Overview of the Week, Monday, 30 June-Sunday, 6 July.

This week we enter our sixth week of class. The semester is over half over, and we are into the last four weeks of class.

During the week, you will be working to improve your understanding of process. As you may remember, the writing process consists of five stages:

1. Prewriting
2. Drafting
3. Revision
4. Proofreading
5. Review

In our discussion of the writing process, we've been hitting each stage in a kind of modified reverse order, so this week you will be learning about drafting and taking your first steps toward learning about prewriting. Many student writers take these steps for granted. They honestly believe prewriting consists of "finding inspiration" (not true), and if they are inspired, they will be able to just sit down and write well (patently not true).

As you are finding, good writing is more a matter or revision than it is inspiration. If you don't take the time to revise that first draft, then your chances of it being successful go way, way down. Don't get me wrong, I'll take inspiration if it comes, but I can't count on it to magically appear when I need to write; so, I'm much more concerned with learning a writing process which allows me to write successful texts when needed rather than waiting for something as nebulous as inspiration to make an appearance. This is where learning how to pre-write, how to get started writing, and how to get my basic ideas down comes in. In other words, it is where pre-writing and drafting come in.

Pre-writing is the stage where you tackle all the chores you have to do prior to writing. You have practiced some of these. Your first pre-writing task is to do a rhetorical analysis, that is, figure out what you want to accomplish, who your audience is, and what your options are in terms of crafting your message. Think the three appeals, ethos, pathos, and logos. Think noise and how to overcome it.

This week, you will learn another prewriting trick writers use to make the task of writing easier, namely, deciding on which kind of writing will best fit their purpose and audience. You will also learn about different kinds of writing and how to write in new ones.

Along the way, you will learn the basic steps involved in research and--this in an important moment in your career as a writer--how to recognize, research, and fix your worst grammar problems. This last should help your proofreading skills impove.

You will also be reading some of the best advice I have found on how to overcome procrastination--one of the typical problems involved with drafting, that is, getting your ideas on paper the first time--and you will read some tips on how to practice being creative. All this is wrapped about and uses process based thinking and Kaizen.

If all goes well, by the end of the week, you will have taken significant strides toward becoming a writer who doesn't need a professor to help them write successfully.

As always, write with questions;

BUT, before writing with questions, review my post on how to read actively and read the blog using these techniques. Also, talk your questions over with your group, as the process of asking questions and discussing possible solutions helps everyone learn.

One of my friends made a relevate observation this week. He pointed out some of the habits you learn in school are counter productive in the workplace. The example he gave was that of a recently fired co-worker. It was an instructive moment for me. Why did the coworker get fired? She had developed the habit of looking to her boss to solve problems rather than solving them herself. After thinking it over, I suspect she had professors and teachers who fell down on the job of teaching her to be an independent thinker, worker, and learner. After all, the measure of a teachers success is just how much their students don't need him or her after a class.

Looking to a professor for help is a good idea, but only after you have exhausted your own resources for learning. After all, I am here to help you learn. If I didn't love the job and seeing students learn, I would be doing something else; so, I like being what students sometimes refer to as "bothered." However, in the workforce, usually you don't want to bother your boss with problems for which you can find a solution. Paradoxically, it follows that helping you learn to find your own solutions, rather than providing them for you, is part of what I should be teaching.

Of course, I have known this for a while. Watching a student fail is always difficult. It is like watching a poorly played game of chess. You want to reach in and make the move which will ensure a win, not watch a friend loose. However, loss is an essential aspect of learning. It is when a door opens and a place and reason to learn make their magical appearance. If all goes well, it is where students fall in love with learning. Watching a student fail, learn from the failure, and learn to see struggling as a door to further leaning makes any difficulty I or a student has watching the process moot.

Stuggle on. The end is in sight.

Steve