Highlighters: The Balancing Act

Last week, I described a strategy for using highlighters to clarify your thoughts on the first draft of a piece of writing. You may recall that this strategy creates a colorful visual that helps you identify the number of ideas you introduce in a single piece of writing, the relationships (or lack thereof) between those ideas, and the amount of space that you devote to each idea. I stumbled upon this strategy as a way of offering feedback on student writing more efficiently than scribbling complicated notes in the margin – in my terrible handrwiting, no less – explaining that the paper starts with a strong claim or thesis statement about topic a, then shifts to focus on topic b, followed in rapid succession by topics c through f, with a particularly heavy emphasis on topic e. As a feedback strategy, the highlighters proved to be a godsend, especially in those semesters when I worked with forty students or more. When my students began using this strategy unprompted on their own first drafts, I realized that it was a godsend for them, too. And then a whole new world of highlighter strategies dawned bright and glowing in my world. 

Suddenly, I found that almost any step in the writing process could be enhanced with the use of my snazzy sixteen-color set of highlighters. I’ll detail three of those uses below. The three highlighter strategies that I’ll cover in this week’s post are as follows: organization; claim, evidence, analysis; and fulfilling the criteria of the assignment prompt. 

The first strategy, Organization, is perhaps the most intuitive of all the highligher strategies I’ve developed over the years. Like the strategy I described last week, this strategy helps you see how many ideas you address in a piece of writing and how those ideas are (or are not) related to one another. The difference between this strategy and last week’s strategy lies primarily in when you use it. While last week’s strategy is intended for use on the first draft of a piece of writing, when you’re still trying to settle on the main idea of the paper, this strategy is intended for use on a more polished draft, such as the second or third. By the time you’ve finished the second or third draft, you’ll have a solid idea of what you want to say and how you want to say it, but your ideas might not be as well organized as you would like them to be. 

This is where the highlighters come in handy. Simply choose two or three colors to represent different components of the text, such as “background information,” “describing the problem,” and “offering a solution to the problem.” Let the highlighters show you any or all of the following issues: 1) how well (or not well) these three components transition into one another, 2) whether you treat each component as a self-contained unit or mix components together, 3) whether or not mixed components fit together well, and 4) whether or not the components are well balanced, in terms of the amount of space dedicated to each. For example, if your highlighting reveals that the “background information” component spans five pages, while the “describing the problem” component spans two paragraphs and the “offering a solution” component spans only one paragraph, you most definitely need to revise, striving for a better balance among components!

The second strategy, Claim, Evidence, Analysis, works particularly well with the classic academic argument paper. In this type of writing, you’re expected to assert a claim, argument, thesis, or main idea in the first or second paragraph of the paper and use the rest of the paper to defend that argument. In defending your argument (aka claim, thesis, or main idea), you’ll strive to present evidence which persuades your reader that your claim is, indeed, correct, true, or at least worthy of consideration. Writers generally find it easy to present evidence that supports the claim, but too often stop there, without offering any analysis of the evidence they present. Yet the writer’s analysis of the evidence is almost always the most important part of his or her argument. It is in the analysis that writers can explain – and readers can understand – how the evidence supports the claim. While evidence can sometimes stand on its own without explanation, most evidence presented in a written argument does require at least some analysis to help the reader understand its relevance to the writer’s claim. 

For this reason, it’s crucial to ensure that you include not just sufficient evidence but also sufficient analysis to help the reader understand – and perhaps agree with – your claim. Highlighters are a perfect way to help you determine whether or not you’ve included sufficient analysis in your paper. Simply choose three highlighter colors, one for each of the following elements: claim, evidence, and analysis. I like to use yellow for the claim, pink for evidence, and green for analysis, but your color preferences will most likely be different than mine. Once you’ve selected your colors, begin by highlighting the claim using your claim color. Then move through the paper highlighting evidence and analysis with the appropriate colors, bearing the following issues in mind: 1) you probably won’t highlight every single word of the paper. This is normal. 2) You may find that your evidence and analysis colors frequently overlap. This is also normal. Indeed, it’s a good sign that you’re blending evidence and analysis together in sophisticated ways. 

To gain additional benefit from this strategy, recruit a friend, roommate, or classmate to highlight the claim, evidence, and analysis on a clean copy of your paper, using the same colors that you used. When your reviewer has highlighted your paper, compare your reviewer’s markings to yours. If you and your reviewer disagree signficantly about what consitutes evidence, what constitutes analysis, and perhaps even what constitutes your claim, you may need to consider revising. 

The third strategy, Fulfilling the Criteria of the Assignment Prompt, is probably the most straightforward of the highlighting strategies. But don’t be fooled into thinking that this strategy isn’t important, just because it’s not complicated! Ensuring that you have fulfilled the criteria of the assignment prompt is a crucial, but often overlooked, step in the revision process. Be careful not to overlook this step: doing so could affect your grade more seriously than you think. To use this strategy, simply choose one highlighter color for each element in the assignment prompt or the grading rubric. As you read a polished draft of your paper, use the appropriate color(s) to highlight each passage of your paper that addresses one or more of the elements listed in the assignment prompt or grading rubric. 
Be mindful of the fact that colors are likely to overlap frequently.

If “grammar” or “language use” is one of the elements listed in the assignment prompt or grading rubric, you can use the “grammar” or “language use” highlighter to call attention to typos and language-use errors, such as misspelled words and incorrect verb tenses, as you encounter them. Simply highlight the errors without correcting them: you’ll have time to make corrections later. 

If your highlighting reveals a significant imbalance between your text and the assignment criteria, consider revising. For example, if the assignment criteria indicates that the provision of “background information” is worth only 5% of your grade, while the provision of “solutions to the problem” is worth 25% of your grade, make sure that the “solutions to the problem” section is larger than the “background information” section. Once you’ve completed any necessary revisions, look through the paper for flashes of the “grammar” highlighter color and correct errors as you encounter them. By correcting grammatical errors last – after you’ve finished revising the ideas in the paper – you’ll not only read and revise ideas more efficiently but also find it easier to correct the errors, as your brain won’t need to divide its attention between correcting errors and pondering ideas. 

As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, highlighting strategies are an excellent way to help you maintain balance in your writing. The colorful visuals can help you see when you’ve got too much of an element that’s relatively unimportant, too little of an element that’s enormously important, or just enough of everything. May your highlighters soon become your best friends!

I invite you to describe one or more of your own favorite writing strategies – whether or not those strategies involve the use of highlighters – in the comments section!

Happy Writing, and Happy Highlighting, 

Dr. Lori 

Beginning, Middle, End?

I was flabbergasted. I’m sure I looked like an exaggerated cartoonish caricature of astonishment, with my eyeballs popping out of their sockets and my jaw on the floor. Have I mentioned that I was flabbergasted?

The students in my first-year college writing class were equally flabbergasted. All twenty-four of us stared at each other in hushed silence for something that seemed like several hours, but was surely no more than a few seconds. One of the bolder students finally broke the silence with a hushed question.

“So you mean it’s really not cheating?”

Twenty-three pairs of eyes locked perplexedly onto my own bulging eyeballs.

“Who told you that it was?” I responded to my bold student’s question with a question of my own. The sense of bafflement in the room increased to such a level that it almost took shape as a physical object. Twenty-three students looked back and forth at one another, searching for answers in each others’ faces. Finally, another bold student said “No one. No one ever said it was cheating. It just feels like cheating.” Twenty-three heads nodded and the light began to dawn in my mind.

“It feels like cheating because stories start at the beginning and progress through the middle and end at the end, correct?” More nodding.

“But what about stories with flashback scenes?” I shook up the settled order of things just a little bit with this question.

Bold student number three: “Yeah, but the kind of writing we do for classes doesn’t have flashback scenes.” More nodding.

“Do we all agree with that? Is it true that academic writing – the kind of writing you do for class – doesn’t have flashback scenes?”

The murmuring began, with words like “of course it doesn’t” bubbling distinctly to the surface of the pool every now and then.

“Wait a minute, though,” one very bold student took the floor, “academic writing sort of does have flashback scenes.” Twenty-three pairs of eyes locked onto the incredibly bold speaker.

I finally invited her to say more.

“Well, I mean, you give background information in your paper that helps your reader understand your argument, right? And you don’t always give all of the background information in the first paragraph. So, in that sense, academic writing kind of sometimes does have flashback scenes. Pseudo flashback scenes.” The nodding and murmuring recommenced, with words like, “that’s a good point,” or “I never thought of that” bubbling distinctly to the surface of the pool every now and then.

Speaking of flashback scenes, I will now insert one to explain how this conversation with my first-year writing students arose. Namely, we were talking about the “legality” of writing a paper, then revising the introduction and claim to ensure a better fit with the ideas in the middle and at the end of the paper. While I referred to this revision process as a good writing strategy, my students referred to it as cheating.

Our subsequent discussion on this topic revealed, as described above, that students felt uncomfortable with this revision process because they were accustomed to thinking of beginning, middle, and end in sequential order. They reported that it seemed unfair or improper to rearrange the classic beginning-middle-end sequence by writing the middle or end of a text before writing its beginning. Moreover – and perhaps more important – students reported that their previous writing courses had often required them to focus on writing good thesis statements in isolation. In other words, students had been taught to practice writing thesis statements, but not to practice developing four pages’ worth of evidence and analysis around those statements.

This revelation explained a lot.

For example, it explained why the papers my students submitted almost always started with one claim, ended with another, and contained a cocktail of evidence and analysis in the middle that often failed to support either the claim at the beginning or the claim at the end. This phenomenon was clearly caused by the fact that my students, all of whom were quite smart and quite good at writing, believed that it is wrong to revise a paper’s claim after the ideas in that paper have evolved.

It also explained why the papers my students submitted often contained two-and-a-half pages of statements, each of which sounded like a separate claim, then wrapped up with one-half page of evidence that typically supported the last of the claims in the two-and-a-half-page list of claims. This phenomenon, too, was clearly caused by the fact that my students believed it is wrong to revise a paper’s claim after the ideas in that paper have evolved.

Finally, it explained why the papers they submitted almost always ran short on evidence. They simply did not have enough evidence to support the initial claim, but did not realize that it’s OK to change the claim after the ideas in the paper have evolved.

We had a talk (or two) about the concept of a “working claim,” which can – and usually should – be replaced by the “final claim” after the ideas in the paper have come to fruition. We had a talk (or two) about writing as a “recursive” process that constantly circles back on itself, instead of moving inexorably in a direction regarded as “forwards.” We practiced writing multiple ungraded drafts and being OK with lousy first drafts and weak, or even nonexistent, first claims. By the end of the semester, everyone in the class had become markedly more comfortable with the idea of using the initial claim as a placeholder until the paper was done, at which point the “placeholder claim” or “working claim” could be revised to better match the development of ideas in the paper.

Many writers never have a chance to reconsider their relationship with the claim or with the writing process. Many writers never become comfortable with the idea that it’s OK to revise the initial claim after the ideas in the paper have evolved. As a result, these writers never develop into the strong writers that they could be! If you’re one of these writers, try one or more of the following tips for developing a greater level of comfort with the idea that it’s OK to revise the start of your paper once you’ve reached its end.

TIP ONE: On a brightly colored sticky note, write the words “WRITING DOESN’T NEED TO PROGRESS IN A STRAIGHT LINE ‘FORWARDS!,'” or “WRITING IS A RECURSIVE PROCESS!,” or “WORKING CLAIMS ARE MEANT TO BE REVISED!” or any other catchy slogan that helps you remember that it’s OK to revise. Place this sticky note on your computer monitor or on a surface near the space where you often sit to write. For the record, my own sticky note contains the words “A PIECE OF WRITING IS NEVER REALLY FINISHED; WRITERS JUST STOP TINKERING WITH THE WORDS AND IDEAS BECAUSE THE DEADLINE IS APPROACHING FAST! =)”

TIP TWO: Give yourself time to write, read, and revise each text at least twice. (See last week’s post on Time and what to do when you haven’t got any.)

TIP THREE: Invest in a set of highlighters that contains at least eight different colors. Use your favorite highlighter color to identify the claim on a printed copy of your first draft. We’ll refer to this color as “the claim color.” Read through the remainder of your draft, using “the claim color” to highlight every single idea in the paper that is obviously relevant to your claim. When ideas that are not relevant to your claim begin cropping up, as they inevitably will, whip out a different highlighter, preferably one with a contrasting color. Use this highlighter to identify the first idea that is not relevant to your claim. We’ll refer to this color as the “1st irrelevant idea color.” If you see additional ideas that are related to the “1st irrelevant idea,” continue using the “1st irrelevant idea color” to highlight these ideas. If, however, the next idea that you encounter in your paper is completely irrelevant either to the claim or to the “1st irrelevant idea,” whip out another highlighter color. We’ll call this color the “2nd irrelevant idea color.” Continue on in this fashion through the end of the paper, and don’t be surprised if you end up using all eight of your highlighter colors. This is completely normal! Once you’ve finished the task of highlighting ideas, simply look for the largest block of color. The ideas represented in this color block are clearly the most important to you – can you turn them into a claim and build an argument around them? The writing, reading, revision adventure begins again!

Note that you can also use the highlighting tool in your computer’s word processing program for this task. Personally, I find it more helpful to conduct this exercise on a printed copy of my work.

TIP FOUR: Don’t forget that writing is a recursive process….

Tune in next week for more helpful ideas on using highlighters to critique and revise your own writing! In the meantime, I wish you Happy Writing!

Dr. Lori

Time (What to do when you haven’t got any)

Last week’s post was full of magical ideas about words falling out of your mind and onto a blank page, arranging themselves in no particular order until several drafts later, after you, all of your friends, one or two teachers or tutors, and every expert on writing who happens to live in your neighborhood (doesn’t every neighborhood have its very own writing expert?) have read through your ideas again and again and again, arguing with them, moving them around, chucking them out the window, reeling them back in again, and finally giving them the seal of approval.

In some ways, this depiction of the process of creating a first draft is accurate, if oddly romantic and mostly metaphorical. This image of the process of creating a first draft is also a frustrating reminder that writing takes a lot of TIME.

The problem with the time commitment involved in writing is that lots of people who are asked to do a lot of writing (i.e., students) don’t really have that much time. You know what I mean: you’ve got 75 pages to read, a discussion post to submit, an exam at the end of the week, and two papers due within two days of each other. On top of all this, you’ve got to work every evening this week, you want to go to a club meeting, you’d like to go to a friend’s party, you promised your Mom you’d go over to her place for dinner on Sunday, and it would be nice if you could spend some time with your significant other before the start of the next millennium.

How can you possibly get all of this done?

Specifically: how can you get those recalcitrant words to form themselves into acceptable drafts of the two papers due within two days of each other?

The key is to remember that writing is more about ideas than words. The words are simply there to show the reader how your ideas grow together into an argument. The work of connecting ideas together can be done long before you choose the words that will drive those ideas home to your audience. This work can be done largely in your head after you’ve put the first draft onto the page. In some cases, this work may be done even without the aid of a first written draft. For example, most of this blog post came to life in my mind three days before I sat down to put its words onto the screen. What’s more, the bulk of this birthing of ideas happened while I was doing something completely unrelated – or so it would seem – to writing, such as washing dishes, vacuuming the floor, cooking a meal, or washing my hair.

Never underestimate the valuable role of housework and other everyday minutiae in facilitating the writing process. The following tips will help you leverage the ordinary acts of your day as crucial steps in the writing process.

TIP ONE: Start thinking about your argument or the relationships between ideas in an upcoming writing assignment the second that your instructor assigns it. Even if the assignment isn’t due for ten weeks, start thinking about it as soon as you have the assignment prompt. It’s never too early to start thinking about the relationships between the ideas you’d like to explore, the evidence you’ll use to support your argument, the ways you’ll analyze your evidence, and the kinds of sources you might need to reference.

TIP TWO: Think about your upcoming writing assignment(s) every time your brain is reasonably at rest, even if you have only one or two minutes of resting brain time to spare. Are you walking across campus? Think about what you want to say and how you want to say it in your upcoming writing assignment. Are you picking out zucchini at the grocery store? Think about what you want to say and how you want to say it in your upcoming writing assignment. Are you cleaning your house or mowing the lawn? Think about what you want to say and how you want to say it in your upcoming writing assignment. Are you just about to fall asleep? Think about what you want to say and how you want to say it in your upcoming writing assignment.

You get the picture.

TIP THREE: Keep writing utensils and sheets or pads of paper scattered in random places throughout the house, so that you can easily jot down ideas as they come to you. It’s especially important to keep a writing utensil and writing surface near your bed, as many of your best ideas are likely to come to you just before you drop off into the Land of Nod. Something about the mystical moment between waking and sleeping seems to lend clarity to the mind.

TIP FOUR: Think about your ideas, arguments, etc. in a variety of expressive media. Words are helpful, of course, for the written draft, but you may find that images, sounds, colors, or diagrams are more helpful in the planning stages. Note that diagrams can be especially helpful when you’re having trouble figuring out whether or not and how all of the topics that you want to cover are related to one another. These diagrams become even more helpful when you transfer them from your mind to a sheet of paper, a whiteboard, or some other appropriate writing surface.

TIP FIVE: Once the ideas start to gel in your mind, set them down on paper (or the computer screen) as a first draft. Don’t worry if the draft is mostly stream-of-consciousness nonsense. (See last week’s post!) Read the draft once you’ve finished it, then let it sit for at least a day. Continue to think about the ideas in this draft as you go about your daily business for the next 24 to 48 hours. Never cease to ponder the best way of putting your ideas together!

TIP SIX: After a day or two of thinking about the ideas in your first draft, return to the written draft. Compare the ideas in the written draft with the ideas in your mind and begin to revise the written draft, as needed. Bear in mind that you may need to repeat this process of drafting, reading, setting aside, thinking, and revising two or three additional times.

TIP SEVEN: Remember that there is no “correct” approach to drafting a paper. A combination of mental work and written work is generally helpful for most people. But some of you may find that you don’t need the first written draft to coax ideas into shape in your mind. Or some of you may find that the paper more-or-less writes itself in your head, so that you need to produce only one written draft. Experiment until you find the right balance of brain-work to written-work: a balance that leaves you not only with an excellent written assignment but also with a bit of extra time!

Tune in next week to explore the world of writing in a straight line (or not….)

Happy Writing!

Dr. Lori

Setting Realistic Expectations about Your First Draft

In my work as a writing instructor and tutor, I’ve often been asked simply to sit with a student as he or she drafts a writing assignment. My role in such situations is to provide moral support while simultaneously serving as a sounding board, a dictionary, a thesaurus, a grammar rule book, and a cheerleader. As a cheerleader, 95% of my work involves coaxing students to put their ideas on the page, even if those ideas aren’t yet fully formed, and even if the words used to express those ideas aren’t strung together in perfectly formed and flawlessly elegant sentences. 100% of the time, my students are reluctant to take this advice.

It’s not surprising that writers are overwhelmingly reluctant to drop anything less-than-seemingly-perfect onto the page. Pop culture leads us to believe that “good writing” is about using commas and big words correctly. Standardized exams, college admissions criteria, and even some educators do little to refute the idea that a piece of writing qualifies as “good” as long as it contains an impressive array of big words and perfectly placed commas. Moreover, the published writing that we see in textbooks or novels or magazines or newspapers offers a misleading look at the writing process, concealing the fact that published texts reach their highly polished state of seeming perfection only after having been read and revised and read and revised and read and revised again by several people who have dedicated their lives to writing. Finally, the act of writing is a deeply personal process that opens us up to failure and criticism in ways that few other acts do. No one wants to risk falling short of perfection in their writing.

And so writers wait in cautious reluctance, hesitating to put anything at all on the page until we know exactly what we want to say, why we want to say it, what impressive words we’ll use to say it, and where to put the commas that will inevitably demand to be included in our thoughts.

In this manner, so many thoughts – good thoughts, creative thoughts, academically worthy thoughts, challenging thoughts, thoughts that could make all the difference in someone’s life- have died a quiet death somewhere between the writer’s mind and the blank page.

I implore you not to let your thoughts die in such a fashion! Hurl them onto the page, even if they take the form of random, disjointed, misspelled words! String them together into sentences, even if you find out later that some or all of the sentences aren’t actually complete sentences or that they use commas in all the wrong places and all the wrong ways. Bring your good, creative, worthy, challenging, perhaps life-altering thoughts to life, even if you find yourself momentarily unable to think of a better word than “thing” or “stuff” or “it” or “interesting.” Build them into paragraphs, pages, and essays, even if you find out later that your ideas are jumbled together in an unhelpful order, or that your argument contains holes big enough to accommodate a freight train, or that you’ve wandered into a forest of tangential ideas.

Just get the ideas onto the page, no matter how awful or disjointed or meaningless or silly or grammatically wrong or misspelled they may initially look. Once they’ve leapt from your mind, they can be shaped and trimmed and revised and moved and tweaked. They can walk with more experienced writers; they can journey towards perfection through the feedback of readers who engage with the ideas behind the imperfect words; they can confront you as strangers, helping you see your very own thoughts with new eyes, a new perspective, and probably some new words. Polishing words that have landed on the page is the easy part – it’s the bit about getting them onto the page that takes a leap of faith.

This leap becomes easier to make when you realize that the first draft is not a platform for perfection. Rather, the first draft is an exercise in persuading ideas to leave your mind and take up residence on the page. That being the case, it is no cause for alarm if your first draft makes no sense – first drafts often don’t. Moreover, first drafts often use bizarre words that don’t fit the context. They often contain incomplete sentences and glaring grammatical errors. They almost always bundle unrelated or only marginally related ideas together in completely illogical ways. They make false or unsupportable claims. They fail to account for a quarter or more of the criteria laid out in the assignment prompt. In short, first drafts are usually pretty awful.

And that’s OK. It’s perfectly normal for a first draft to be awful. Indeed, first drafts are sometimes referred to as “exploratory drafts,” the idea behind this name being that the writer uses the draft to explore ideas, not to explain them with clarity, logic, and perfect grammar. Don’t be afraid or embarrassed to let your ideas roam freely across the blank page, becoming transformed as you write your way to the end of a first draft that will almost certainly be disjointed, illogical, meandering, and full of weird language-use errors. Remind yourself frequently – I keep a sticky note bearing this message on my computer monitor – that it is easier to revise words on a page than to pull ideas from your mind.

Write with revision in mind, and hesitate no more — no one expects perfection on the first draft!

Tune in again next week for my comments on time and what to do as a writer when you haven’t got any of it.

Happy Writing!

Dr. Lori

How To Survive the Journey of Writing in College and Beyond: An Introduction

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