Saturday June 15, 2024; 11:13 AM EDT
- I was once upon a time a writing teacher, and sometimes I went to conferences and listened to talks by other writing teachers about the work we did. Possibly the worst talk I ever heard was about the diagrams writing textbooks use to illustrate the process of writing.#
- Some diagrams present the process as a line, starting here and heading over there, the speaker said, pulling several of these diagrams up on the screen beside him at the front of the room. These diagrams tended to begin with doing research on a topic, and they’d head on over to forming a main idea and choosing an organization. They’d end with revising and proofreading, he said. #
- But some diagrams acknowledged that a writer keeps thinking and sometimes has to go back and do more research, sometimes has to come up with a new organization, sometimes has to toss away a portion of a draft or a whole draft and begin a good bit of the work again. These diagrams tended to be circular, like a snake trying to eat its own tail. No telling how many times a writer would need to circle through the elements of the process before becoming satisfied with the draft. These diagrams make clear that writing isn’t a fully linear process, the speaker said.#
- And then there were some outliers among the diagrams. There were Venn diagrams and clouds of inputs linked by arrows to a central processing unit. There were diagrams where different colors of ink played a role.#
- The speaker’s thesis seemed to be, “There sure are a lot of diagrams in writing textbooks.” At the time, and in my hazy memory of that day in the 1980s, neither the thesis nor the diagrams help me think clearly about how writing works. Nevertheless, I’m sure a couple of lines were added to the speaker’s resumé going forward, holding their own on an interior page for years to come.#
- Maybe the resumé was the only thing at stake that day, which is a shame. People need strong public voices, for one thing, and if for no other reason than that, writing matters. Talking about writing as if writing matters — a worthy goal. It needs to be accomplished not like the motto at the base of the statue on the college campus at the start of the movie Animal House, which as the camera pans in on the noble figure atop the pedestal we eventually see below him the words “Knowledge Is Good” . . .#
- If writing matters, it matters in a given context. It’s good or less good in a given context. That talk about diagrams was a lot of language with next to no significant context to give it weight. With no context, writing can’t matter.#
- I had a thought about blogrolls the other day, which is that they are a way of saying to readers, “This is what I see as the context for my work. For what I hope can be our shared work.” We plainly need a tool like that.#
- The people too are the context for “my work, and I hope for our shared work.” We need a tool that’s good for bringing people together to affiliate on a shared project. We need tools for sharing the process work and the results of a project. And a tool for allowing people to find a way to participate. To some degree we have these tools, and to some degree not. Context for the project, people involved, process markers, ongoing results, ways to participate, ways to illustrate and test the results out in the world, ways to insist upon and honor the real stakes in people’s lives.#