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| Improving the Roughly Final Draft |
| Now, almost all the familiar, often frantic work of revising is completed. With QUICK WRITING PROCESS, it has been part of a developing process, selecting what to keep and what to leave out, to engage the reader in the unfolding structure and meaning of your argument. Cutting the raw draft down to size to make it coherent and consistent, and then unifying the roughly final draft, is intensely absorbing, bringing out the passion and personality of your thoughts and words. In this way, QUICK WRITING PROCESS makes a necessity of a luxury most writers under pressure cannot afford: having done the hard work of thinking through, setting out, and analyzing your argument, you become your own sympathetic, totally committed editor, bringing fresh energy to the task of improving words, sentences, paragraphs, transitions, tone--anything that has to do with the clarity and power of your product. Now, almost all the familiar, often frantic work of revising is completed. With QUICK WRITING PROCESS, it has been part of a developing process, selecting what to keep and what to leave out, to engage the reader in the unfolding structure and meaning of your argument. Cutting the raw draft down to size to make it coherent and consistent, and then unifying the roughly final draft, is intensely absorbing, bringing out the passion and personality of your thoughts and words. In this way, QUICK WRITING PROCESS makes a necessity of a luxury most writers under pressure cannot afford: having done the hard work of thinking through, setting out, and analyzing your argument, you become your own sympathetic, totally committed editor, bringing fresh energy to the task of improving words, sentences, paragraphs, transitions, tone--anything that has to do with the clarity and power of your product. I've had thousands of students and writing clients who have never felt this kind of involvement in the process and product of writing. The ultimate reason may have to do with our view of education and communication, our vision of democracy; but it is clearly not a matter of talent. Any writer or teacher can tell you about talented people who never wrote. QUICK WRITING PROCESS assumes that anyone's writing is worth doing well, for both the writer and his or her readers. This second reading, then, in which you improve the roughly final draft, is not the usual slapdash substitution of words and phrases, or a last-minute attempt to impose order on chaos, but the natural efflorescence of an organic process, bringing ideas to life before the reader's eyes. People may experience this organizing, shaping, vivifying intensity in their work, in their relationships, in their recreation; but they don't expect it from writing. Creating a piece of writing should be exciting and fun, challenging your deepest resources, and making you vulnerable in a healthy way. These are, after all, the qualities we admire in our favorite writers. Improvements The introductory paragraph of my roughly final draft carried the assertions I intended to develop for the reader throughout my paper. On a second reading, the next two paragraphs seemed to meander, to imply rather than state, depending too much on a sympathetic reader. They Improving the Roughly Final Draft were too personal. I combined them in (A) so that my objections, my series of "serious questions" about giving a writing competency exam have a cumulative effect, leading the reader through time, money, and pedagogical concerns to my conclusion about the inevitable danger of putting the test before teaching and learning. I wanted, also, to tighten the language and make it more straightforward (less dependent on an understanding or on an identity in values between writer and reader), and to make the passage more consistent with the overall tone and texture. The next paragraph, too, wasn't as clear as I wanted it to be: the "image" of the English department is important in the politics of the college. Although there may be people who would like to see the English faculty immersed in "remedial" instruction, it is important to identify the dependent relationship among the different departments of the college. To diminish the role of the writing faculty alters the responsibilities of other faculty members, especially those who see themselves as conscientious teachers. Improvement (B) made this clearer. The fourth paragraph also needed to be stated in a more direct way, in a "public" tone consistent with the rest. The irony, and the hypothetical arguments were holdovers from the moment when I first felt really engaged in this topic and my own experiences and frustrations and ideals about teaching writing suddenly became relevant to the writing of the paper. However useful in generating material that led me to an important private discovery, casual irony is not appropriate for the reader. More important, in so short a paper, I need each point to serve as many purposes as possible, so I re-created this passage about new teachers by combining two others to reflect a sense of my overall theme: that we should teach writing as a lifelong skill (C). Then, with a simple transition, I brought all the separate points to bear on the ultimate question about an exam: how do we define "competency"? Instead of another series of questions, I illustrated this issue in the form of one of the many paradoxes it raises, hoping to prompt the reader's thinking (D). There was certainly no need to include the next passage, filled with self-righteousness, drawing attention away from the argument and toward the writer. Although the passage was fun to write, and stated what I believe, it was not consistent with the overall tone of the paper. The second reading saved me from myself there (E). The next paragraph was really the turning point of the paper, moving from a criticism of the details of giving an exam to the larger issue of teaching and learning writing in a liberal arts college, a larger context in which I wanted the reader to consider the exam. I needed a stronger transition (F). I already had the example of a self-paced course in statistics, so I could delete the others at the end of the paragraph. But I did want to keep the last line as a summary, an indication that there is a better way to achieve the goal (G). A new transition turned the reader's attention away from the competency exam (H) to a better idea, the alternative I briefly wanted to develop. The last line of the original paragraph was one that kept coming back throughout the whole writing process, and I retained it for my conclusion. The flaws and illusions involved in the competency idea could be typified by comparing it to the comprehensive Bard College program. (The play of words on "affording" an illusion may help draw the reader's attention to these basic issues as well.) The final sentence of the paragraph expressed my deepest conviction about teaching writing, and offered a perspective in which a competency exam at best is trivial and irrelevant, and at worst is a black hole for our scarce resources and energies (J). The new conclusion, including the sentence retained from (H), matched the order and feeling of the introduction, and went one step further than a summary, to leave the reader with a larger context, a comprehensive perspective for thinking about the question posed (I). |
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