By Melinda Wilson
The desire to begin writing immediately after receiving an assignment often hinders our thought process. As a writer, I have succumbed to this trap on many occasions. Desperate to meet a deadline, I skip the prewriting phase. Brainstorming and outlining are eschewed in favor of spontaneous drafting. However, not once has giving in to this urge benefited my final product. Recently, I found that this experience can also impact my process as a Writing Consultant.
I’ve read that writers encounter their most significant challenges on the idea level as opposed to the sentence level. In other words, while a piece of writing may be grammatically sound and stylistically impressive, it may also be intellectually underwhelming. I thought of this again recently when a student, who had been asked to compose a thesis-centered argumentative essay, told me proudly that “it should be no problem” because he had opinions about everything. We began our session with an attempt to identify a topic for his essay, and as I rattled off several possible topics, he responded with his stance on each: prisoners on death row should definitely be used for medical experimentation; spanking one’s children is absolutely appropriate and effective; clean needles should never be provided to drug addicts. Although I was glad to see the confidence with which he forwarded his position, I was curious with regard to his process in reaching these positions.
My instincts told me to challenge each position with the hope that the student would recognize the need for self-interrogation. However, some students read this move as an attempt to tell them how or what to think, a move that certainly would be counter to my goal as a writing consultant. Clearly, this particular student prided himself on these opinions. It seemed he felt that if these opinions changed, his concept of self would also have to change because we ARE our ideas. So, how can consultants constructively approach flawed thinking or lack of thought without damaging the writer’s confidence and/or his or her fundamental composition as a human being? How could I help this writer to achieve quality thinking as well as quality writing?
I explained that while it’s good to know where we stand on such controversial and influential subjects, it’s crucial that we know why we feel the way we do. After all, our reader will want evidence to support our position. No one will just take our word for it. And, more importantly, our ideas are representations of ourselves. Shouldn’t we then take at least as much time to develop our ideas as we do to choose what to wear in the morning? Unfortunately, this explanation wasn’t getting me very far; in fact, it came off a tad insulting, though I only meant to poke fun at a flaw of my own to lighten the mood.
Nevertheless, it was clear I had to recalibrate. A fan of the Socratic Method, I began asking questions, but this time, I focused on why these issues were important at all. “Why is it important to consider whether or not prisoners on death row should be used in medical experimentation?” I asked. The student took some time to respond, which I found encouraging. Finally, he said, “because it’s an ethical issue. But it’s complicated.” Right!
By the session’s end, I realized that as a writing consultant, I was getting caught in the same trap as the student: the desire to get straight to the writing. I wanted to move quickly to the question of evidence, but the issue itself required more thought. I’m not sure what this impulse is exactly, or from where it comes, but I suspect that it’s a result of our limited time. When we have readymade opinions, we can get right to the writing stage without much prewriting process. While this may be satisfying in the moment, the final product is rarely to our satisfaction.
Published March 30, 2015
