Writing

[Student of Trinity]

Maybe this can fork off from the College thread: How does one learn to write well? What makes good writing good? Two things occur to me.

 

The first is that it's a fantastic exercise to write a précis, of almost anything. You get a longish text, at least a couple of pages; your task is to compress it to a couple of paragraphs. So you have to figure out the gist of the original text, and sift the wheat from the chaff. Identify the details and supporting arguments that can be omitted in the short version. Discern the key points, and state them concisely.

 

I believe this is a good exercise for several purposes. It's good just as a brain-trainer, since more than half of intellectual life is sifting wheat from chaff. For writing, in particular, I think the value of writing lots of précis is that once you are familiar with the practice, then even while you are yourself writing a longer text, you can be thinking about how it would come out in précis form. If the précis would simply leave out most of what you are writing, then maybe you should cut a lot of it out of the original, too. If the précis would be very hard to make, because your main point isn't clear, then you need to make it clearer — or figure out what it is.

 

The other thing I think about, as a main ingredient in good writing, is really the same thing, I guess. It's the German expression, "der rote Faden" — the red thread. It comes from a metaphor in a novel by Goethe. One of the characters in the novel keeps a diary, in which jealousy is a persistent theme. The author compares this to a practice of the British Royal Navy, of weaving a red thread into its ropes, so that even cut-up sections of the rope can be recognized as naval property. The red thread runs right through the entire rope, and is immediately recognizable at any point.

 

Good writing should be like this. It should always be clear what the main theme is.

[keira]

I never have taken any sort of writing class up until this year (if you want to count AP English as one), but I have noticed huge differences in my writing style from four years ago to now. Some of my first FT posts...wow. But now my RP-writing skills have certainly improved (although I've got a long way to go to be decent at it), and even my essay-writing has gotten better (although that's mostly a this-year sort of thing).

 

But why? I've only taken a "real" writing class this year; before that it was speech and debate, before that it was ten years of what a preposition is. So we can't really attribute my better writing to schoolwork, can we? After all, I've been writing and getting better for four, only taking a relevant class for one. I personally think that writing doesn't come from classes or books, it comes from reading and practicing. Writing is one of those skills where "book smarts" (as in, what youd see in "How to Write for Dummies" or from a lecture) doesn't get you very far. It comes down to practice, practice, practice.

[Balladeer]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

How does one learn to write well? What makes good writing good? Two things occur to me.

The first is that it's a fantastic exercise to write a précis, of almost anything. You start with a long text and compress it without losing the key points.

It's good just as a brain-trainer, but also the practice helps you both in cutting the fat and stating yourself more clearly while you write.

With good writing, the main theme should always be clear. Like a red thread woven into the entire length of a rope; its immediately recognizable at any point.

Good practice, yes, if a bit less colorful and informative.

My own college writing, though, has been more of the opposite. We are given a few key points and told to expound on them till we reach 750 - 1000 words. Writing fluff, that's what I call it.

[Kreador]

The first best help for writing well is to read things that are well written. If you spend all of your days reading internet postings by barely literate people, you won't learn much about the proper effective use of language. So some time should always be spent reading good books.

 

It can also be remarkably helpful to find effective passages from books or articles and physically retype them and proofread your work. The act of moving words from your brain through your fingertips and onto a page requires a lot of processing that you don't get from reading alone. Of course, remember to delete anything you've retyped so you don't accidentally call it your own. It's similar to art students learning by trying to copy famous paintings.

 

Also, because of the way English grew as a language, some of the structural elements are hard to recognize (too many exceptions to every rule). Studying a foreign language, particularly something like Latin, really helps in understanding conjugation, noun-verb agreement, and so on.

 

Finally, finding older (pre 1960s) books on rhetorical theory can help in learning how to structure thought and argument. After that era, "rhetoric" became thought of as a dirty word relating to fraud, rather than what it means: the effective use of language to support an argument or conclusion.

[Alorael at Large]

I'll back Slarty and Kreador: the most important first step is reading good writing. If you want to be a novelist, read novels. If you want to be an essayist, read essays. The latter is much less likely to happen on its own; very few people read essays for fun. But the best way to learn how to do something well is to get lessons from masters, and fortunately the work of writing masters is easy to come by.

 

Then, I think, I'm with SoT: once you understand the basics, write. Write early and often. Write all kinds of things. Write without filtering, and write with savage editing and paring. Write humorously, seriously, ludicrously. One failure of American education is that even students who are taught how to write usually learn how to write sterile, neutral, dead academic prose. It's serviceable, but often awful to read. Finding your "voice" sounds very nice when the teachers push it, but it's a real thing, and the only way to learn how to write convincingly and intelligently without turning into a robot is to keep doing it until you learn how to mix your own authentic style of writing with the confines of accepted written style.

 

—Alorael, who actually thinks internet forums are good practice for that. No, they usually won't get you up to the standards of the godawful five paragraph essay, much less serious academic paper-writing. But you'll get comfortable writing in a way that conveys something and using your own style. Once writing fluidly and comfortably becomes second-nature, tailoring the details of style and content to any needs is much easier.

[Enraged Slith]

The trick is to gauge how smart/capable the rest of the class is to figure out how much effort you need to put into your paper in order to get whatever grade you're aiming for.

[Alorael at Large]

That's true in school, if you have teachers who don't set their standards high enough. In real life, if you're trying to convince people of something you always want to put forth your best effort.

 

—Alorael, who also just doesn't believe that good writing is that much more effort than bad writing. Or rather, you can write well or write poorly to start, and it's really a matter of training and skill. You can choose to edit more or less, dig harder or not for good citations and sources, but the initial words on paper should always be your best. When you've improved, it takes effort to write poorly!

[Kreador]

I'd agree with Alorael that internet forums can be a good place to practice your own writing style to develop your voice, as long as you're careful about who you take seriously on any forum. I'd add to the first point that, if you intend to write fiction, you should read as broadly as possible in all types of writing, not just fiction. Read poetry, read plays, read non-fiction of all types, and read fiction is as many genres as possible. You do run the danger of becoming a grammar troll (as I can be when I'm not watching myself--seriously, lay versus lie is not that difficult to understand).

[Dintiradan]

I've always wanted to do NaNoWriMo one of these years. My biggest problem with my writing isn't its quality (though it's lacking there too), but with my speed. I think NaNoWriMo would help me turn off my internal editor until the revision step.

 

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

The first is that it's a fantastic exercise to write a précis, of almost anything. You get a longish text, at least a couple of pages; your task is to compress it to a couple of paragraphs. So you have to figure out the gist of the original text, and sift the wheat from the chaff. Identify the details and supporting arguments that can be omitted in the short version. Discern the key points, and state them concisely.

Reminds of what I was working on a few days ago. I'm going to a conference in a couple of weeks run by my funding agency. You've got close to forty umbrella projects funded by it, and each project has around half a dozen researchers working in the group. Now, the first day of the conference, there's this mammoth presentation where someone from each group presents on what everyone is worked on... in two minutes. Thus, I had to send in one slide that will be discussed for twenty seconds. Making up elevator pitches for a year of work is tough.

 

Originally Posted By: Kreador

Finally, finding older (pre 1960s) books on rhetorical theory can help in learning how to structure thought and argument. After that era, "rhetoric" became thought of as a dirty word relating to fraud, rather than what it means: the effective use of language to support an argument or conclusion.

I like your definition of rhetoric. The reason most people (rightly) dislike rhetoric being taught is because it ends up being "finding the right arguments to support a conclusion" instead.

 

(Finally, if any of you science-y types have tips that would help this unmotivated demotivated Masters student continue writing his dissertation, I'm all ears.)

[Kreador]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

I've always wanted to do NaNoWriMo one of these years. My biggest problem with my writing isn't its quality (though it's lacking there too), but with my speed. I think NaNoWriMo would help me turn off my internal editor until the revision step.

A possibly more helpful thing than waiting until November is to keep a notebook handy and just get in the habit of scribbling ideas in it. Then weekly look at what you scribbled in the notepad and start making connections. Your brain will likely start to think of it as a sort of game, and we all love games.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

I like your definition of rhetoric. The reason most people (rightly) dislike rhetoric being taught is because it ends up being "finding the right arguments to support a conclusion" instead.

A person skilled at rhetoric can use that skill to convince people of false conclusions, and the only defense against that is understanding rhetoric and how to spot the fallacies in the argument or assumptions.

[Randomizer]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

Reminds of what I was working on a few days ago. I'm going to a conference in a couple of weeks run by my funding agency. You've got close to forty umbrella projects funded by it, and each project has around half a dozen researchers working in the group. Now, the first day of the conference, there's this mammoth presentation where someone from each group presents on what everyone is worked on... in two minutes. Thus, I had to send in one slide that will be discussed for twenty seconds. Making up elevator pitches for a year of work is tough.

One professor at my university spent a year at the National Science Foundation review grant proposals. He said it was a great experience in finding out what to write in order to get a grant. Faced with the huge volume of requests, they reviewers had specific things that they looked for in a proposal and ignored anything that didn't have them.

Quote:

(Finally, if any of you science-y types have tips that would help this unmotivated demotivated Masters student continue writing his dissertation, I'm all ears.)

My boss believed in cutting funding for grad students and making them teaching assistants again as a motivational force. But that was because he hated the grant proposal process. He had a lab full of students that loved to do experiments, but we really hated writing them up. So there would be bursts where papers were suddenly done amidst years of nothing.

I had to force myself to get any writing done on my dissertation and tried to shift as much of the text to references and let the reader hunt down information if they needed it. Just decide on the framework and concentrate on getting a chapter written. Doing it in sections helped me to finally get it done instead of trying to do it as one paper.

[Harehunter]

Kreador, you have to be the first person, aside from myself, who sees the value of studying Latin with the goal of better understanding this amalgam we call English. Learning the differences in sentence structure was, for me, quite fascinating, especially when compared to German. But most useful was learning the cognates from which a great deal of the English language is derived.

 

As my Latin teacher would say, "Vere durus!".

[Kreador]

Funny, my Latin teacher would say "Opera non perfecta usque spatiosa femina cantat," but that's neither here nor there. ;-)

[Student of Trinity]

That post by Jewels gave me quite a turn.

 

First I thought, Sheesh, that sounds a lot like what I just wrote; only not exactly. Yikes, I must have already posted exactly these same ideas, sometime last year, and forgotten about it; and Jewels has just remembered it and quoted it back to me, from whatever other thread I posted it in. How embarrassing.

 

Then I thought, Arg, it's even worse: my previous version was much more concise. So not only is my memory failing, but my writing is deteriorating rapidly as well.

 

Eventually I did twig that Jewels had just written a nice précis of my post. I was so relieved.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Kreador

It can also be remarkably helpful to find effective passages from books or articles and physically retype them and proofread your work. The act of moving words from your brain through your fingertips and onto a page requires a lot of processing that you don't get from reading alone. Of course, remember to delete anything you've retyped so you don't accidentally call it your own.

Actually, although the principle is sound as a way of learning, I think this might really be dangerous, because it might work too well. Even if you delete the stuff you typed out, having typed it once, it might spring to your mind later, and you'll forget that you had originally copied it from somewhere else. Suddenly you're a plagiarist, without even realizing it. If you are ever judged on your writing in any important way, that can be a real catastrophe.

Of course, if it were really just the one phrase or sentence that slipped into your own texts this way, people probably wouldn't condemn you too harshly. They could accept that it was just an oversight, and maybe even believe the true explanation if you gave it.But it's still not something you're going to want to have happen, and if you do a lot of typing out other people's sentences just for practice, and then do a lot of writing, then I think the danger might be real.

When I'm really writing well, whole sentences just pop into my mind. I want them to really be mine. In fact it's always possible that they're remembered from someone else, even if I never typed them out before myself. But I don't want to raise the odds of this happening.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

tips that would help this unmotivated demotivated Masters student continue writing his dissertation

Hmm. Writing is hard and takes a long time. Motivation is always a problem, to some extent. Once you've basically figured it out, filling out the details that you need to put into a paper can be tedious.

But it shouldn't really be so horribly tedious that you can't do it. Explaining things nicely, and explaining why they matter, should be fun. So a serious motivation problem is probably not really a writing problem.

It might really be the more basic problem that you simply don't like this stuff. If that's the case, you might still want to push through to get your degree, but you should face the fact that you need to make a career change. You might want to stop pretending that you are dedicated to producing a glorious thesis that will Advance Science, and start planning how to just get the thing done, to a minimum standard, as fast as possible. You might even be able to level with your advisor about this plan, and get some help executing it. One of my own students is basically doing this now, and I'm not upset with him about it at all. He's done some decent work, and now he wants to move on, and that's fine.

Or, if you do in fact still like the basic stuff you're doing, your motivation problems in writing your thesis might really be scientific problems with what you have to say. Maybe your data just isn't really as good as you'd like it to be, or maybe there is some crucial theoretical argument that you think you are supposed to make, but you find you don't buy it yourself. Or something else of that sort. In such a case, you should again probably talk about it with your advisor, because that's what an advisor is there for.

Maybe with some help you can fix the problem, whatever it is. Or maybe the right course, for a Master's thesis, is just to accept that the time frame of a Master's isn't really long enough to fix every problem. That's why a PhD takes longer. So it may be quite okay to write up what you have, just as you have it, and simply explain the problems with it. Again, I don't know what your school or advisor is like, but I could be perfectly happy with a Master's thesis like that. It's quite common for an advisor to assign a Master's project that turns out to be a little too ambitious for that level. So you could do a thesis that isn't like the party returning to town with big bags of loot, but more like the scout sprinting back out of the cave yelling, "Monsters!" That's still research.

Or maybe you like what you're doing, and your results seem quite valid, but you're discouraged because they seem boring and obvious in hindsight. This is a common reaction, and the best cure I know is to find some smart person who has not been working on your project, and explain your results to them. If your listener understands your results immediately, and agrees that they are boring and obvious, then maybe you need to consider one of my previous scenarios. (Or maybe your listener is a freaking genius. Try another listener, smart but not a mutant.) But usually what happens is that other people have quite a hard time understanding your results, even if they are very smart. You find yourself having to explain lots of stuff you've been taking for granted, and you see their eyebrows rise a few times. Afterwards you realize that what you've done isn't actually so trivial, after all.

Failing all that, maybe all you need to do is take a break for a few days, then lay in a big supply of coffee and knuckle down. Follow an outline so you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and get on with the job, and you'll be fine as soon as you get some momentum going on it.

[A less presumptuous name.]

There is definitely a lot of good material in this thread. My first comment goes out to SoT:

You recommend writing a lot of précis but don't advise actually copying works. Wouldn't you perhaps run into the same dangers, though? When writing a précis, there may be a particularly well-phrased idea that you don't alter when summarizing, and that could slip into future writing as well. Really, though, I suppose that if the phrasing sticks out that much, you'd likely remember it regardless of whether you retype it.

 

I'd also like to share something that really improved my writing process. This fall, as I was writing, editing, and rewriting college application essays, my writing came a long ways. Reading college message boards, I see that a number of students (clearly bright based on where they've been accepted) who opted not to have other proofread their essays. To the contrary, I brought down numerous drafts to my parents and brother, all of whom are excellent writers. Bouncing ideas around and hearing their suggestions really helped me to improve my writing.

 

Two things about that experience were particularly helpful. First, my editors were all good, experienced writers. My brother had just graduated from college and had developed great writing skills. My parents have both taught in the college setting for years and were able to help my writing mature drastically. Second, I had multiple editors. If they agreed on something, chances were that it was a more general comment. If they disagreed, it was probably something related to personal style. Because of this, I didn't end up mimicking anyone's style, but rather took elements that I liked and added them to my own voice as I was refining it.

 

Also, the sheer amount of writing I did was really helpful. Most pieces were under a page, but they were very open personal essays. Writing so much gave me room to explore my voice and learn how best to communicate abstract ideas from the depths of my mind. This skill is useful in all writing, not just personal essays. While the topic and tone may differ, knowing how to take something from your mind and put it on a piece of paper is really valuable.

[Kreador]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Actually, although the principle is sound as a way of learning, I think this might really be dangerous, because it might work too well. Even if you delete the stuff you typed out, having typed it once, it might spring to your mind later, and you'll forget that you had originally copied it from somewhere else.

You might think that, but in 20+ years in the publishing business and teaching this technique, I've never seen that result. What actually happens more often is that the writer begins to type different stuff from what the original author wrote. You learn elements of the original author's work, but you actually end up developing your own voice.

[Kelandon]

Originally Posted By: Harehunter

Kreador, you have to be the first person, aside from myself, who sees the value of studying Latin with the goal of better understanding this amalgam we call English.

Back in the first few decades of the 20th century, when Latin was dropped from most educational curricula in the US, this was actually the argument that most Latin teachers made in favor of keeping it mandatory. "But they'll never learn grammar if we don't teach them Latin!" was essentially the gist of most pro-Latin arguments at the time.

Of course, they lost, but it was a valiant effort.

My writing developed most significantly at two points in my life: first, when I was taking a summer class between 7th and 8th grades, in which we learned grammar and parsed sentences seriously, for the only time in my life; and second, in around third year of college, when I was reading a bunch of Latin and Greek and Shakespeare all at the same time, and I saw both how the ancients wrote in other languages and how writers of English adapted it to more or less our modern tongue. I hardly even had to practice writing in that year of college; I learned more by reading than anyone could've ever taught me if I had simply tried to write over and over again.

[VCH]

Quote:

(Finally, if any of you science-y types have tips that would help this unmotivated demotivated Masters student continue writing his dissertation, I'm all ears.)

Don't write a dissertation, instead write a paper or two, then, if need be, cobble them together. Dissertations are of no value any way, papers on the other hand, are. In other words, mimic a good published paper, in length and style, and forget the rest.

(Disclaimer: for what it's worth I just recently got a paper accepted to the Canadian Journal of Zoology; this paper will now be my chapter one for that thesis junk)