building with Legos

revisiting the writing process

Now that you have your first essays in, it's time for a little review; after all, there are more papers coming.

General, Specific, Abstract, Concrete

Your writing should avoid these lazy, easy, meaningless uses of language.

That sounds simple (though it's not quite as simple to do; it takes practice): eliminate all of the abstractions (opinions, feelings, vague language) and replace them with concrete details (actual incidents, events, cases); also eliminate all overly-general statements (words like "things" and "music") and replace them with specific, exact, descriptive examples ("spent carbon rods" and "the machine-gun guitar of Nirvana's 'Smells like Teen Spirit'").

This is called showing rather than telling; it paints a picture for your reader. It is at the core of nearly ALL college-level (and professional) writing. When you write descriptive and narrative essays, the examples come from your observations and personal experiences. When you write a paper about material that is new to you or which includes specialized, expert information, the examples come from outside sources rather than personal experience, but the strategy is the same: make some claims and back them up with specific, concrete evidence, not just opinions and undeveloped generalizations.

Here's another example, one that I used in my old English 28 class, to demonstrate showing Vs. telling.

Effective essays show rather than tell. Your essay, like the readings in our textbook, should be made up of examples that are fully described. Not only does this support and illustrate the claims you are making in your paper, but it also gives the reader something to picture, to understand. You want the reader to see what you see, experience what you experience. You do this by avoiding abstractions and generalizations, by writing concrete, specific details.

Abstractions are words and phrases that mean different things to different people (words such as good and beautiful are abstractions), so they do not communicate pictures to readers. General words could be several different things (the word dog, for example, could be anything from a Terrier to the cartoon dog Snoopy); the more specific your language is, the clearer picture you give to your reader ("terrier" is more specific than "dog," but "a soggy, limping Jack Russell terrier with a torn left ear" is a lot more specific than either. The more descriptive detail you add, the more specific your writing becomes; more specific writing communicates clearer pictures to your reader.

Consider the following real example. The student was writing about how texting can be distracting and how her friend Kimberly was missing a real, lively experience at Disneyland while staring at the screen of her smart phone. The original is very short; it is also so abstract and general that it doesn't really show the reader anything. It's just a statement without any evidence. The revised version provides the evidence in the form of detailed, descriptive examples. Notice the writer does not have to say she is "missing out"; the scene itself shows this. It's longer, yes, but it's also more polished and more communicative. It also uses dialogue because the scene described describes people talking (so it makes sense to use dialogue). The expanded version is much more effective writing.

Original:

Kimberly misses out by texting during the beautiful fireworks, the rides, and the parades…

Revised:

"Oooooh. Look at the purple starburst. It's gorgeous."
"Just a sec," Kimberly responded. Her face was not looking skyward; she was staring at her palm.
"Kim, quick, look." A spray of six fiery bursts lit the night sky.
"Huh? Oh, yeah. Michael texted. He's going out to the movies, and Jen is freaked out about her hair." She started typing furiously ignoring the art in the sky.

and if you need to incorporate material from your sources?

And, again, sometimes this requires looking things up, interesting facts that bring a topic to life for your reader. Finding nicely-phrased, unusual, thought-provoking examples from sources often helps you make a dull topic really interesting and powerful. Consider the following example:

Original

Japanese capsule hotel rooms are very small and inexpensive.

Really? Are they? Have you ever stayed in one? Revised:

A Japanese capsule hotel room is open to a central hallway, often facing other capsules, and offer power, Wi-Fi, light, a place to store minimal belongings and a space to sleep in a tube-shaped container measuring just "1.2m wide, 2m long, and 1m high" ("12 Things you Need to Know about Capsule Hotels"). There are shared bathrooms and showers and occasionally grab-and-go dining facilities. The main attraction, in addition to just trying something different, is the cost for a short stay. "In Tokyo, the average one-night stay is just $35 in a capsule hotel compared to the average $151 in a more-conventional hotel room"(Martinson).

All of the essays we are writing in this class require this sort of quoted/cited material. And note: not only does this give your reader a ton more useful, interesting information, but the word count jumpt from just nine to over 100 words!

but, really, isn't there some formula?

quadratic equation

I'm going to give you a rather wimpy answer: sort of. I mean there are different sorts of writing, and most have different sorts of styles, requirements, and audience demands.

In our class I am giving you a very effective formula for a paper that requires information gathering/sharing or that takes a position (argument), and that is among the most common writing situations in college/university and, really, in the rest of the world (unless you follow a career in creative writing, but even most novels do follow set formulae.

If hard pressed, I would boil the process down to three things that I have already shared with you:

  1. narrow the focus and expand with loads of concrete, specific detail (examples)

  2. scaffold

  3. the essay itself is not a fixed length; however, it will typically have an exciting opening example that relates to some point, some background/context for the topic, an in-depth look (with lots of examples) on one key area of your topic, and a thought-profoking final example/

#3 up there feels most formulaic for a paper template, and you can plug things into it ranging from Too Much Stuff to Alt Houses to Inetentional Communities (well, you get he idea). It is very flexible and versatile.

Points 1 and 2 are more about the process; we've gone over 1 quite a bit (starting with that little frame you might have built). The second point has been alluded to several times, but let's have a final review on scaffolding.

First, you might not like this idea, but real writing is rarely done in a single sitting, and it is ever rarer that the paper is designed starting with word one and working straight through to the final word. The information about capsule hotels above is something I looked up after I'd moved on to begin the section "but, really, isn't there some formula?" Here's why I did that. I did not want to lose that next train of thought, so I needed to get something rough on paper (or the screen here), and I knew I could get the information on dimensions and cost later and then stick it in the right part of the lecture. Sometimes, I even will remove a whole chunk from a lecture I am writing and move it to a different lecture where it seems a better fit. Of course that leaves a hole where I choppped it out, and so I have to come back to work more the that missing part when I get time.

If you are actually marking up your prompts and making check lists of what needs to be in any paper, there is no reason why you can't look things up in any order you like. With a computerit is easy to cut/paste/move things all around. And, of course, I sort of steer the class into doing that anyway. The discussion come from the readings, but they also help you build some starting material for the upcoming four-page paper. If you have looked at the Final Paper (I hope you have), you will see that there are four topics--the same four we will have looked at in the earlier papers. Yes, you will be asked to add a new (often creative) element to your existing paper, and you will smooth the whole thing out.

That's the formula for the process: jot down bits of things as they come to your or as you find them. Use them like Legos to build a modest building that can later be turned into a Castle.

The essay structure? Yes, it is a formula with some variations. You may not see it quite yet, but by the Google Projects paper you will likely see you are doing much the same thing wth each new subject. And it translates very nicely to a lot of other classes (not all, of course, but "a lot" is not bad).