Download PDFIntroduction
When working with student writers, I try to communicate to them that it is really through the process of writing that we begin to know what it is that we want to say.
I am not the first person in the history of teaching writing to share this with students. Anne Lamont’s piece “Shitty First Drats” advocates that writers not worry about perfection at the drafting stage. She argues that what is most important is to get something written/typed onto the page.
Versions of this can be seen in free-writing and brainstorming activities where instructors attempt to facilitate a space where students get their ideas out, unencumbered by the need for their writing to be perfect and quieting the negative thoughts about the quality of their writing.
While these previous approaches are useful, I have found Jan Reiman’s (2016) work to be most helpful. In her piece, she writes about the “paradox”: the reality that writing isn’t just mere transcription of our inner thoughts onto the paper, but that through the act of writing that we come to know what we want to say. In short, writing isn’t a record of our thoughts, it is a way to clarify them for ourselves and therefore others.
This is a bit of a different approach to writing. Students are sometimes drilled into thinking that they should have a thesis before they begin to write, but I find this to be incredibly cruel and not at all reflective of the invention component of the writing process. Coming to the main points, what I have also called the little nuggets of our writing, is not something we may know of at the start of our writing. Instead, it is through the act of writing that we synergize ideas to uncover what are the main points and connections that we want to make.