Well, that misfired. The general idea: if you have to justify your writing as though its a niche concern, there will be a pressure to share and, thus, to overshare. But all of those niche concerns are pretty universal, and I do wonder if articles on, say, parenting, would be better if they began with the assumption of their subject matter's universality and importance; it's a slight but important shift between "I've had a problem with my child with x" and "a lot of parents have a problem with x". Writing from a third-person, objective perspective is not always earned, but there's no reason it shouldn't ever be used.

The vital step when teaching someone to write is to convince them that it's not chaos: planning, working through ideas, outlining, drafting, and editing really can lead to a superior product, so long as you are willing to put in the time and the effort.

The vital step in writing professionally is to recognize that chaos defeats the method every time: meticulous planning, careful drafting and revision, and whether you say what you intend (or do better!) depends on moments of inspiration that resist that plan. And whatever you write, you will find ways to say it better, later. No writing is ever done, just finished, and the willingness to let it go is most important.

This is what I think of whenever I write an essay prompt. From the Paris Review:

Interviewer: That's not showing much respect for your fellow women, at least not the writers.

Dorothy Parker: As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

The latest paper prompt is sitting at twelve words (I don't like to fuss with extra: each word should do the work of explaining what the essay is to be about), one of which took about 45 minutes to pick out (it must gesture in the direction of the answers I would like to get without tipping the balance of them one way or the other, as a few of the discarded words would have done), and the last three representing two different terms I cannot decide between.

I will be following this with interest, as someone who taught freshmen last year and will be teaching them again this year (probably exclusively). Even very academically talented freshmen at top universities don't know how to write--or don't know how to control their writing--and the easiest way to get them to improve is to require them to write all the time.

The continuing series of me reflecting on my teaching experience, for future reference:

This past semester I taught a freshman seminar, to 16 students. Freshmen seminars at Duke are (I have been told) intended to be extensions of the freshmen writing course, but bringing students into closer contact with the subject matter of the department sponsoring the course. Aware of this fact, I decided to assign my students a large number of weekly response papers--8 out of 13 weeks, the first week being excluded. The structure of the class was, in this respect, a success, as everyone showed at least the periodic ability to improve over time (or at least stop making the same mistakes). I would like to credit my interventions in their writing, but realistically the high frequency of assignments did most of the work.

In structuring the individual assignments, I came to realize there were two different, sometimes unrelated, goals I wanted the students to achieve:

1. Mastery of subject matter. The topics for any particular week were intentionally matched, and I had a tendency to ask them to write on those aspects of the week's reading with which they had shown the least facility. The writing assignment becomes then a way of forcing them back into the text until they can emerge with a plausible answer to the question.

1a. The tricky nature of the assignments was this: they were designed and billed as reflections, i.e., writing to be done after the reading had (ostensibly) been completed and class time given over to discussion of the text. Students being what they are, the first reading and the class discussion might have lacked from time to time, but assignments, like death, have a way of focusing the mind, and this almost always meant at least one substantive engagement with the text; in practice it sometimes meant up to three; and since the writing assignments were due before the beginning of the next week's classes, this could mean up to seven days devoting some time to the readings. The papers improved in part because I managed to design the average week so that students were constantly in some form of contact with the reading. (Additional benefit: since the questions were not given out until the afternoon after the last class of the week, they had to read and participate with the expectation that they might want to write the paper that week.)

2. Mastery of writing skills. Those of us who have ascended to the status of adult readers have mastered a wide variety of skills, usually without knowing it: close reading of a text, the ability to summarize, finding logical flaws in an argument, imagining counterfactual cases that might complicate an argument, developing our own independent arguments, comparing multiple explanations of the same incident or phenomena, etc. The writing assignments tended to produce better writing--and force the students to work more consciously--when they had an explicit writing skill they were targeting. It also has the side benefit of teaching them that "writing an essay" is not one skill but a number of different skills.

2a. Subsequent editions of that class, or similar classes, will probably culminate in a term paper rather than an exam. An extended paper would, I think, give them a better sense of the payoff for the writing that they've done and the skills they have developed over the semester.

Sometime last year when I was first exposed to Princeton Record Exchange, I had a moment of dissonance as I attempted to figure out exactly why I wanted to be buying records in the first place. From the very beginning of my serious interest in music, I have always been unconcerned with the particular format the music comes in, and more interested in whether the music itself is worth listening to. I eventually settled on a combination of buying things I knew I liked and would also, by extension, like on vinyl--this trip including Murmur, Highway 61 Revisited, Electric Ladyland, Remain in Light--and things which I would probably not buy but for being able to get them inexpensively--1999, T. Rex's The Slider, Scritti Politti's Cupid & Psyche '85. I'm not sure there's any explanation for my slight preference for vinyl that can't be best explained by the fact that the stereo attached to my record player is the best I've ever owned, and that I listen to albums at a louder volume than anything else. Louder, clearer presentation over multiple speakers is better because it separates the elements--it allows you to hear things you otherwise might not, and get a better sense of how the whole fits together.

The funny thing about this situation is that even when I'm playing Murmur or Highway 61 Revisited, as much as I love those albums, I have a very hard time concentrating on them. Murmur has easily clear a few hundred listens since I first bought a CD of it in 7th grade. It cannot ever be new for me again, nor can it be something that doesn't have the accumulation of many different significant personal moments of appreciation (Murmur's actually an odd case here, and Dylan's better, because Murmur is often antiseptic emotionally). And on the whole, this transition, which has affected a large number of my cultural experiences, seems to be beneficial: I used to identify very strongly with something because it spoke to me, but it didn't speak to me in my sense of well-being or identity, but rather in those parts of my life that seemed unsettled. There are not so many of those anymore. What remains is instead an increased appreciation of how and why those moments once landed like they did: the technical elements that make the emotional ones transcend simple manipulation, that raise a work into something that can outlast the initial flash of inspiration. Which is just to say all that stuff Hemingway talked about.

One of the classes I am teaching this semester is a freshmen seminar. It's designed to be both an introduction to political science, or at least my slice of the discipline, and also to serve as a companion to the required freshmen composition course. As such, I make them write a number of response papers over the course of the semester. Once a week, I will put together a short presentation on issues of content or style that have appeared over multiple papers. Yesterday's presentation included a short section on the value of reading outside of coursework: the more you read, the more resources you have at your disposal, and the stronger your writing will become. (I doubt there is anyone amongst my readers who does not already know this, but I imagine we all had some point at which someone told us this or we figured it our for ourselves.) I suggested, at the end, a number of essay collections that I have found particularly useful as guides to style:

David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster, “Roger Federer as Religious Experience”
Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind, “Fail Better”
W. Somerset Maugham, The Vagrant Mood
Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions 
T.S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam, When I Was a Child I Read Books
F. Scott Fitzgerald, My Lost City
Mark Twain, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”

And, to my surprise, they collectively expressed some interest in which one I'd recommend to them for ideal Spring Break reading. There are some moments that being an instructor really does feel completely worthwhile: that was one of them.

I must be wrong about this, because I think it makes a pretty basic mistake about publishing:

How many times have you written something, published it, and then realized in retrospect that what you thought you said was not in fact what came through? (Even if you’ve never done this yourself, you’ve certainly witnessed it in others.) What if you could revise a work after publishing it, and release it again, making clear the relationship between the first version and the new one. What if you could publish iteratively, bit by bit, at each step gathering feedback from your readers and refining the text. Would our writing be better?

Iteration in public is a principle of nearly all good product design; you release a version, then see how people use it, then revise and release again. With tangible products (hardware, furniture, appliances, etc.), that release cycle is long, just as with books. But when the product is weightless, the time between one release and the next can be reduced from months or years to days or even hours. The faster the release cycle, the more opportunities for revision—and, often, the better the product itself.

Perhaps this is just a feature of being further along in one's academic career than I am, but I doubt the process is ever "write something, then publish it." It's "draft something, re-draft it, show it to one audience, revise, show it to another audience, revise, send to friends for their comments, revise to send to a journal, receive comments, revise for the same or another journal, repeat this process several more times, then maybe publish if you're persistent enough." In other words, every text already is iterative; these iterations form the basis of future scholarly work if the end product is significant enough, or the basis for travaux on which we can interpret legal documents. Nor does the fact that a book must be published in a discrete form change this: successful books can have editions in which the content changes (especially true for textbooks, one would think), and if one eventually thinks better of an argument one made, then there's always the option of writing something else to represent one's new view on that work (is this not the essence of Augustine's Retractions, or Auden's explanations for why he altered or omitted poetic work he no longer believed in?).

Because I am writing and only thinking about writing, two writing-related links:

* Jeffrey Eugenides on writing his new novel, and specifically his decision to put aside most of a book that wasn't working in order to pursue an idea he liked. May we all have that courage and the superabundance of good material.

* On manual notetaking. I know I am old because this remains a vital part of my process: read, think about what I've read to organize it, write down what I have, manually write out a schematic of how the whole thing is supposed to fit together, write down the citations I want for each section. Only then do I turn to my computer to actually write the whole thing up. Though I have tried, I can't really automate the earlier processes on the computer, which is fine by me.