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Home  Research writing tips The Quick Writing Process Adapting QUICK WRITING PROCESS to Your Own Needs
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Adapting QUICK WRITING PROCESS to Your Own Needs |
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Writers have to bridge the reader's natural defenses, the natural reluctance to take on still another job of making sense of someone else's words, and testing their authenticity. Adopting a new system for something as complicated and personal as writing may seem more trouble than it is worth. You have to give up some old habits that, however unsatisfying, work well enough, and are familiar. But applying new strategies that organize your work more efficiently and make it more consistent opens up exciting possibilities for change. The clearer you are about your commitment to a project and what you can learn from it; the clearer your relationship to the reader and your anticipation of the reader's legitimate questions; the clearer your sense of how to select the most representative material, the more confident you become. If your writing process is based on solutions to problems rather than on compromises with writing blocks or a sense of powerlessness induced by the old mythologies of pedagogy and culture, then your writing will become more flexible, resilient, and powerful. You will discover fresh, elegant ways to represent the complexity of your thoughts. Unfortunately, most teaching dwells on small details, without attending to the continuous activity of writing. QUICK WRITING PROCESS emphasizes discovery, flexibility, and mastery. Adapting the QUICK WRITING PROCESS model to your own needs, you will discover a stronger voice, a sense of structure reenforcing meaning, and a new energy in choosing words. QUICK WRITING PROCESS also changes the way you read (see Chapter 9). You examine whether the writer has set the context for his or her argument in the beginning of an article; whether he or she has embedded a challenge to the reader in the texture of an essay. You look for coherence in reason- ing, and comprehensiveness in scope. You come to expect new perspectives, a broader context at the end. Everything you read with this heightened awareness contributes to making your own writing clearer and more powerful. Knowing that you can write well under pressure changes your policy toward any kind of writing, from exam essays (Chapter 10), to research papers (Chapters 11 and 12), to memos and reports (Chapters 13 and 14). Runners speak of the "right" feeling in their muscles; painters and pianists tell of the confident feeling "in their hands," because their art is the disciplined physical expression of a mental process. Writers also experience this intense clarity and elegant simplicity. For them, too, the feeling arises not so much from the mystery of talent as from attention to process, to perfecting their own form and style for accomplishing work. QUICK WRITING PROCESS depends on common sense and writing experience, not on magic or talent. It is a system for resolving writing questions, and a policy about writing. With QUICK WRITING PROCESS, the writing product is suffused with the writer's own style and substance, and that may well be the real magic.
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