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At this point, I have much more than enough raw material for my paper, more than I would have imagined when I began to analyze my relationship to the intended reader, and my own feelings about taking a stand on the competency exam question. QUICK WRITING PROCESS delivers you headlong into the writing process, neutralizing the familiar resistances to starting. Besides, in this case study, I don't have time to put it off: the paper is due in the dean's office tomorrow morning. My limit is three pages, and I'm about to sift through and analyze the list of freely generated because-clauses linked to my thesis, to put them into the order of a balanced argument-outline.
Before the analysis, it's important to understand the relationship between time and structure in the writing process. Managing time is essential to the writer's control and independence. Most writers don't appraise their time realistically and, invariably, the result is a distortion of the writing process. The writing we do under pressure (an exam essay, a memo due in the afternoon, a cover letter for a wonderful job that has to be mailed today) has a last-minute feel to it. We know it as we write, and we feel it as soon as we turn in the bluebook or memo, or send off the letter. We hope it will "get by," or we resign ourselves to a disappointing response. But this familiar experience reflects something more than an unsatisfactory process. The deeper issue is that most people are not fully aware of the way words strike readers, and so they use their writing time inefficiently. Readers may not have an inkling of a writer's most difficult struggles. Novelists are often fondest of the writing that has given them the most trouble, but readers are grateful for books that seem to have been written "easily," as if without effort. Two different goals are involved here: the writer develops his or her craft; and the reader seeks enlightenment or pleasure, or both. If you explore the diaries, notebooks, and letters of writers, you may be surprised to find that what gave the writer a private feeling of accomplishment may have little to do with a reader's experience of the work. This is generally true, at one time or another, of everyone who writes. But for inexperienced writers, it is usually destructive. "Sorry, I know this is full of comma errors," a student says, even though her essay, read aloud, has overwhelmed the class with its power. Another writer will assure you the meaning's there. "I haven't bothered to put in all the connections," he says, "but you know what I mean." Both writers have little perspective on the way readers perceive their work. With some constructive feedback about the effect of their words, they could redistribute their energies throughout the writing process to strengthen communication. The most common and debilitating distortions in writing result from this failure to manage energy and time. It is extremely common for people who dread a particular writing task to spend most of their available time on one small part of the process, so that the final product is out of balance, lacking any sense of focus, and constructed so loosely that the reader can't keep the message or method in view. It's easy to see this in terms of structure. Some people will spend almost all their time and energy on the beginning of a piece, getting it "right," but leaving no time for the middle or the end. There are people who never write conclusions even though this ensures that whatever they have to say will spill out and evaporate. (No matter how good the beginning and middle of a piece of writing, if there is no sense of an ending, and of pointing the way to a new perspective, the reader may retain only an example or a vague general impression.) There are people who only write conclusions. They give the reader their general assertions, even a sense of perspective; but the writing is abstract, without the necessary specificity of the argument, the anchored examples, the progression of evidence that supports general statements. The whole essay drifts away. Most familiar are the writers who have no time, inclination, or confi- dence for beginnings and endings, and give the reader only a middle, with perfunctory opening and closing statements. The result, for readers, is irritation and disorientation: "What was this really about?" or, "Oh, I see. Why didn't you tell me you were talking about that in the first place? For most of your paper I thought you were writing something else entirely and now I don't have the time to go back over it." Planning time, in QUICK WRITING PROCESS, is important for avoiding these writer's distortions. It is done within a basic sense of structure, so that your essay or memo has the balance of an interesting, useful beginning, a solid, specific middle, and an inspiring conclusion. If I have less than a day for my position paper I must commit myself to a timetable for the whole project even before I generate a thesis and because-clauses. Planning time and space is best done even before considering the fundamental questions about the writer and the reader that initiate the writing process. QUICK WRITING PROCESS acknowledges the boundaries of a writing project because its goal is to get the job done. Underlying this principle is the inescapable fact that setting these boundaries is the writer's responsibility. It is an act both of independence and of control, and gives the writer motivation and confidence. Deciding first the time you can realistically allot to your writing project to get it done thoroughly is essential, and liberating. Amid the pressures, fears, hopes, excuses, and good intentions, you simply say, "This is what I'm willing to do--set aside this much of my best time and energy to complete this job." You may wish you could do more; you may want to do nothing at all. But the decision about time helps you, resolve the issue of your commitment to the project immediately, and that is a tremendous help. The QUICK WRITING PROCESS timetable ensures that none of the writer's energies are wasted, and that each activity in the process initiates the next. For example, although I've written about twenty pages of explanation about QUICK WRITING PROCESS so far, I've actually spent less than an hour in writing time on the position paper itself, preparing and then generating a thesis and because-clauses. Now I have a quarry of raw material, which assures me I have "enough" to say, and can do a thorough job. The real virtue of QUICK WRITING PROCESS is that everything you do counts, in producing the best piece of writing in the given circumstances. The QUICK WRITING PROCESS process transforms time from one of the pressures against writing well to one of the writer's most important resources.Here, then, is the timetable for this project as I worked it out before even preparing to write. It is predicated on three hours of writing (an evening's work) for a three-page paper. This timetable includes everything we have done so far to arrive at our list of because-clauses, and includes the producing part of the process, to be described in Chapters 5, 6, and 7. Timetable: "Competency Tests?" (3 pages; 3 hours)
My because-clause list was the first real writing for this position paper. The list took about half an hour to generate (even though many of the clauses for purposes of explanation, are much longer than they need to be). But it was a half-hour well spent. Already I have language I can use in the final draft of the paper. I know the tone and the attitude I will take toward my reader. I have a sense of the places where I have the strongest ideas and feelings to convey, and those where I have less investment. I have my beginning, based on my provisional thesis. Later, in the roughly final draft, I might want to add a few introductory sentences to capture my reader's attention or assure him that I am going to answer the question. I have no doubt that once I analyze my list of because-clauses, I will discover something new that will form the extra sense of perspective beyond a summary a good conclusion needs. In less than an hour, then, I have the essence of my paper: its psychological underpinnings, a quarry of ideas for my logical argument, and a good feeling for the way the structure will enable me to write efficiently and, at the same time, permit the reader to follow a balanced argument. If I spend the next half-hour analyzing the main ideas, and then arranging them in the most effective order just as they are, I will be well on the way to the argument-outline that provides the framework for the raw draft. Writing under pressure doesn't permit the painstaking build-up or filling-in that most writers do when they begin a paper, those first few pages or early paragraphs that exist to get the writer started and disappear in later drafts. The planning stages of QUICK WRITING PROCESS serve that function by committing the writer to the project and to the provisional thesis. Generating the because-clauses for the thesis locates the argument's center of gravity. Sifting through the because-clauses culls the best material into the most coherent structure. The first hour, then, consists of preparing, planning, and generating a solid thesis, and the central argument of a balanced paper. By the end of the second hour, I will have a coherent rough draft containing more than enough good material. In the final hour, I can ensure unity, anchor examples, and fashion a conclusion that goes one step beyond anything I've said so far to give the reader a broader, deeper, or clearer perspective. Then I can polish, proofread, and type the final product. This three-hour commitment ensures a paper that gives my answer, in my own voice and style, to the question posed by my intended reader. QUICK WRITING PROCESS allows me to discover my answer through a relatively spontaneous process within the allotted time, a process over which I exert a good deal of control. I will have done the best I can, not only for the reader but for myself as a writer under pressure. When I was a student, my first two-page paper took me forty hours. For other papers, I spent ten or twelve hours painstakingly trying to get the beginning "right," without leaving time for the middle or the end. On some assignments, I spent so much time trying to fill in the reader on the rich background for my topic or my thesis that I left no time or energy for the middle--the argument. Most often, this happened on final exams, where I would squander the forty-five minutes allotted to "Essay Question One" on only one of the issues involved in a full answer (see Chapter 10 for the application of QUICK WRITING PROCESS to examwriting). Occasionally, I wrote what I meant in general terms, but could n6t discover the specifics or the examples to provide concrete evidence. QUICK WRITING PROCESS time-planning prevents you from falling into these ineffectivepatterns. You discover and commit yourself to your own thesis early in the writing process; you also make a time commitment and stick to it. Even if you start your writing project weeks in advance, you still need a process-related timetable to ensure that you will complete the whole job through the flawless product, on time. One of the keys to good writing under pressure is the realization that you must do each part of the process with equal vigor, and as thoroughly as possible within the time limit. You want the good material on the page, not left over in your mind to regret a day later. Moreover, each activity in QUICK WRITING PROCESS initiates the next, in a continuous process. We've imagined, here, that I was asked to prepare my position paper on an English competency exam less than a day before the dean needed it. Given such an urgent assignment, I might have sat down at the keyboard and squeezed out three pages word by word. I might have had a hot streak and come out with more material than I needed, giving me the luxury of cutting back. More likely, I would have hit a blank wall, stymied after a paragraph or page, aware that I really didn't know what I meant, or where I was going, or that I simply meant too many things to proceed without planning. I might have found out what I really wanted to say too late to do anything about it; or that everything I'd written up until five minutes to nine (shooing students and colleagues away from my office with a wave of the hand) was suddenly rendered vulnerable by a thought that only emerged as the tower clock rang out the hour. That's why QUICK WRITING PROCESS includes a timetable for each project, within the boundaries of available time: a complete timetable for the forty-five minutes in which you must produce a one-page memo for your boss before he or she leaves for lunch; or the three months for your undergraduate thesis; or the half-hour for the brief speech at your town meeting tomorrow night. You make the time-commitment in order to get the whole job done. After using QUICK WRITING PROCESS once or twice, with additions or adaptations that suit you in unique ways, you will find that the job of writing under pressure no longer induces a mystifying and debilitating terror.It took me about a year in college to come up with a reliable process for writing; in graduate school, I adapted the process to longer papers. It was only after I began teaching writing that I realized how few people had any system at all. With QUICK WRITING PROCESS, your writing improves because you use more and more of your best energy appropriately, instead of wasting time on the needless anxieties and fears, the dislocations and distortions, that result from a failure to plan time and space. |
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