|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Suppose I am under pressure to write about whether to have an English competency exam as a requirement for graduation at, say, Shakespeare College of the Communicable Arts, where I teach writing. This (thankfully) purely fictional assignment is due tomorrow morning, and I am expected to write "about three pages." The dean is the audience. He doesn't need background: he wants evidence for a point of view--a position paper. This imaginary assignment has the familiar characteristics of many such writing tasks: there isn't enough time to do a good job; there is a strong likelihood that what I say will not convince the reader as he weighs my views against those of others closer to him; but there is the possibility of doing something useful. It is also a topic I would never willingly choose to spend time on, so I immediately resist the task. If we took the example of a student paper in a college course, we could substitute other limitations roughly in the same range: the required length might be anywhere from two to fifteen pages; the paper might be due not in twenty-four hours but in a week; the audience would be a professor who either wanted to compare the student paper with some ideal paper in his or her mind, or hoped to find some fresh thinking on an old topic. Or we might take a memo, due in a few hours, for a supervisor who is depending on the writer to survey options and put forward a recommendation in one easily readable page. Each of these cases presents particular problems of its own; but they all share the general characteristics of writing under pressure. And probably all are accompanied by a certain sense of dread. Writers react to the pressures of time constraints in different ways. Even if a deadline is several months or a year away, some people scramble to get started early, and still find themselves rushing at the last minute. Others need pressure to get anything done. Space requirements exert similar pressures: some writers dread condensing material, others dread expanding it. The power relationship between reader and writer intimidates some writers and provokes others. You may not want to write your memo or your paper in Modern Civilization, but you know you must do it. That gives the pressures of deadline, length, and the relationship with your reader real force, and you must respond, either unconsciously by letting them dominate your writing process and product, or consciously by transforming them into advantages. QUICK WRITING PROCESS harnesses the writer's energies against these pressures by shaping his or her commitment to the task.
|
|
