Vision Before Revision

A Letter to My Students About Thinking and Writing

Let’s be honest.  

Many of you don’t like to write…at least not the kind of assigned academic writing we do in school.  But, you also know that you kinda have to do it, both as a requirement for success in school and to become a better curator of ideas, if you know what I mean, a thinker.

So, what you do is, you wait and then you just sort of start with a squishy, poorly defined idea-maybe just a few thoughts about a prompt-and push forward into an essay, feeling around in the darkness to find something solid, an idea, that you can latch on to.

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you discover that idea early and your essay comes out pretty good.

Often, however, you just stumble around in the dark, writing words, but never finding anything solid to grab onto, nothing to keep you from tripping over the mess of ideas tumbling out of your panicky brain.  You probably come through to the other side, the essay gets done, but you’ve left a trail of intellectual litter strewn across the lawn that’s pretty ugly when you consider it clearly at daybreak.

When I was grading your recent essays, I have to admit, I was frustrated. There’s so much to be frustrated about right now, but, unfairly, my frustration was directed only at you. So, I’ve been looking for some ideas to circle back and address some of the gaps I’m seeing. As I was planning, I found these words in one of my old notebooks, scrawled in red across a page full of black notes.

Vision Before Revision

What a glorious turn of a phrase! It’s simple and witty, yet gathers together a deep truth about writing that we, your teachers, don’t do a very good job of sharing.

I’ll put it another way, less elegant, but perhaps more direct.

Before you can write a fantastic essay, you kinda have to have something worth saying. 

We try to impart this wisdom to you, but I don’t think we ever just say it. Instead, we implore you to try strategies like prewriting. We ask that you deconstruct the prompt so that we’re sure you are asking the right questions about the content. We ask you to write a claim, or perhaps we call it a thesis, but right here we drop the ball, sending you staggering into the darkness.  

What we should be asking is this:

“What do you have to say about this topic?”

Because, you kinda need that answer before you begin writing. You don’t have to have a roadmap-we don’t expect you to know the path you’re going to take-but we do need you to have a clear view of where you’re going to end up before you set out.  

If your answer is “nothing,” then writing isn’t the problem, is it?  In that case, the problem is that, for whatever reason, you are disengaged from the topic. That was the problem with many of these essays, in retrospect. Again, let’s go with honesty here: this could be a “you” problem, but it could also be a “me” problem. It might even be a content problem.  Right now, I’d bet it’s a pandemic problem that neither of us has much control over. Whatever the case, I’m sorry for my frustration. Either way, that’s a different discussion for a different time. For this discussion, what matters is that you recognize the question. It remains true that, until you have something to say, the writing can’t be very good, can it?

So, the next time you’re tasked with writing for school, ask yourself what you have to say before you throw open the door and wander out into the darkness.  Grab a flashlight and cast about for what you really think or know about your topic.  Shine a light on ideas, see what’s in and around them. Are they all by themselves in the shadows or are they stacked up in a haphazard pile with other observations that you can dust off and organize? What’s there, hidden, that you can use?

If you find you’ve nothing to say, it’s my job to help. If you find there’s something, but you can’t make sense of it, again, it’s my job to help. That’s what I had hoped to do with the prompt work we did leading into the essay, but I never asked that fundamental question.

“What do you have to say about this topic?”

TLDR: Figure out what you have to say, if you have anything to say at all, and write it down. Ask for help if you need it. Give yourself a target…a destination. Then, blaze your path to that place using the prompt as your copilot. I think you’ll find that the words will come more easily if you do and they’ll be better words-the right words-too.

Be safe, Kiddos.