Write as Well as You Can

It is hard to believe 8 weeks has slipped by and it is time for my final blog.

I especially enjoyed Zinsser's text this week. I really liked what he had to say about making your writing entertaining. It was helpful to see in what ways I can accomplish this. It was one paragraph, but that one paragraph holds a lot of great tips, including how these bits of entertainment become your style. You need to give your reader amusement, and this is usually “an enjoyable surprise” (Zinsser, 297). These amusements become our style and our style is our personality. Through this week’s readings, I have learned you cannot let someone take that away.

The idea of ownership of my own writing, of workshopping, editing and people telling me what to do in my own text...

I found Zinsser and Graham’s words on editing helpful. Being a novice writer, I have no idea how the whole editing process works. Although, I do see now how workshopping was indeed a form of editing. It is good to know that if I am confident in my work, I should defend my work. I learned through the workshopping that it is very helpful to have other sets of eyes looking at my writing. I also found that as a professor, you often gently suggested ideas. There were instances I took your suggestion, and a few that I didn’t when I thought my work said what I wanted, the way I wanted it to, and changing it would have affected that. I think that was one of the points Zinsser was making—don’t “sell out.” Just because you’ve received the payment for your work, it is still your work. It is not okay to allow someone to make changes to the point you don’t even recognize a piece as your own.

I think it’s important to allow an editor to keep you focused, to give you feedback, to have an “objective eye” (Zinsser, 299) that will help you improve your text. As I said in one of my process memos, it is so easy to get too close to a piece of your own writing. It’s an editor’s job to make sure your text has clarity. I found that an important part of workshopping. Even though I thought something made perfect sense the way I had written it, if even one other person doesn’t get it, I need to clarify. A point Zinsser made that stuck with me, is when allowing an editor to do his/her job, it is important not to let someone edit out your distinctiveness. I would think all of these suggestions start making more sense once a writer has entered the world of publication.

To sum up what Zinsser said, and what I will take away from this class--own your work. Believe in yourself and your writing. “You will only write as well as you make yourself write” (Zinsser) How true! If I want to get lazy and skip some revising, it won’t be as good as it could be. Work, and then work harder.




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