Write Like a What Now?

We just finished a three-day weekend here. Dora and I got out of the city for most of it. That was very nice, but while in the country, our dog Dio got some kind of skin infection on his head. So today the vet had to shave his head and scrub the skin clean (read "raw").

So now when I walk the dogs I try to keep my mind occupied. If I don't, I end up fixated on the horrified looks of passers-by. You might find it hard to believe, but most people don't like looking at infected dog head skin.*

Anyway, as I walked my little Frankenstein monster along Andrassy ut, I tried to figure out what it is that keeps my students from writing clearly.

The subject brought me back to a mantra posted on the wall of my high school's expository writing classroom, "Read like a writer; write like a reader." I throw this idea up on the whiteboard during the opening and closing lectures in my first-year writing skills course. Many of the students latch onto it. They often quote it in the summary statements of their final portfolios. It's a nice phrase. It's got symmetry. It's got alliteration. And it makes you sound like you care about writing.

The problem with this advice is that it is easy to say, but it is exceptionally difficult to execute. This is the issue I tried to unravel a bit today. So while people gasped in horror at Dio's gory little head, I contemplated the challenge of 'writing like a reader.'**

The fact is, most of my students do not think about the reader while writing. They think about the rules of grammar, the due date, source citation, the word count, and (if I'm lucky) the content of their essays. These things ought to be the focus during the early stages of writing. They are important. Unfortunately, many students believe that once they can understand their own writing, then everyone else ought to understand that writing as well.

However, when a writer is focused on understanding the meaning of their own work, it's impossible to think about the reader - to consider how another person could/would/might understand a sentence or a paragraph. It's impossible because our brains can't build a strong enough wall between what we want to say and what the text says.

Whenever a writer tries to edit for clarity while still teasing out the meanings and concepts in a paper, there's a turf war in that writer's brain between the intended meaning and the text's possible meanings. Intended meaning is always going to win that war. So to write like a reader, a writer must have the firmest of grasps on the material before reaching the editing and proofreading stages. Once there, the writer then has to think about the material as though they have lost that grasp; they have to anticipate how their words could be misinterpreted.

The advice this challenge might spawn: "Stop thinking about what you want to do, and think about what you might be doing." Not quite as catchy as the adage from my high school, but it does get at the complexity of the task.

Such activity not only requires time and abstract thought - it also requires a powerful sense of insecurity. You have to be the type to worry and fret about all the ways your words might be misread. Most writers I've met have that kind of insecurity in spades. It make some areas of their lives more challenging, but it makes for some very readable prose.

Many beginning writers, on the other hand, believe that once the words are on the page, the task of deciphering an essay's meaning belongs to the reader. They seem to say, "If the paragraph isn't clear, why don't you read it again, stupid." While this kind of confidence might help a person in some situations, it often leads to poorly written papers.

So during my dog walk, while I was worrying about how strangers were reacting to my dog's head, the writing advice I generated was this: "Try being a bit more insecure about yourself and your work."

Mmm, maybe I'm a bit biased.

*Note to my students: "dog head skin" is an awkwardly long noun sequence. Just the kind of thing I've warned many of you against. Avoiding such a sequence is almost always a good point of style, but you will find writers who will break that 'rule' if the awkwardness of the phrasing compliments the meaning of the content. In this case, I used an ungainly and ugly collection of nouns to better get across how unpleasant my dog's head is when shaved.

**I'll leave the challenge of Reading Like a Writer to Francine Prose's lovely volume on the subject.