Like Ice on a Cactus – Finding the Unexpected

Has this ever happened to you:

The final edition of a paper is at long last completed. You’ve worked on it for weeks. Drafts have come and gone. Your writing has been through peer review. Your professor has even looked through parts. Sentences have been tweaked to perfection. You’ve printed it out and it looks beautiful! BUT, just as you go to hand it in you notice a typo! Ouch! After all of that work…

Why does this happen and what can we do about it?

We live and breathe our final papers for an intense period of time, during which the reading and reviewing of our writing can get a little sloppy. Both our eyes and our minds become fatigued. When we read silently to ourselves we tend to read fast and we tend to read what we think we see, or what we thought we wrote, not what is actually in front of us.

For example, this sentence looked perfect to me for months: This project will focus on three gardens located on the hostipal grounds. But, when I went to turn in my paper I noticed that I needed to make clear that I was going to do my research in a hospital, not a hostipal!

So, my advice this week: as you go through the finally editing stage of your work, read your writing out loud and slowly. If you do this, you will say what is actually on the page and you will catch more little errors. Your tongue will trip on words that you would not have gotten stuck on had you been reading silently. Even if you have previously reviewed your work (possibly many times before) you may find the unexpected.

Good luck this week! And, please share with us any tips that you may have!

P.S. I also find it helpful to print a copy of the assignment I am working on rather than just editing on my computer screen. For those who don’t do this out of concern for our trees – use scrap paper! It’s better to do this than to have to print a second final paper.

Many Leaves of Basil and Many Pages of Writing

One of my favorite things to do is to collect the fresh green leaves off of the basil plant that finds its home on our little balcony. With the fall officially here I did a big “harvest” the other day, making sure to take advantage of the growth before it was too late. Seeing all of the leaves together in my bowl, instead of spaciously displayed on the stock, showed me that we had so much more than I thought. It was a great surprise!

What if we thought of the pages of our writing like I did these beautiful basil leaves? If we looked at them all together, would we be surprised by all of the work we had done so far this semester?

I tried it and - YES! - I was delighted to find that I had done more than I remembered! I thumbed through my old notebook and my new notebook; I put together in a binder all of the transcriptions I had typed from the interviews I am conducting for my research, and the summaries I had composed about them; I gathered all of the scraps of paper I had written on and the drafts I have been revising. I couldn’t believe it – there was so much! And, in addition to realizing how much work I had done, it was fun to read through things and see how my thoughts have evolved over the past few months. What a great self-esteem boost!

So, here’s what I want you to do:
1. Pull your work out of the corners where it is hiding – in filing cabinets, on bookshelves, in bags, etc.
2. Gather all of your exploratory writing – journals, notebooks, loose-leaf paper, etc.
3. Place all of your work on the floor (neatly).
4. Place a pillow near all of your work, sit down and make yourself comfortable.
5. Take a deep breath and look through everything you’ve done. Find yourself engulfed – both physically and metaphorically – in your work.
6. Take another deep breath and BE PROUD OF YOURSELF.
7. Put everything back where it belongs!

In writing intensive classes we do a lot of informal writing that we may forget about, or we may not see how it connects to the bigger picture. When we do an exercise like this, however, we see just how much writing we have done, how our ideas have grown, shifted, or become clearer, and how this has helped point us in the direction of our more formal pieces.

Just like I turned the basil leaves into pesto, let’s turn all of our great work into amazing finished pieces.

If you have any questions or suggestions or if you just want to say “hi” please leave a comment. I look forward to hearing from you!

Happy writing…