It seems like all the cool kids have blogs these days, so I thought I’d start one, too. I’m not entirely certain that I qualify as a “cool kid,” although one of my students did once tell me, speaking as a representative for the entire first-year writing class, that I was “such a nerd that it’s cool.” I took this as a compliment.
While there may be some doubt as to whether or not I actually qualify as a blog-worthy “cool kid,” there is no doubt that I have some stuff to say about writing, most of which should be at least marginally helpful or interesting to people in any or all of the following categories:
- high school students who are preparing for college
- undergraduate college students
- graduate students who are navigating their way through a research project, thesis, or dissertation
- people who do a good deal of writing for work
- people who are particularly fond of or interested in writing or language
- people who are looking for something to read during the pandemic.
If you find that you fit into one or more of the categories listed above, please swing by each week to check out my tips for surviving – and perhaps even enjoying – this exciting journey known as “the writing that you will do in college and beyond.” You’ll find a new tip every Friday, unless I get confused about what day of the week it is. This happens to me sometimes; my confusion seems to be linked to my general feelings of uncertainty about things like daylight savings time and other arbitrary conventions related to the measurement and naming of time, daylight, and darkness. Bear with me!
You may be wondering exactly why this slightly time-befuddled nerd whose nerdiness has exceeded the bounds of nerdiness so far as to have achieved an aura of coolness should be trusted to say anything practical or helpful about writing. This is a fair question, and I’m glad you asked it. (I could hear the question rattling around in your brainpans as you read.) Your question has given me the perfect way of transitioning into a short bit of history about myself as a writer.
My history as a writer really begins with my history as a reader. I come from a family of readers, so it’s no surprise that I love to read and always have. As a pre-literate child, I pestered my mom not just into reading a book to me every day but also into retrieving the book that I wanted her to read from the hiding place in which I had stashed it. Early in the afternoon, I would hide the book, then wait until mom had found the book and gotten settled in the padded rocker in the living room before I would climb into her lap to listen and watch as the pages went by. This sounds like a great and sweet thing, until you find out that I asked my mom to read the same book to me every single day and that I hid said book in the same place every single day. That’s right: I put the same old book in the same old hiding place every single day. Moreover, the hiding place wasn’t really even a hiding place; it was a pillow propped up against the slatted arm of the padded rocker in which we would ultimately sit to read. That’s right: I “hid” my book between a pillow and the arm of a chair with wide slats that did nothing at all to conceal the book. Every day. Every single day. But mom played along every single day.
Eventually, I could “read” the book by myself, in the sense that I could recite each page of the story from memory. But memorization is, after all, an important part of the process of learning to read. From recitation of a memorized text to reading of a novel text was a short leap. By the time I entered kindergarten, I was comfortably able to indulge in a skill that many of my classmates would not learn until first grade. Bear in mind that this was the 1970s, when kindergarten was still about playing with big cardboard bricks and medium-sized wooden stoves and little plastic telephones. Instruction in reading and math wouldn’t start for another year. When reading instruction did start in first grade, I rolled with it, even though the endless hours of filling out phonics worksheets didn’t really seem to have any sort of effect on my pre-existing ability to read. This exercise did, however, awaken my fascination both with filling out worksheets or other types of forms and with manipulating the building blocks of language.
As I continued through my primary education at a Catholic school, I, unlike my counterparts in the public school system, learned how to diagram sentences. If anyone had asked me how I felt about diagramming sentences – not that anyone ever did – I’d have asserted wholeheartedly that diagramming sentences was even better than filling out phonics worksheets. I rejoiced at this opportunity to continue manipulating language, and my fascination with the bits and pieces of language continued to grow. I was captivated by the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which meaning could be changed by moving a word or changing the placement of a piece of punctuation.
My fascination with language began spilling over into notebooks full of stories, diary entries, and a handful of poems. I filled up those notebooks assiduously after school and on the weekends and during the summer months of my junior-high and high-school years, but I did very little writing in school itself. Because I did so little writing in school, I had very few, if any, opportunities to receive feedback on my written work or guidance on the proper use of concepts that are important to academic or professional writers, such as style, voice, tone, evidence, argument, and analysis. I didn’t even know what most of those things were until I was embarrassingly old, had somehow been hired as a college-level writing instructor, and discovered that I could figure out what “rhetorical devices” and other mysterious writing-y things are by eavesdropping on my colleagues’ conversations.
My lack of knowledge about writing notwithstanding, I managed to stumble successfully through school by drawing on two strengths: 1) my love of reading, and 2) my solid understanding of the inner workings of language and the ways that words can be glued together or pulled apart again to say exactly this, but not that.
Eventually, I started to learn a few lessons about what it means to write well in the world of western academia and the professions. Ironically, I learned the first two or three of those lessons in my second language from a kind and insightful professor of German literature who seemed to understand intuitively that no one had ever actually taught me how to write in my native language. I continued to pick up a few lessons here and there from German professors both at home and abroad. Meanwhile, I continued to read, and my reading branched out from the realm of English-language fiction or fantasy and the untranslated classics of German literature to the realm of English-language academic research. As my reading habits began to shift almost entirely to academic reading, my fascination with the building blocks of language swooped in and began analyzing the way that sentences, paragraphs, and arguments were constructed by academics in my field. And so, at some point about halfway through my career as a graduate student, I finally figured out how to write.
Now that I’ve got a pretty good handle on both writing and writing instruction (I taught writing for seven years), I’d like to share what I’ve learned with you, so that your own journey towards confidence and efficiency in English academic or professional writing might be a little less awkward and confusing than mine was! Thus was the idea for this blog born.
If you want to know more about where I went to school and where I’ve taught and all of that good stuff, check out the CV linked through the landing page of my website. If you’d like to consult with me on a writing project or about your general growth as a writer, check out the rate sheet linked through the landing page of my website. (https://engaging-texts-editing-services.com)
In the meantime, plan to meet me here next week for your first writing tip: Set realistic expectations about your first draft.
See you soon,
Dr. Lori
Engaging Texts: Has Your Text Been Engaged? 