Professor X (27 page)

I believe in the editing process, the procession and refining of draft after draft, but I also believe that students have to be shown exactly how to do it. It's all well and good to direct a student to edit a paper, to do a new draft—but what the hell does that mean? I tell my writing class on the first night: You'll hand in first drafts of every essay to me. But here is what won't happen. You won't get back your first draft covered by teacher hieroglyphics,
awks
and
ills
and
frags
like the discordant cries of exotic birds, scrawled
???
s and arrows and circles like the tracks of those same birds, all followed by a small sermon at the end:
Your details are plentiful and your topic a novel one. The main problem is your thesis, which is underdeveloped. Your lack of topic sentences leads to wandering paragraphs and a loss of control. Watch capitalization and comma splices. Have a nice day.

No one reads that stuff. I never did. It might as well be written in Sanskrit. No one reads anything but the grade on the last page. What we will do instead is pass out copies to everyone in class and edit the compositions together—we will workshop them.

I was a little nervous about this approach at first. I wondered if the workshop format was too intense for my tyro writers. I have been in many college classes, and the only ones in which people cried—and I mean broke down completely in huge, racking sobs—were the writing workshops. And these were English majors, who had asked for their misery! I wasn't sure my apprentices could hold up.

Students are capable of becoming good editors, but they must be taught how to go about it before they can work on someone else's paper. Anyone who wants to learn how to dismantle and clean a carburetor must watch it being done; writing works exactly the same way. To learn to write you must watch someone do it. Doesn't it stand to reason? Writing is the most private of arts. We are surrounded by the finished products, but the drafts are hidden from us, and we never get to live with the writer as he or she polishes, tunes, rejects, augments, agonizes, and generally reworks the thing. We talk volumes about the writing process and give the students no more than a few road signs—and those written in hieroglyphics—indicating how it actually works.

The idea is not complicated. For the first few classes, the students follow along with me as I edit their pieces on the chalkboard. Concept by concept, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, I edit out loud and on the fly. The class watches what I do, and listens to my thought process. Why do we need to expand this idea here? This paragraph seems rushed—can we slow it down? Why is this observation irrelevant? There seems to be a problem of logical structure here; D follows A—do we need to insert B and C? The author of the composition takes notes on what is to be done with his or her essay; the rest of the class follows along, seeing (one hopes) their own writing in the work of others, the same gaps in logic, the same sorts of confusion over and over again, the same infelicities—writing speed bumps—that slow the reader to a crawl.

This is all something of a high-wire act. This writing and rewriting and editing out loud can be risky. I am never sure how successfully it will go. This very book has moved smoothly and cooperatively on some days and crankily on others. Writing and editing well, being in a good zone of productivity, is as mysterious a process as hitting a baseball; who can say why on a given night the .300 hitter, facing mediocre pitching, goes 0 for 4? There are some nights when the student essays stump and defy, when the student writers seem to have done something magical: that is, created a Gordian knot of confused prose that cannot be undone, writing that cannot be improved. I feel like a jeweler who has dismantled a watch and forgotten how to put it back together: the wheels, the springs, the works lie about in disarray. My contribution to the student prose seems to add little more than a layer of rather high-blown confusion. When that happens, a cloud of deflation descends upon the room. Writing seems impossible—to the class, to me.

Those nights aren't completely wasted. The class gets to see just how difficult it can be to free one's prose from the weeds and brambles of composition. I am at least gratified that my students can see how torturous the process can be. They see it as I labor to edit and rewrite, standing at the board, staring in frustration, sweat glistening on my brow.

Oh, but on other nights the editing goes so sublimely well! Every emendation seems to tighten and strengthen and nourish and clarify the prose. The editing process seems magical. As a class, we read the original prose out loud, and then the rewrites. We savor the taste of good writing in our mouths. Even to a class that has never before given any thought to the business of writing, the results are impressive. And then comes that almost divine moment of clarity when a successful rewrite seems so achievable that the students, unbidden, join me in the process.

They, too, are writing out loud.

Their steps, at first, are tentative, their corrections elementary. They might note the sort of thing they have never noted before. Perhaps a clanging, empty sort of word like “particularly” appears three or four times in a paragraph (“I've never been particularly eager to buy a motorcycle. . . . The dealers I've spoken to have never been particularly convincing . . . There's something particularly dangerous about these vehicles.”), catching our attention in as distracting a fashion as an oddly dressed movie extra who keeps passing by the camera in a crowd scene. I will ask them to compress a paragraph and they will do so by deleting words, which is a good start but only half the battle. The prose becomes oddly telegraphic and bare, like an old building whose gargoyles and pediment have been removed for safety reasons. And then finally, after long effort, a student will not just remove words but actually recast the writing, turning sentences around, substituting new and better verbs, and at that moment the writing teacher can bathe in the warmth and glow of learning.

We have made the first strides.

One of the tricks to this game is choosing the right essays to work on together. If a composition is too poor, our final product will differ too much from the original, and the students will suspect their instructor of trampling the piece to death for his own glory—entertaining, perhaps, like a magician who can transform a silk scarf into a dove but cannot convince the audience that the dove and the scarf don't remain separate entities. Essays that are too well written don't really work either. Light prose touch-up jobs, the mere ironing out of pronoun agreements and clipping of long sentences, give a distorted view of how much work a typical piece requires.

Very occasionally, a student will submit an excellent first draft, and I will present it to the class. A good piece of writing gives hope to all. The teaching of writing is unfortunately a negative business, with the vast majority of student essays illustrating many more don'ts than dos. Effective writing teachers must not let the smallest problem pass while, at the same time, remaining encouraging and upbeat. This might be the most difficult tightrope to walk in all of teaching. Students do not succeed just by writing a lot; they've got to be shown their errors for the work to be productive.

As I start to revise a piece in front of the class, I experience a moment of uncertainty. Will this actually help anyone? Isn't every sample of unskilled composition unique? The answer to the latter is no. The shortcomings of student writing fall into familiar and universal patterns. The thesis hasn't been sharpened to a point that guarantees a rigorous organization of thought. The paragraphs may start out with some unity, but after a bit the writer's attention wanders, and he leads the reader down a warren of back alleys and dead ends. The modifiers dangle. The prose may limp along in the passive voice, or, owing to a paucity of vocabulary, use ten dull words where three good ones would do.

The ideas in the essays are commonplace, when they exist at all, and the lack of ideas makes for a prose that churns in place. The writer metaphorically clears his or her throat, adjusts the microphone, fiddles with the lecturn, consults notes, afraid to get to the point because really there is no point.

The writing is larded with clichés—not the ones listed in the writing texts, which really present no danger because no one actually uses them, like
more fun than a barrel of monkeys
and
sly as a fox
and
good as gold.
No, I'm talking about contemporary clichés, the ones we don't even notice as they float untethered around us:
she was there for me
and
I couldn't get past it
and
that was in my comfort zone
and
it is what it is.
The writing is deeply flawed, but as I work at the front of the room to peel away layers of verbiage, the class becomes eager to join in the process.

We discuss and justify every change. We're not in a hurry. We may get to only three compositions in a three-hour class. To wrestle with a piece of writing takes time—a scandalous amount of it. As we work, I direct the class's attention to the clock. Look, we've spent 40 minutes on the first paragraph. Now it's 50. All of a sudden, it's an hour. To edit an essay effectively is sure to take several hours.

They are horrified, but that is the truth. It is what it is.

Writing clearly and well requires great effort, a level of effort which many of my students are not acquainted with. One of the comments I find myself making often about first drafts is that they appear to have been “hastily composed.” Writing is unique in this way: 15 minutes at a computer and there exists something, a palpable chunk of writing, to be handed in; turning in such a piece of work is the equivalent of turning in, for an algebra assignment, random jottings of numbers and letters—gibberish, really—and hoping it passes muster. After a while, the students start to put more time into their assignments. They're afraid not to. That a crappy paper, even with the name of the author obscured, might find its way into the hands of the 22 other members of the class, all gleefully editing like crazy, is a real threat.

Threat? Did I say that? It's a crude teaching strategy but occasionally effective.

Writing, as we all know, isn't just a physical act, the clickety-clackety-clack of hands on a computer keyboard. Writing is thinking. Writing is saying something worthwhile. While we work on these compositions—editing, rewriting, tightening—I also spend a great deal of time on the front end: the conceptualization. I try to teach students how to do a better job, when they have the freedom, of selecting their topics. A great subject makes for better writing. My students think of their essays merely as exercises to be gotten through with as little exertion as possible. A subject with some depth, a topic about which they have some expertise, will generate livelier and—this is the intriguing part—more competent writing. My students are the protagonists of their own complex and fascinating lives. They view their own existence, as we all do, with a great deal of nuance, a fine and discriminating eye. They are capable of great wit. The hard part is to get them to channel all that marvelous stuff—all that life—onto the page.

Though sometimes enough life is too much life. I once made the mistake of editing with the class an essay written by a mother about her child's protracted death from leukemia. The essay dripped with grief; the child had died years ago, but she had obviously never gotten past it. We started working on tense agreement and chronological inconsistencies, but could build up no steam for the project. Our complaints about the essay's organization seemed carping and disrespectful. The sadness of the subject made the whole class question the worth of our larger endeavor. What did proper usage matter in such a world of tragedy? Writing seems powerless against the gods.

Personal subjects are a good start toward powerful writing. But part of college is a requirement that students write about subjects they know little about at first. Not every college essay can be about one's life. Sometimes, the essays have to be about things like wind turbines, and this is where the students really hit a brick wall. I recently asked my Pembrook students to write an essay comparing and contrasting Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, based on a pair of biographical articles that appeared in the
New Yorker.
I thought they would enjoy the release from the oversaturation of possibility in the personal essay. These two articles were their complete universe. I thought, as I often do when I introduce these sorts of assignments, that I was doing the class a favor. How much would I have enjoyed a
New Yorker
–based assignment in college? Instead, my students found the task hopelessly onerous. They found the articles as difficult to get through as Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason.
The assignment overwhelmed them.