Reading 1: “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott
Reading 2: “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” by Nancy Sommers
Choice: I decided to read “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” because I enjoyed Sommers’s other article in which she described where her inspiration for writing comes from, and I thought that the way this article draws distinctions between novice and accomplished writers would help me to better understand the importance of revision as part of the writing process.
Summary: Both these articles discuss elements of the writing process, but while “Shitty First Drafts” focuses on the beginning of the process, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” focuses on the revising process. In “Shitty First Drafts,” Lamott argues that the most effective way to write is to write, and she establishes this argument through personal anecdotes telling of times when she used shitty first drafts to discover what ideas she really wanted to explore. Overall, this article serves as a strong reminder that shitty first drafts serve as the starting point to works of art. In “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers,” Sommers describes the distinction between how student writers and experienced writers approach revision. She argues that student writers make the mistake of seeing revision only as an opportunity to alter lexical concepts rather than to alter meaning.
Overall reaction:
Both of these readings proved very relevant to me as an English Education major. When reading “Shitty First Drafts” I kept thinking about the writer’s notebook we are working on in English 324: Teaching and Evaluating Writing. The main thing that I took away from this article is that the purpose of a first draft is simply to get down your ideas, and I think that the writer’s notebook serves as a great tool for achieving this objective. I think Lamott’s idea that good ideas are discovered through writing is a powerful notion that the writer’s notebook supports. Lamott states that “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something - anything - down on paper” (855), and writing freely in my notebook has convinced me that this is true. These freewrites are how I want to help my future students discover how to write with fluency and how to put those little voices of doubt out of their heads, so that they can create a shitty draft that can lead to something great. I also found “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” really helpful because I’ve never realized how many students feel locked into meaning in their first drafts. Sommers describes revision as a process where “As their ideas change, revision becomes an attempt to make their writing consonant with that changing vision,” (868), yet when students don’t see revision as a process of changing meaning they only use revision as a process of making lexical changes. I now know that this is something I will really have to caution my future students against because they will probably not have as much experience as I have with peer reviews. I feel lucky that I have had the opportunity to be in the honors college and to volunteer at the writing center because both of these experiences have taught me to focus more on ideas and structure rather than on grammar and word choice. Together, these essays show that writing is meant to be altered as ideas change and meanings are clarified.
Connecting the dots:
Reading “Shitty First Drafts” reminded me of reading “Good Writers Always Follow My Rules” because I felt like both of these essays challenge common misconceptions about writing. What I really appreciate about these readings is that they give writers permission to suck and permission to try new things. In “Shitty First Drafts,” Lamott encourages writers to get over the feeling that their first drafts are supposed to be good by saying of one of her first drafts that, “The whole thing would be so long and incoherent and hideous that for the rest of the day I’d obsess about getting creamed by a car before I could write a decent second draft” (855). While I’m not sure I have ever felt this passionately about hating my writing, it was still nice to hear that my feelings of self-doubt are not unique. I also like how Lamott attributed these feelings to the idea that she could not meet the expectations others had of her. In “Good Writers Always Follow My Rules,” Dufour and Ahern-Dodson state,“[...] when writers treat options as rules, writing can actually become more frustrating because the writer insists on abiding by the rule, whether it works or not.” (122), and this quote demonstrates how writing to adhere to supposed rules inhibits creativity and the process of creating. I loved how these essays presented mistakes as natural and necessary to the process of writing.
All writers feel self-doubt. I'm glad to see how you're connecting this to what you're doing in ENGL324 because it shows that you'll be able to empathize with your own students as they struggle with writing. They might not be able to articulate that it's self-doubt; they might say they hate writing or writing is hard or it sucks. But you will realize that they're not usually being dismissive; it's an emotional reaction and they are doubting themselves.