FIVE RULES FOR WRITING THAT DOES NOT SUCK

Anyone who's taught college for more than a day and a half knows that the idea of writing anything more complex than a "To Do" list for a course strikes some students with an inordinate amount of fear, while leading others to the rapid conclusion that the course is more trouble than it's worth. Students in the latter category generally drop the class after the first session, so we need not concern ourselves with them. (Be sure to say "Hi" to them the next time you pull up to the fast food drive thru window; for this is where students who take the easy way out generally end up.)

Students who stick with the course despite an onerous writing requirement are generally full of woe as a consequence, because the writing requirement makes it impossible for the students to know Exactly What The Professor Wants (EWTPW). Since a student's ability to predict a course's EWTPW coefficient is directly proportional to their ability to get an A, which, in turn, is directly related to Everything Else in Life, any writing assignment is a life or death situation. And, since much student writing positively sucks, it would seem that student's fears about writing are well justified.

To reduce the possibility of writing related suicides among SVSU students, the Virtual Gewerth website offers this brief guide to good writing, called (what else) The Virtual Gewerth Guide To Writing That Does Not Suck. Since The Real Gewerth (TRG) is a dour, cynical and judgmental type who, at base, is not a nice person,the five basic rules contained in the first part of the guide are not couched in touchy-feely, all-ideas-are-equally-good, writing- as-an-outlet-for-creativity-and-a-way-to-build-self-esteem psychobabble. The rules set out the absolute minimum expectations for college level writing aimed at a professional audience. And, as described below, bad things can happen if they are not followed.

Despite the apparent obviousness of this rule, it is lost on a distressingly large number of students. A great deal of bad student writing reads as if the student is talking his way through the assignment or the paper, pouring out half formed ideas in a headlong torrent of words. The "sentences" that result are a patchwork of disjointed ideas, informal phrases, and clipped, meaningless sentence fragments. The end product is something closer to a stream of consciousness monologue thanwriting. Someone who does not pay attention to this rule tends to write sentences (and paragraphs and pages) like this:

Their [sic] is alot [sic] of concern about crime nowdays [sic], it is going up everywhere and people are afraid and are buying more guns, and calling on more criminals to die.

This is an example of Writing That Sucks. One cannot tell from the sentence what point the author is trying to make, or what the remainder of the document is going to be about. Is what follows going to be about people's fear of crime? The fact that a significant segment of the population owns weapons? Or is it about capital punishment? Second, there are large, gaping and obvious mistakes in the sentence that no college student should make. The first word of the sentence, "Their " should be "There." In addition, the colloquial term "a lot" is misspelled (it's two words--a lot--not one), and in fact, shouldn't be used at all since it is too informal an expression to be used in a formal paper directed at a professional audience. Appearing as the opening sentence in a term paper, it is a tragic error that will result in a bad grade. Appearing as an opening sentence on the writing portion of a promotion examination, it is a tragic error that will result in the better job going to someone else who probably paid attention to Rule 1. Appearing as the opening sentence of a report written for a supervisor, it is a tragic error that will, in all probability, lead to an alternate career in the food service industry (drive thru division).

Students must understand that talking and writing are fundamentally different. While speaking to someone in conversation is a spontaneous, instantaneous, ephemeral event, good writing is none of these. Since writing takes time, it is expected that the thoughts underlying the writing will be organized, logical, and complete. Since writing takes effort, it is expected that authors will select the words that they use with precision and care, so that what is written reflects what is meant. Moreover, since authors do not have the benefit of the immediate feedback of a listener, it is expected that authors will, to some extent, try to anticipate the likely effect that the choice of words will have on the reader, and alter those word choices accordingly. Finally, since the sole purpose of writing is to render human thought permanent and timeless, it is expected that authors will render these permanent records cleanly and clearly by attending closely to matters of correct spelling, punctuation, grammar, and format.

Assuming that Rule 1 is true, and writing is different than talking, what can students do to make sure that what they write doesn't sound like a monologue run amok? Ironically, one of the best solutions for the monologue problem is to encourage students to go into a room and read what they've written out loud. Strangely enough, reading something out loud can bring out writing problems that may otherwise escape notice. Read and listen. Do the sentences say what they're meant to? Are some kind of confusing? Are the ideas presented in a logical order, or do they jump around more than Barney on speed?

Also, to eliminate those annoying run-on sentences, use the breath test. This has nothing at all to do with oral hygiene, but it is a sure cure for a sentence that keeps going and going and goingandgoingandgoing. The breath test assumes that one normal breath should provide sufficient air to read one good sentence out loud. Breathe. Read. If you run out of breath before you run out of sentence, fix the sentence.

Rule 2 takes effect every single time someone reads what someone else writes. There is no way to avoid Rule 2. Students must stop thinking about writing assignments as things that are merely graded; something that, if done badly, they can compensate for by kicking ass on the mid-term or the final. Writing assignments deserve more respect; they are intimate self portraits in prose form. When people meet someone new, they tend to care about the little details of their appearance--whether their hair is combed, their tie is straight, etc. Since any written document always represents the author to the reader, shouldn't the details count for just as much? Is the correct word in the third sentence of the fourth paragraph "affect" or "effect"? Does the introduction work well enough to tell the reader exactly what the rest of the paper or report is about? Does the conclusion really summarize all that has come before it, or clearly state a position on an issue if that is what is required? Or, does it trail off, and wimp out so that the reader is left to guess where the author stands?

TRG realizes that the substance of Rule 2 (i.e., people make value judgments about others on tiny pieces of evidence-- such as a misused "there") and its implications (we should pay attention to the small details of writing from the moment we set down the first word of a document) are not what students want to hear. After all, as a Professor, TRG should like all his students, and care about them as people, and not judge them just on the basis of what they write, but also on things like how hard they're trying, and realize that they have other courses to prepare for, and have other demands on their time (such as a job or a family), and recognize that Criminal Justice classes aren't English classes after all. Consequently, TRG should temper his wildly unrealistic expectations about student's writing, and be less demanding and judgmental, and not yell at them in class, and not get all torqued up if a student (or twenty or thirty) can't tell the difference between "its" and "it's" by the third year of college.

To which TRG's considered, reasoned response is: BULL. The hard facts are that employers and others frequently care only about what people can accomplish, about whether they do what they're being paid to do. In the end, the world values success and outcome over well meaning effort. Thus, TRG's tirades about bad writing reflect his profound frustration that a horrendously large proportion of college juniors and seniors are making embarassing mistakes that should have been corrected long before the sixth grade, as well as his belief that such silly mistakes, if left uncorrected, will prove even more than embarassing once the student hits and splatters messily on the job market.

TRG also realizes that Rule 2 and its implications lie in opposition to tons of conventional wisdom holding that the placement of too much emphasis on the small details of writing too early in the writing process (e.g., worrying about whether the correct word is "affect" or "effect" in the first draft) impedes a student's ability to learn to write, and causes him or her to eventually hate to write. This ill-considered position implies that: (1) given enough time and enough drafts, the creative chaos of the first draft (with all its half formed thoughts, random musings, mistimed logical leaps as well as the various and sundry grammatical, syntactic, spelling and punctuation errors that Aren't Important Enough To Worry About Now), will, via successive revision, get chiseled out, so that by draft N, the student will have a flawless five carat gem of a paper; and (2) the intrusion of a dour, cynical and judgmental Professor who harps on his students at length for their errors and who is, at base, not a nice person (in other words, someone like TRG), will cause the student to tremble in fear, drop the class, and never write so much as a check for the rest of his life, because he hates writing so much.

Unfortunately, this position is untenable, because it rests on two not-always-true assumptions: (1) that people who write in a business or professional context have loads of time to research, ruminate and revise; and (2) students who hate writing haven't been nurtured.

In most instances, at least in the criminal justice field, there is a strong expectation that police officers, probation agents, attorneys, judges and correctional administrators will be able to write to a deadline that is typically tight at best, and impossibly short at worst. The "read, ruminate, write and revise" model that can take up a whole 15 week semester in college simply won't work anywhere else; in the professional context all four processes may have to occur simultaneously. Consequently, in the professional context, the need is for writers who get it right the first time most of the time. To train students to do otherwise does them little good.

The fact that student writers may need to be nurtured so they won't hate writing may be true, but it is entirely beside the point. In the professional context no employer will hire, much less take the time to nurture a college graduate with severly deficient writing skills. All of which leads us to:

Now, on to Rule 4:

Professional writing is the most uncreative act in the world because its structure is so unrelentingly linear. It begins with a short introduction setting out the problem or issue discussed, moves to a body where, in neatly subdivided sections and subsections , the problem or issue is dissected and presented in a logical and systematic fashion. At the end is a conclusion that summarizes the discussion, and states an opinion, judgment or decision, that can be drawn from the facts (and not the author's feelings or personal opinions) if one is appropriate. In other words, the format for most professional writing follows the traditional outline format: I, A, 1,(a), etc.

Unfortunately, outlining is becoming something of a lost art among students. It's not hard to understand why. There is sometimes an element of tedium involved, and, once again, conventional wisdom tells us that bored students will grow up to hate writing. More importantly, the ability to outline presumes that students have the ability to separate the central and the peripheral ideas in the research that they've done, a skill that can't exactly be taught, much less learned overnight. Consequently, lack of an overarching organizational scheme is a critical problem in student writing. But it's also easy to spot, particularly in longer assignments, since students with this problem frequently turn in a ten or fifteen page paper that is one gigantic, undifferentiated block of text, randomly hacked into paragraphs.

One solution for this problem would be to have the students who exhibit difficulties in this regard try to outline the paper after they've written it. Whatever problems exist with linear organization will quickly become apparent.

Writing That Sucks turns reading from a spectator sport into a participation sport. Consider the example of Writing That Sucks below:

The definition of delinquency is so vague that almost any American striving to suceed [sic] or make to [sic] much money could be considered a criminal. Any wrong act whether it is morally justifiable or not could be a criminal.

The omission of key words (e.g., "youth" after "American" and "act" as the last word in the sentence) and the misspellings mean that the reader must stop the process of reading (and various associated processes like understanding, imagining, and enjoying) and instead, mentally edit what is written so that it makes sense. The solutions to this problem are not pretty; nor are they popular with students because they involve things like being careful and disciplined while writing, paying attention to what is written and editing on the fly, and having (or perhaps more accurately) taking time to spell check and proofread the final copy.

The blunt fact is that the ability to write at just an adequate level is a supremely difficult skill to develop at all; to do it well is rare; and to do it flawlessly is a gift from God. No matter which of these levels of writing skill a student hopes to attain, all are grounded in discipline and attention to detail that is automatic and available virtually on demand. As my first and favorite writing instructor told me:

Always aim for a good sentence; then tie four or five together and you've got a paragraph; after that sew four or five paragraphs into a page, and then start all over again on the next page, with another sentence, until you're done.