that you turn in good writing.

And good writing is almost always revised writing.

Think about that word: revise. It means to "re-see."

The first time you write a draft--even if you think it's FANTASTIC--there are things about it that you won't see right away. And so at some point, you'll have to re-see it.

How do you re-see things?

I've found that there's nothing better than utilizing an audience. You can find these in various places:

1. The writing center
2. Your peer-review group
3. Your mother
4. Your roommate
5. The class--especially when we do in-class paper discussions and BPRs.
6. Anyone else who loves you enough to read through your stuff

So, here's what the writing process looks like:

1. You stare at the computer for awhile until you write down a lot of crap.
2. You consider yourself your first audience, and you read it out loud. (Reading out loud totally helps, I promise.) You try to re-see the things that should be changed and you change them.
[days may pass]
3. You find another audience. Let's say your peer review group. They read your paper and talk about things you could do to make it better. You go home, try to see it from their point of view, then decide what to change and/or keep. Then you write another draft.
[more days may pass]
4. You find another audience. Maybe the writing center. You listen to what they say. You write another draft.
[even more days may pass]
5. Why not use the class as an audience? (We have in-class paper presentation days specifically for this!) We all tell you what we think you should change. You think about it. You write another draft.
[maybe even weeks will pass]
6. If enough time has passed since you last saw your paper (this usually works best if you haven't looked at if for a week or two), you can look at it with fresh eyes again. Re-see it. Then you can write another draft.

This is how "real" writers write, people. We do not have magic tongues that spew forth golden verbiage on command. Maybe your crazy roommate has that, but normal people don't. This is not something to worry about.

What you do worry about is scheduling in the time. Writing takes time. Revising takes even more time. Finding good readers takes chocolate chip brownies.

If you're good with that, you'll probably be OK here. No matter what kind of "writer" you think you are, the best writers are just the ones who don't stop revising. The ones who don't expect to.

SWILUA's Thoughts On Jumping Through Hoops

A lot of you may be in the habit of just doing the minimum required to get an A (I know I was at your age). I’m not going to mock you for this (at this moment) or even make the futile argument that “you won’t be able to do that in this class,” blah, blah, whatever. You will be able to do that in this class. You will be able to do that in most classes. Most teachers are not psychic and even though I have my psychic moments I do not always know when you are putting forth a good effort and when you are patiently jumping through my hoops with no other thought about the hoops than that you should jump through them.

But is this going to do you any good?

You know the answer to that.

At some point your life has to stop being just a game, just an exercise of jumping through hoops. At some point you have to be able to say to yourself and to God that you have taken your talents and your gifts and used them to build the kingdom. And each of us has a sacred, vital responsibility to use our specific gifts to build the kingdom. Writers have a responsibility to write. Mathematicians have a responsibility to do math. Computer programmers have a responsibility to write the best dang programs they can.

A sacred responsibility.

So what? I’ll tell you what. Take responsibility for your own education. Don’t just do assignments, think about them. Don’t just blandly respond to required journal entries and dismiss them as busy work. I know a lot of stuff I initially thought of as "annoying busy work" ended up being foundational to my academic career. Just took ten years for me to understand it.

So when you have stuff you don't want to do what do you do? You search. Ponder. Pray. Pray a lot. Each of you has more power than you think. But you will never be able to harness it unless you give your whole self. Just “jumping through hoops” is tantamount to leaving your candle under a bushel or burying your talents in the ground. Some might call it sin.

Remember, you can learn here at BYU. But no one is going to force you.

SWILUA's Thoughts on Procrastination

People procrastinate for a lot of reasons, but I think one of the big ones is that if we’re faced with a huge project, we don’t even know how to start. Here’s the secret: all big projects are really just a collection of tiny projects. You just have to figure out how to break it into manageable bits and then find the time to attack the bits—one at a time. Novels are written one sentence of dialog at a time. Really. So if you find yourself putting something off, figure out why you’re doing it. Is it because it seems so huge? Well, take ten minutes and figure out how to subdivide it.

But I think there’s another big reason that we procrastinate things: we’re afraid of sucking. So we self-handicap. If we don’t write it until the night before we can always say, “Ah, well. If I’d actually spent time on the paper it would be good. The only reason it bites is because I procrastinated.” And we never have to admit that we were never sure it would have been good. I confess, I spent a lot of my own time embracing this kind of self-handicapping. But the problem is that time keeps going on and eventually you realize that if you don’t actually try to do something good with your life, you’re going to end up doing a whole lot of nothing. This is a scary moment because when you actually try to succeed and you fail . . . well, it hurts like a mother. (And let me tell you: mothers HURT. I know this. I have two children.)

But there’s a secret to getting over this kind of fear. Are you ready for it? Okay, here it comes.

Give yourself permission to suck.

That’s right. You will never get the best out of yourself unless you aren’t afraid of falling on your fool face. Failure is just something you have to do if you’re ever going to succeed. Do you know what it means if you have never failed? It means that you have never tried to do anything that was outside of your grasp. It means you have never reached beyond what you already knew you were capable. It means you have limited your own potential to do good in the world.

So those are my thoughts. Break things into little bits. Work consistently. Get help. And give yourself permission to suck. (Learning to love revision doesn’t hurt, either.) It’s Dr. SWILUA's little recipe for happiness. (And an A in class.)

SWILUA's Grading Philosophy; Just so you know.

AT the beginning of my semester in Math 113 I had the second worst grade in the entire class. I’m not talking B+ kind of bad. I’m talking a 41.3% testing average. I was failing. It was a weird concept for me, failing, especially because I was working 3-4 hours every single stupid day trying to understand the stuff. I mean, how could I be working so hard and still be failing?

Then, one day, like a miracle, a boy named Christopher came up to me and revealed that he was the only person in the class with a worse percentage than me (his was 38.7%) and that we were going to be study buddies. I think that was his term. Or maybe my mother's. My memory is fuzzy.

But I do remember that we worked. We worked six days a week. 7-8 hours every weekday and 8-12 hours on Saturday. We spent every second we could in the math lab (they often had to kick us out at night). We got two or three assignments ahead so that by the time we got to class we already had a pretty good understanding of what was going on. We worked our trash off.

Finally, one day, I had this epiphany deep in my brain cells. All of mathematics seemed to open up and I understood what the entire thing was about. And it was beautiful. By the end of the semester, I had raised my testing average from 41.3% to 105.6%. I went from the second worst grade to the second best. I became a math lab tutor and the only person admitted to my graduate literature program who got a higher math score on the GRE than English.

What’s my point?

There is a happy indignation in assuming that hard work should be rewarded with high grades. The problem is, if we’re rewarded solely for our effort and not for what we produce, we don’t reach as high and we don’t work as hard. It’s the reason communism fails while capitalism succeeds. Grades push us. Should they define us? Absolutely not. Should you jump off the Kimball tower when you, inevitably, get that first A-? I’m thinking probably not. (In fact, I have this other speech, that I won’t give here, where I encourage all of you to get at least one C in your life. It’s a good speech. Remind me to give it if I don’t remember to myself.)

But should you let grades push you to learn at a new depth?

Absolutely.

The majority of your grade (more than 70%) in this class will come from things you have written. (Seems fitting, really, that in a writing class you’re graded on writing.) I don’t grade on a curve. I have had classes where the entire class got an A and classes where no one did. Most classes do seem to have a variety of grades. And one happy bit: if you do every single assignment and come to every single class, I will personally guarantee that you won’t fail the class no matter how much of an F you got on each paper. That’s just because I’m nice.

Welcome to Writing 150

Read the Syllabus and we'll be fine.