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So I was thinking about my essay …
When I am writing something, I often find myself writing, even when I’m not, you know, writing.
By which I mean I might be walking the dogs, or just waking up in bed, or just about to fall asleep, and some notion occurs to me and I sense that it is going to be useful to something I’m working on. Even though I am not actively working on the piece, some part of my subconscious is engaged, solving the problem at hand.
This happens so often that it has become second nature, and I can sometimes even draw my attention to a more active mode of thinking about what I’m writing even when I’m far from my desk.
I am describing what I call “obsession” when I outline the “habits of mind” of writers in my books, Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities and The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing.
I use the framework of the writer’s “practice” -- the skills, knowledge, attitudes and habits of mind of writers -- in my teaching because one of my chief concerns about the highly prescriptive instruction with which the five-paragraph essay comes coupled is how it stunts students’ appreciation of the complexity of writing.
They are not allowed to practice their practices.
The vast majority of the students I work with have been conditioned to believe that writing involves crafting an idea (or ideas) in your head and then writing those ideas down. Writing does not work this way. The writing itself gives shape to the idea, and one of the habits of mind writers need to develop is what Drew Magary (by way of Walter Mosely) calls “percolating” in a recent essay, “How to Write 10,000 Words a Week.”
If you do enough percolating, it starts to look like an obsession.
Reading Magary’s essay on his method was like looking in a mirror. The way to write 10,000 words (or more) in a week is to be working on a number of different things, to be doing different things (editing, revising, etc. …) to those different things, and essentially to carry one’s writing around on a pretty much full-time basis. Magary shows how fun writing can be under these conditions, and I can only agree.
This experience is foreign to the students I work with. Much of the writing they’ve been tasked with doing, and the writing that matters most in their lives (AP tests, other standardized exams), is done on demand on a timed basis. The notion that we might allow our writing to percolate in our brains over the course of days or weeks seems sort of pointless.
Assessing growth in a student’s writing habits of mind is not easy. It should show up in the written artifacts, but it may arrive in questionable ways, pieces that seem overstuffed with ideas and lacking cohesion. Using the standards students are held to for the purposes of schooling, what I see as progress in their writing practice may be punished.
Over the years, there are a few things I’ve begun to look out for in order to detect growth in a student’s writing practice habits of mind.
The first is the line that leads the post -- “So I’ve been thinking about my essay.” This is a pretty straightforward declaration that the “writing” has extended beyond the explicit moments at the page or computer screen. This student has been percolating.
Even better is the student that has been thinking about their piece of writing and decides they want to shift gears, change focus, even blow the whole thing up. For the purposes of a grade[1], this might be an actively bad idea, as one never knows what can be put back together after said explosion, but as a sign that the student is nurturing an obsession with a topic or task, chef’s kiss.
Another sign is the student being disappointed in their work even before they receive a grade or feedback. If they sense that something has been left undone, even though they’ve technically finished and turned in the assignment, that’s growth.
Other things to look for include students blowing past a word count, or even altering or ignoring some of the objectives of the assignment in order to pursue a particular line of interest in their own thinking.[2]
When students want to come by the office to run an idea by me, it’s a good sign. In those moments, I try to withhold judgment and tell them to keep heading toward what feels like it holds a lot of energy.
I’ve found that under the right circumstances, students can come to actually enjoy writing, and if we can get students obsessing about their writing, over time their writing will improve.
(And keep on improving well after the class is over.)
That’s a guarantee.
[1]This is why I have shifted to an ungraded classroom where process and growth is privileged for the purpose of assessment.
[2]This often saved me in college. Rather than dutifully slogging through the expectations -- like a standard literary analysis essay -- which would’ve resulted in an average or below result, I would try to find a little room to maneuver inside the assignment. My favorite instructor response was “Not really what I asked for, but compelling nonetheless.” A-minus.
