Trust the Process

We’ve all been there. It’s midnight the night before a big paper is due. The coffee is percolating 6 hours too early, and I know I’ve got at least 7 hours of work to do before I can submit this bad boy—bad, here, being the operative word. Despite my efforts and my long hours and my sleepless nights, I never got the grades I knew I could earn on my writing until I learned to slow down and trust the process.

Tired memes may be a result of sleepless nights.

I’m talking about the Writing Process: a step-by-step approach to writing that all good writers, in their best moments, employ in different and often unique ways. In its most basic form, the Writing Process starts with prewriting – the steps you take before you begin composing a draft. These steps might include jotting down your ideas, brainstorming, asking questions, doing research, reading, annotating texts, taking notes, concept mapping, outlining, and talking about your ideas with peers and colleagues.

After prewriting comes drafting, and this stage takes on innumerable forms. For most writers, the important thing is to get started. It has been well established that one cannot complete a piece of writing without first sitting down to write. The key is not to become attached to any of the material you produce in the drafting stage, because more likely than not it will get cut to shreds before the end. That’s because the next stage in the process is revision, and many a poorly written sentence has succumbed to its wrath.

Please, metaphorical wrath only.

Revision is a difficult task for almost all writers, in part because it’s nearly impossible to do it alone. Writers need interested, engaged, and knowledgeable readers with whom we can share our work and find out how it sounds in another person’s head. The goal of writing, after all, is to be read by someone else. But how to revise it to make it fit for human consumption? You need the writing process! And that’s where the Writing Center comes in.

We will help you find it.

When you bring a draft of your work to the Writing Center, you’ll work with a peer who faces the same internal struggles as you do whenever they sit down to write. What shall I say? Will my professor think it’s dumb? What’s the best way to organize this discussion? Do my sources even support this thesis? How do I cite a documentary film? Do you think this cheese is safe to eat? While our Writing Consultants don’t claim to know the mysterious workings of professors’ minds, and we probably can’t advise you about the contents of your fridge, we can help with everything else.

So make an appointment at the Writing Center, no matter where you’re at in your work. Your consultant will be happy to talk with you about your thesis, your sources, your organizational strategy, your citations, and even your writing process. We can help you discover new strategies for building an essay from the ground up, and once your process is in place, you can slow down, too, and learn to trust where it will lead you. Writing will still be hard work, but with a little help from the Writing Center, you can get to sleep at a reasonable hour, and get your coffee drinking back in the morning where it belongs.

Coffee and pie not included.

The Research Paper that Grew Legs and Destroyed Cities

There really are only a few things that I believe myself truly, unabashedly, and unapologetically good at. And right at the top of that short list is procrastination. It's a gift, I don't mind saying. Since college, though, I've learned to temper said gift to some small degree. I set schedules with alarms that blare annoying, piercing sounds, or program them to play some song that I utterly despise (at the moment it's "You Give Love a Bad Name" by Bon Jovi; I started this because I used to set my clock radio to NPR and then just lie in bed on the weekends listening to the news or Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me, sometimes for hours when I should have been at work). At times, I lock myself in my office through the early morning hours, and periodically on the weekends. I set my phone to vibrate and make sure to leave it on a different floor of the house so as not to be distracted by friends calling and luring me to this oh-so-cool thing that I already knew about and hadn't had the slightest inclination to join, but now that I am about to sit down and work, well, that sounds like a great idea. That last one might have more to do with with nerves or anxiety, than procrastination (the effect is the same though). After all, you can't fail at something that you haven't started. But boy, when I was in college did I truly have a penchant to procrastination. I once wrote an 8-page paper given to me at the beginning of the semester an hour before class. I don't remember the grade I got on that one, but I do remember walking to class reading it and turning red over the many, many typos and terrible constructions contained therein.

I know I'm not alone in this fact. If I were to take a poll of undergraduate students and ask, "How long does it take you to start an assignment with a deadline a month away?" I'm pretty sure I'd get a response of at least 75% answering three weeks. But that is slight consolation. The great men and women of arts and letters and science, what did they do? How did they circumvent the universal desire to watch a half-a-day's worth of infomercial GIFs? Well, as it turns out, they may not have had the fortitude and robotic determination that you may have thought.

So, for this time of year when many of you are beginning to have nightmares of unfinished term papers growing legs and a lust for destroying cities, I figured I'd give you some advice, and show that there is some hope.Well, maybe I shouldn't be the one to give you advice (see everything above). Maybe I'll let someone with credentials and accomplishments speak for me. Here is a link to a series on how many artists and writers and scientists got done all the great work that they did.

Hope that helps.