And I know I'm not walking on it.
No, I'm not falling or flying either.
Someone hung me out here.
The clouds rub by wiping me clean
as would an army of sponges.
Some might call this bliss.
Alone. Not a sound. Not a sight.
The distinct sense of nothingness
is pervasive. And here I remain
hung in the air.
Some might call this hell.
Alone. So alone. The agony
of absolutely nothing eats
away at the inner soul of the
man. And here I remain
hung in the air.
I feel air under my feet.
Air is under my feet.
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Blink
Camera wide shot
Blink
Too much to take in
Blink
Light-bulb lanterns droop
over oak tables
Blink
Brown fan set the
morning mood with its moan
Blink
Too much to take in
Turn off the camera
Blink
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After reading much recently from online and from my students and from other sources, I concluded that some people may like a post regarding improving your writing style. I looked through a few posts on this topic just to make sure I'm not being redundant with my approach. What I found was that writers focus their advice either on grammatical errors or on soft concepts such as being interesting and reading good writers.
Eliminating grammatical errors really does not help style; it simply removes poison from writing. On the other hand, these soft concepts give you a direction to go, but they do not give very specific instructions to work from or tools to work with. Therefore, this blog post series will focus on offering instruction and handing over tools to help your writing go from good to better.
Initially, I began writing out all the five ways in one long post, but I found that this topic would make for a very long post. So this one article will be broken up into a series of five different posts to facilitate easier reading.
These blog posts will be working through components of basic composition and expository writing. The former concept may be very familiar to you, but the phrase "expository writing" probably raised a few eyebrows, so allow me to define expository writing: expository writing strips down a work into the clearest and shortest way of saying things, thus exposing the meaning of your words. It will help you shape your words to your intended meaning and, therefore, enhance your existing communication abilities.
As I go into this topic, I carry with me a few assumptions. First, you understand and use proper grammar. I will not be reviewing errors, so you better know how to write right. Also, you read enough to have an advanced vocabulary so words like antithesis and salient and jocular don't scare you, and in fact, you probably know what they mean. Finally, you have read widely enough to know of certain authors when I mention their names to know who they are, so I don't have to mention the extent of their careers.
Outlines are simply fragments or sentences ordered down a page. Their function is to help you organize your thoughts and create a sequence for their delivery. Since most professional writers do some form of outlining, it won’t hurt you either because the concept and process is not very hard. In fact, you probably already do it in your head.
As to their formation on paper, outlines group similar topics together and order those grouped topics in a series. Essentially, you are simply trying to find likeness as much as possible. The process is similar to organizing a drawer of socks, putting the darks on one side and the lights on the other, or organizing a closet, putting together dress shirts and casual shirts and jackets and pants as well as arranging by color inside of each section. Another analogy would be is that outlining is a grocery list; you simply put the similar items or same aisle items together in order to save time in the store.
Let’s move to a writing example. You are composing an email inviting some friends to a paintballing event, and you need to get out all the information in a clear way. The outline could look like this:
Vital Info
Reasons to Come
You put the very vital information for your friends first so that they can decide whether they can come. And you put all the wonderful reasons to come last. Inside of the vital information, you put the date first because if there is a conflict with the day your friends won’t come. You put the time next because the day might work, but the time might not. Location and cost and what to bring may be interchangeable, but the order may depend on financial condition of your friends as well as how much equipment they have and whether they like the place. But in short, you consider the best order for your reader to receive the information.
Another common format for organizing materials is known as the motivated sequence by Monroe. You can find various locations that provide details on it such as Wikipedia, but here is the basic format.
In each step, you cover something different to move your readership to be primed for the last step, action. Thus, the goal is obviously to move the person to action, but the four steps are needed before in order to the person to the point of acting because each builds on the next. This classic outline is, therefore, excellent for persuasion, one of three main causes for writing. (The two others are to inform and to entertain.)
In short, many ways exist to outline your material; however, all outlining takes into consideration the grouping of similar ideas and creating a specific order for delivery. The reason for this two-fold consideration is due to a two-fold reason: outlines expedite and clarify your writing. The expediting is for your time’s sake, and the clarity is for your reader’s sake. Thus, outlines help both parties.
So the next time you begin to format an email, take a moment to write out a brief outline and then reorder your points for the best effect. Your email will be clearer, and you won’t have to send nearly as many clarification emails.
(A quick note: this outlining portion is done before your start your writing during the prewriting stage of your writing process. The entire writing process has essentially three parts: prewriting, writing, and rewriting. Rewriting will be the focus of the remainder of these posts.)
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Alone by the avenue, I watch
metal cattle clatter
over the cracked blacktop.
Shrieking each nudges the other
toward their goals. Plastic and
aluminum souls feasting on the
deaths of millions, sucking their
brackish blood into their bosoms,
while alone by the avenue I watch.
Challenge students by giving yourself challenges. A professor who understands everything on the topic will not understand the student who doesn't understand the basics of the topic.
Give both subjective and objective assignments. Objective will help you make sure that those who are diligent will be rewarded; however, the subjective assignments will force your students to use their creativity. In short, by using both assignments will stretch both you and your students.
Resist the urge to lower the bar and make your own job easier for grading. 60% of your class should not be getting a B on a regular basis. Certainly, a few classes may be exceptional, but the majority of the time the mean, median, and mode should be C because that means average. And there is nothing wrong being average when the average is excellence.
Don't fear a few moments of silence after a question. Don't rephrase unless it was very badly phrased. Don't reiterate. Don't re-prompt an answer. Let the question sit on the brains of those listening for maybe 10 seconds because your brain has the answer, but your students are learning; they don't know the answer necessarily.
Don't take the safe classes that will keep your GPA high. Take some classes that will put your GPA at risk. There is no point in boasting a 4.0 when you went after easy classes. All you proved by that high GPA was that you can game a system.
Don't think the teacher ought to give you a high grade simply because you completed the assignment to all the specifications. Satisfactory is a C. Lacking errors is not a positive, but a lack of a negative. Thus, errors should and do bring down your grade very often. Remember if you're doing your absolute best, then you can't complain if it is judged on par with everyone else. Excellence should be the average, not two standard deviations about the mean (97%).
Resist the mindset that you're paying for this education, so it is your right to get a high grade. You are paying for the privilege of having talented people instruct you and evaluate your grasp of a field. If your grasp is sub par, then your grade should be sub par. If your grasp is good, and you produce results that can be clearly seen, then you're grade will reflect that as well. You never have the right to a grade. But you do have the right to prove yourself for a grade.
Pieces of paper may grant you a pay increase, but education will grant you success. Don't merely go through classes trying to learn what you think may be valuable for your field. Learn everything that everyone is teaching. Evaluate it. Test it against what is true. You will become educated this way instead of informed. Education will train you to become a better human being whereas a knowledge transfer may as well make you a computer.
Write. Write. Write. Even if you will throw most of it away, keep writing. You are learning excellence by this methodology, putting in the time to a craft that will shape the future world by shaping the future minds.
Wean people away from the concept of genres. Blend them together in such away that Barnes and Noble will have a hard time deciding which shelf it should place your work. Refuse to be reduced to romance or scifi or fantasy merely. Write the excellent novel, not the excellent scifi!
In line with the last thought, don't write for a market. Write for excellence and let the market create itself. I find myself too many times having to think about who would want to buy what I'm writing and how I should slant what I'm writing to that market. Instead find authors who write well, figure out what makes them tick. Then write well yourself. The market will make itself, even if you can only publish them to a blog or by eBook.
Words ought not be bought simply for their bulk. So don't simply buy the book that looks thicker. More doesn't always equal merrier. More may just equal filler like cotton candy, some sugar a bunch of air.
Realize that hard reading equals real learning while light reading means nothing new. If a book is hard to read fast, that may in fact be a good thing because you are encountering things you hadn't thought of before.
Read broadly. Have a favorite type of book for sure, but read beyond that. You may prefer non-fiction. So read some fiction. You may prefer fiction; read some history books. You may prefer blogs; so read some newspapers on occasion. Even listen to audio books that you have read before in order to get a new perspective on them. Don't let reading habits form you. Form your reading habits.
Buy art, not just movie posters, but real art. Buy something you don't understand in order that you may eventually understand it. When you learn to understand that which you couldn't quite grasp before, you gain something more than knowledge. You gain determination. You can ability to understand a wider variety of expression.
Become a patron of artists. Find artists that express in their art values that are right and support their expression by purchasing that art. Artist need to eat just as much as engineers do, so spend maybe a few dollars less on your new plasma and save some for a local artist.
Every year pick a topic and become an expert in that topic by the end of the year by reading or listening to a book every week. After 52 books on something, you probably know quite a bit about it.
Lastly, never ever give into the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's good. Just because something is unpopular doesn't mean its good either. Think beyond the marketing, beyond the media bonanza, beyond wild success because that usually means its a fad. And if you live for the fads, prepare to live for stuff that doesn't last. Build your life on stuff that last.
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