8/6/2023 0 Comments Ideas about writing![]() ![]() I show a YouTube video by Tim Weninger, a computer scientist and engineer at the University of Notre Dame. The professionals are just a little better at waiting things out, pushing through what Anne Lamott calls “shitty first drafts” and all the ones that follow, the revision of a tenth and a thirteenth and a twenty-third draft. ![]() Like firstyear college students, people paid to write-the journalists and the novelists and the technical writers-more often than not despair at the difference between what’s in their heads and hearts and what ends up on the page the first time around. My writing students are usually relieved to hear that published authors often find writing just as fraught as they do. That, to me, is revision: the heavy lifting of working through why I’m writing, who I’m writing for, and how I structure writing logically and effectively. It’s important to keep in mind I’m not talking about revision as proofreading or copy editing no amount of grammatical, spelling, and style corrections transforms a piece of writing like focused attention to fundamental questions about purpose, evidence, and organization. Revision is not the thing writers do when they’re done writing. the night before our deadline-writers need revision because revision is not a discrete step. Anyone interested in writing clearer, stronger, more persuasive and passionate prose, even those of us who are procrastinators panicking because we need to get a project finished or a paper written and it’s 2:00 a.m. Novice writers, experienced writers, all writers. The fantasy that good writers summon forth beautiful, lean, yet intricate sentences onto a page without sweating is an unhealthy fiction, and it is wrong. “The standard perception that revision is something that happens at the end of the writing process is a good place to start revising ideas about revision.”-Cathleen Breidenbach \)Īuthor: Laura Giovanelli, Wake Forest University ![]()
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