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| Integrating the Writing Process and Product Writers constantly shuttle between extremes. In constructing a piece of writing the writer goes through two distinct forms of activity: the process of discovery, and the presentation of his or her discoveries. We know from experience that when our writing is going well these two extremes of spontaneity and conscious control reenforce each other. The goal of QUICK WRITING PROCESS is to help the writer achieve this integration. The QUICK WRITING PROCESS system envisions writing as a continuous process, from defining the writer's relationship to the reader and the environment, to estimating the scope, scale, and style of each project. You plan the structure of your answer around meaning, transforming the topic or question into a provisional thesis supported by because-clauses. You gain perspective on gathering, selecting, and ordering material by talking through a subject or a writing block with an objective listener. For longer or more complicated projects, you start with a provisional "treatment" as a road map, or as a working framework for moving from argument-outline to raw draft. You record emerging themes in your research journal, and then gather them into theme-families in an argument-outline that will serve as an index to meaning in your long, raw draft. Cutting the draft for coherence and consistency produces a roughly final draft--an excellent opportunity for feedback before you polish the final draft into the unified product. By contrast, the familiar compartmentalization of the writing process imposes upon it an unnatural sequence. Crucial writing issues arise at inconvenient times. If, out of anxiety over getting the job done, you wait until the final draft to find out what you are really trying to say, you can be sure your final product will lack balance and confuse the reader. If you try to perfect the elegance of a particular style from the moment you begin to work, you will waste a tremendous amount of time and energy on writing that is only useful for what it makes possible later. Writing Polarities A number of polarities accompany this familiar compartmentalization of the writing process. Instead of prompting useful writer's questions, they become writing problems, internal pressures that increase the writer's sense of helplessness. But by integrating process and product, QUICK WRITING PROCESS strengthens the writer's independence. For example, all good writing is characterized by the writer's discovery of how to present specific evidence with general application. Such writing not only informs readers, but invites them to integrate the material with their own ideas and experiences. This tension between the concrete and the universal is best resolved by making the level of generality a continuous concern throughout the QUICK WRITING PROCESS process. As you freely generate because- clauses, you work within a chosen range and order of material, from concrete examples to generalizations, that will help you build a bridge to your reader. Some pieces of writing encompass both a public and a personal style. The material may suddenly shift from analytical to experiential with great effect. But analysis provides a basis for understanding new experiences, and the structure of your writing can elucidate that relationship. There are times in constructing a piece of writing when you feel the pull toward trusting your reader to understand more than you can put into words, and other times when the pull is in the opposite direction, toward meticulous explanation or documentation. Resolving these inherent tensions among possibilities is part of the underlying excitement of writing well. The more consciously you choose among the possibilities, the more independent you become as a writer. QUICK WRITING PROCESS encourages conscious choice. Generations of teachers and books have presented writing as a limited series of immutable forms: "comparison and contrast," or "cause and effect." The familiar outlines to be filled in, the formats and conventions to imitate, inevitably erode the power of writing, substituting conventions for decisions. To become an independent writer, you need to think continuously about the process as you create it. The Ultimate Pressure: Competing with Yourself It is possible to immerse yourself in a project (even to make an outline first), finish thirty pages of an article or paper in a few days, and then discover on reading the draft that your tone is all wrong, or that the whole article is too abstract. When this happens, you may not have the time or the energy to fix it or begin again. It would be a great help if you could use what you have as a rough draft, written primarily to discover what you wanted to say, or how to say it; but a full, rough, exploratory draft is a luxury most writers under pressure cannot afford. Unpleasant rough-draft surprises almost always result from unresolved issues in your own writing process. For example, one of the fundamental tensions in writing is the expectation that the struggle to get it "right" will overwhelm the satisfaction of doing it. Few people are eager to write; almost everyone has some personal reason to dread it. Our teachers, organizations, and professions demonstrate that the act of writing is not very well understood or appreciated. Nor are the rules and conventions that have come to represent readers' expectations much help. We all know from the start that writing involves suffering. But if we begin every project on that assumption, everything we write will be out of balance, confused, or inappropriately addressed to the reader. You cannot write well with a divided spirit because the simple fact of not wanting to do it is immediately communicated to readers. Although they may not be able to articulate their response, readers stop after a first paragraph, or make a minor correction, or ask a rhetorical question containing their sense that your writing is working against itself. Even when you free yourself of external pressures and self-censorship, there is still the internal pressure of competing with yourself. Shaking off the conventions and expectations that limit thinking-whether they are grades in school, or an organizational writing code, or the criticism of someone close to you--brings you face to face with your own confidence, experience, and values. This intensely personal responsibility can become the most difficult pressure of all, involving your deepest feelings. This is the tug of war at the heart of good writing, the dynamic tension between security and risk, caution and confidence. Struggling through these pressures one writing assignment at a time, you create your own style. QUICK WRITING PROCESS assists you in that struggle by focusing on meaning. You become independent as a writer when the personal discovery of meaning coincides with your capacity to present it to your readers. |
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