Writing Process and Me, Conor (Blog Post #2)

 I am most naturally comfortable with the drafting and pre-writing stages of the writing process. The deeper into revision we go, the harder it is for me to focus and do the work that I need to do. I recognize that revision is truly necessary to succeed as a writer, but I’ve had quite decent success with my frequent avoidance of it thus far in life, so I haven’t found the external motivation to practice it and to dig into it. Perhaps I need instead to focus on the internal motivations and concerns surrounding revision to really improve my relationship with it.

I love to plan out various projects (I have whole documents on my computer dedicated to various in-process writing projects that I have) and can easily get caught up in these planning stages, trying to figure out the relationship between different ideas and doing more thinking, researching, reading, thinking, until I have re-arranged the relationship between the different ideas and pieces of the project a thousand times. I can generally put together pretty strong drafts from all of this pre-writing (though it is often difficult to actually buckle down and bust out the draft). But I freeze when it comes to revision, either doing the bare minimum or completely scrapping what I’d written and essentially writing an entirely new draft.

Comments

  1. RbtaylorSeptember 8, 2020 at 10:08 AM

    Your first paragraph made me consider how I used to be the worst with procrastination, but I always had success procrastinating so there was no motivation for me to change my ways. You're absolutely right that the motivation to change comes from internal factors rather than external ones.

    Your second paragraph makes me think that a lot of your revising comes as an integral part of your pre-writing and drafting phase. Because writing is such a fluid process, it is hard to say that revision is something that only has to happen on the back end of writing. If you are moving ideas around during your in-process writing projects, I would say you are both pre-writing, drafting, and revising all at once. Perhaps your relationship with revision is deeper than you thought.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Andrew post 9

I think it's vitally important for writing center staff to keep abreast of writing center scholarship. Because students who visit writing centers vary widely in their proficiency, their motivations for seeking help, and economic/identity categories, and bring in work from disparate disciplines, staff need to be adaptable to multitudinous tutoring relationships and scenarios. Requiring staff to go through practicum courses (held on maybe a biennial basis) and holding regular department forums where tutors can present research or seek counsel would help keep everyone on the same page with regard to the latest findings and debates in writing center theory and practice. However, I don't think that it's reasonable expect that each member regularly conduct their own research, since many tutors are graduate students or full time instructors whose resources are often already stretched thin on account of pressures to produce writing/research in their own field of study. Asking too m...
Read more

Andrew blog post #10

 I'm usually fairly confident working with writers outside my discipline. I think part of that has to do with my own experience as an undergraduate, where I switched majors from political science to literature to philosophy then, finally, to psychology. To my mind, basic critical thinking skills--the kind that I teach my students in my rhetoric classes--apply just as much to qualitative analyses as they do to quantitative/empirical analyses. Questions of audience and purpose factor into effective writing and communication--approaching any paper, regardless of the class that it's for, I always push writers to ask themselves how much information is necessary for them to provide to contextualize an argument, and remind them that each item of evidence they introduce has to be accompanied by an explanation of its relevance to their overarching thesis. One of my writing center students' first assignment for his rhetoric class was to write a paper about his major (bio-medical engi...
Read more

Andrew blog post 4

Perhaps one way to promote appreciation of other "Englishes," as the CCCC statement (as much as they would disapprove of the use of the term) is to recalibrate considerations of style in writing pedagogy, one that demonstrates that what we call "standard English" is but one among many modes of expression that can be modulated according to varying purposes/audiences. Many people, I think, don't particularly enjoy reading academic English, which, besides imposing oppressive standards on marginalized people, is often a clumsy, bland, and inefficient means of expression; writing is most effective when it comes off as the work of a singular voice and intellect.  Students' general education in universities should also include critical studies of how languages are products of conquest. This, of course, has been a constant throughout history--consider how Spanish and Portuguese integrated Arabic vocabulary by virtue of Muslim rule over the Iberian Peninsula. However...
Read more