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Academic writing Editing Memoirs Paragraphs Writing style

Writing Without Fear: Finding Your Voice

  • Mark Twain pondering at his desk
    You don’t have to be a Mark Twain to allow your personal voice to come through as a writer.

At an art college where I used to teach, students were required to go on a field trip. As an incentive in my class, they had to write a 250-word report that would count for 5% of their final grade; I also guaranteed they would basically get an A on this assignment if they just finished it and handed it in. Interestingly, some of these reports were better written than their term papers. Freed from the necessity of conforming to their preconceived ideas of what an academic essay is supposed to be, they allowed their real abilities as writers to surface. More importantly, their personal voices came through.

Allowing what you write to reflect who you are and what you believe is a perennial balancing act for students and academics alike. But it is also an issue for people in a wide variety of situations—the businesswoman giving a keynote address at a dinner or writing copy for her company’s brochure; an aggrieved citizen writing a letter to their local district attorney; or an immigrant for whom English is a second language trying to write their resume.

Some editing services advertise they can transform a piece by an ESL author to make it read like it was written by a native speaker. To some extent, this is what we also do. But I don’t think it should be done at the expense of neutering who that person is. As a professor, one of the joys of working with international students was the added perspectives they brought to the classroom. And as a magazine editor, I likewise found the pluses of having contributors from around the world far outweighed the extra effort that may be involved in working with them.

Writing without fear can be especially hard for high school students writing their personal essays when applying to college. The hypercompetitive atmosphere surrounding the process can be very scary, which can lead applicants to be overly conservative. The resulting essay might seem to fulfill all the school’s requirements except one: the clear sense of who the applicant is. In other words, a lack of a personal voice, a quality admissions officers really do look for.

The one type of writing we have worked with that does not really suffer as much from artificial constraints is the personal memoir. These can be rather fun to work on. For instance, we once got a book written for family and friends (it was to be self-published). As such, the prose was casual and unforced, so we could concentrate on things like grammar and structure to allow it to breathe better. In this case, the author did not seem to understand how to break up their text into proper paragraphs (i.e., he made paragraphs that went on for pages, or run-on paragraphs). The results were very gratifying, and our job was made easier because the writer was speaking from his heart.

Categories
Academic writing Editing Structure Writing

Writing is Thinking: There Are no Shortcuts, Including the 5-Paragraph Essay

Click on this image to go to Jonathan Lang’s excellent post on “Unlearning the Five Paragraph Essay.”

There are misconceptions out there about writing, and one of them is that writers have talent and the rest of us don’t. Schools try to “teach” writing and just leave most people with a distaste for trying to express themselves with the written word.

Many of us had our writing styles ruined by education. I’m one of them. After eight years of full-time grad school trying to turn out PhD-prose, I became a horrible writer. Constipated and verbose at the same time. It wasn’t until I discovered new ways of writing qualitative research that things started to get better. People who tried to help me, editors at journals, colleagues, were at a loss.

I had to struggle through it. Writing poetry actually helped. Reading the new ethnography helped. A mentor would have also helped. But I was too embarrassed to ask, or even think of asking, or pay for a coach. After all, I was supposed to know how to write.

If you’re having trouble, it’s probably at least partly the fault of mass education. In particular, the five-paragraph essay formula is devastating to good writing. And that’s what schools teach, because busy high school English teachers with 200 students a day don’t have time to mentor beginning writers.

I’m going to say that having ideas is the most important part of writing. Writing is a process of thinking them through to find meaning. I often say, “I don’t know what I think until I write.” You may want to start with an outline, which can help organize your thoughts, but be prepared to let the writing go where it wants to. You can fix it in the next draft.

I generally disregard the conventions of mapping out an entire article or essay beforehand, because the process of writing unearths ideas and connections I didn’t know were there, what we call, “writing straight ahead.” (An outline can come after, when I’m struggling to figure out what the hell I just wrote. As I said, there are no shortcuts.)

I urge the struggling writer, at any level, to find someone who has time and patience to point out where you are successfully communicating, and who is able to help you identify and bring your ideas into the sunlight of the printed page.

Yes, to some degree this is a plug for our services. But even if you don’t want to pay for our help, or you don’t think we are the right people for you, it’s worth finding an editor you can trust.

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Fiction and nonfiction writing Research tools Writing

Joys and Sorrows of Online Research

Frere Hall, in Karachi, Pakistan, which dates from the British Raj. Source: Wikipedia.

I was writing a story for myself, set in South Asia, and was using online searches to research some locales. It was fun: Finding pictures of remote valleys and small towns on maps, reading about them on Wikipedia and other sites I thought I could trust.

I don’t know if websites about Pakistan are more dangerous than other sites–it would be consistent with the increased dangers of other things, like travel. I was trying to find names for my characters and searched for lists of surnames and first names. Learned some things about Pakistani ethnicities, which are not as simple as I had assumed. Of course Pakistan has been a crossroads for millennia, why wouldn’t family names be complex? Understand that I am not bashing Pakistan. I concluded they are as diverse as we are.

Some of the websites were sketchy, wanted me to create an account, and those I got out of quickly.

Anyway, I eventually found the perfect setting in a “tribal area” of Pakistan, which I am not going to name. I was on Wikipedia and there was a short article with one picture. There were external links to two websites. I clicked on the first link and something came up which had nothing to do with the topic, and I got out of there quick. The second one led me to a site warning me that I had damaged their system by entering it and would have to pay them to fix their computer and thus be able to get my files back. In other words, I was a victim of ransomware.

This all happened really fast as I closed the browser almost instantaneously. But now my computer was frozen. I immediately unplugged the backup drive and tried “control-alt-delete” to close the browser. No response. I was able to get into Windows 10 settings and do a “reset.” It actually was the second reset in two days—the first time was related to a hardware malfunction. By now I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

Fortunately I have my computer backed up in two places, one in the cloud and also an external hard drive. Still, having to go through the reset and reinstall process took the whole day, once again, was tedious and a waste of time. The computer is now operating normally and I didn’t lose any files.

I did contact Wikipedia to report the problem. It was hard to figure out where to send the “malicious content report,” but it did eventually get forwarded to a volunteer editor. The link for reporting is info-en@wikimedia.org, in case anyone else should ever need it. A week later the volunteer sent me back a nice note and said he had removed the links.

My take-homes from this experience:

  • The virtual world has opened up to writers. The admonition to “write about what you know,” can be cautiously ignored, to some degree. What I still know about is people, and I was careful to write characters I could breathe substance into.
  • I do have a lot of generalized background knowledge about the story setting, have been to South Asian cities and villages, and was able to imagine myself there in ways that I think are convincing to the reader.
  • I was careful to only describe scenes I felt were convincing.
  • Be really careful about clicking web links! If I was doing this again, I would probably go to the library and use their computers. But that part of the story is finished. I’m now moving on to Chicago and LA, places I know more about.