Advice for Students

Transcript

Shanna Butler: One of the best ways I think to be a good writer is to just do it. Don’t be afraid of what you’re going to write, just get it out and try not to be afraid of what people will say, show it to them and if they have a bad reaction don’t think your work is bad. Just keep working at it and do your best. Reading good writing is one of the best ways to become a good writer, so read all the good things you can read and keep writing. One of the ways I stay sharp is that I write in my journal just about everyday. I figure if I have time to do freelance work, I have time to write in my journal and so I write in my journal before I ever start any of my freelance work for the day. That helps me, it warms me up and it also helps me to fulfill the commandment that I am supposed to be writing in my journal and I think that it blesses me in my writing. I’ve seen how writing can advance people’s careers. It’s a tremendous thing. Especially if you’re in a business and you can write, they promote you because you can write good documents. I mean, it doesn’t seem to make any sense but most businesses require you to have some kind of writing skills if you’re going to get a job with them. Just in non-professional ways, I think writing helps because it will help your posterity. It is something you can do to write family history and in your journal. There are lots of ways that writing can help you.

Fidel Montero: Often writing is looked at as something you do in school and something that you only do in one class, in English class. Often we think of writing as something we do in school and as limited to a classroom setting: however, the more experience I have gained in writing I have made a direct correlation with my writing and my thought process. In fact, today, I can express my thoughts a lot better and with more depth in paper than I can in words. Writing can be an extremely powerful learning tool. And if, as a community, we can learn that writing will help you to be a better thinker and thus help you to develop your ideas better and communicate better, I think we would do better and we wouldn’t have some of the miscommunication that we tend to have.

I would really tell them to help their students to understand the process so they’re not scared about receiving a paper with an F. I think that most students who are not good writers are scared to write because they don’t have confidence in their own writing. So the first thing: I would tell the teachers to help them gain confidence in their writing and help students gain confidence. Secondly, I would ask them or I would advise them, to teach them basic skills: teach them how to brainstorm, teach them how to outline a paper, teach them how to revise, how to edit, and they’re things that as a good writer you take for granted. Just like a basketball player takes for granted the process of shooting a free-throw and the mechanics of it. Good writers take for granted the skills that they have. And a lot of times they expect students to have those, however many of our students don’t because they don’t write a lot. I believe teachers should write across the curriculum. Whether you’re a history teacher or a math teacher or even a PE teacher, writing is a critical skill because writing is thinking and writing is going through the thought process of learning content. So if I’m teaching science, I want my students to be able to describe to me what they’re learning in my class because if they’re able to do that I believe they’re internalizing what they’re learning. So for teachers who aren’t teaching writing, you’re still teaching students how to think and how to process that thinking. So writing, in my opinion, is one of the most powerful tools that you can use in helping students learn in any content.

James Christensen: Part of my advice to the next generation is: you need to learn how to write, you need to learn how to communicate effectively and well. I am more interested in somebody becoming not only literate as a writer, as an English person, but also culturally literate because I think that gives you a lot more ammo for your writing. And so I try and talk students into going to a liberal arts college and not just going and studying drawing in the woods. I think that a lot of life is doing things that aren’t our favorite things to do. And it doesn’t mean they’re bad, it doesn’t mean they’re wrong, they’re just difficult. And so I think it is just part of maturing as a person that you learn how to make it work for you—the difficult stuff, and that’s what I have tried to do and if I’m any better, that’s why. It doesn’t matter what discipline you’re in as a student. It’s absolutely essential if you’re going to be successful, I think it’s essential that you know how to communicate in writing, I think you need to do that. I wish I were better at it and I wish I learned it earlier. I think we are often judged by the way we put words down on paper. And so if you intend to pursue a career in anything and you want to advance and you want to be thought highly of, I think being literate and being able to write is a pretty core element in your career strategy.

Claudia Laycock: Nothing helps like doing a lot of writing. And reading your writing and reading other peoples’ writings. I read, for instance, some of these motions we get from attorneys will have maybe only 10-20 pages of expository writing that I have to review. But along with it may come a myriad of documents that I have to review. Reading that kind of stuff helps you learn what good writing is. I do a lot of reading outside too—reading novels. I read certain magazines every week. I’ve been reading Newsweek since I was about 12. So I do an awful lot of reading of different types of writing. And I think that always helps too. But I think the important thing is to, when you choose your classes, talk to other students and find out who the good teachers are. And if they’re the demanding teachers, than that’s the teacher you need to take. Don’t take the teacher that lets you just get away with just doing sloppy work because you’re not going to come out prepared for whatever you want to do next. And if you’re headed to grad school, take every writing class you’ve got time for. Any graduate school where you’re going to have to write a thesis and a dissertation. If you’re not used to writing anything longer than two pages, you’re never going to make it through a thesis on your own. And your professors are going to be helpful to a point but they aren’t going to help you write that thing. They’ll help you edit it at the end but you have to get through it yourself.

Abe Mills: My advice to young people who are in college and maybe even younger and are you know, as far as trying to learn how to write, I would say, just don’t run away from the struggle. Struggle through and fight through things because sometimes it’s the big struggle and at the end of that struggle if you get through it, the next time you go at it again you come in at a higher level I think and I think that the more you challenge yourself, even though its hard and sometimes a pain, its ultimately like, its like running or athletics or anything that you do. Through the pain comes the, you know, the opportunity to become better and to feel better about yourself and to gain a greater understanding about, I think, lots of things in life. If you’re just going around and you’re writing stuff that’s easy to write then you’re not learning as much and you’re not progressing as much and you’re not growing as much but I think that if you take those things, as hard and painful as it is, at the end you will enjoy it a lot more.

Susan Black: I think everybody has a talent and I think you have to pray to the Lord to know what your talent is, but you can’t dismiss writing. Some people say, I am going to be really creative in my writing. I say, “well that’s great” but writing is like playing the piano—the more you write, the better you become. There was a time when I started out where you’d say I was playing chopsticks and my writing reflected that. I am embarrassed to read what I have written in the past—even last year. The more you do something, the better you become, until you go, “I could do that” and “what is your deadline” and “great, I can meet that.”

Terry Olson: I think the starting point for writing something good is that you have a story to tell that matters to you that you’re passionate about it. The issue is meaningful, the ideas are important to you so that your intensity of commitment leaps off the page in an understated way. I don’t know if that makes sense. In other words, I don’t want to overwhelm people by being insistent in my writing, but I want to be so clear and I want my students to be so clear about why this is meaningful that the reader gets it. In a way, the reader can almost feel the spirit of the writer as well as the substance of the ideas on the page. The worst writing is writing that you do where your heart is somewhere else so your hand or your computer is putting words on a page but you’re not there. When you are in alignment with what you feel passionate about, what is meaningful to you, and you believe you have a story to tell—that is the kind of writing I want to read and I am enveloped by when students do that.

By the way, I assign a lot of short papers. I have found that short papers require students to be succinct, specific, focused. A lot of the tragedies of undergraduate student writing can be avoided if you make the paper slightly shorter than is necessary to do the job. If you make it longer, students labor and wander and it’s as much an agony for me to read those things as it is for them to write them. They are busy padding, I’m busy looking for the point, “where’s the beef” kind of thing. I’m trying to assign papers that are shorter than you think they need to be because students are then disciplined to get to the point, and so am I.

Geoffrey Germane: The advice that I would give to engineering students concerning preparation for their professional career would be to do everything that they can as an undergraduate or graduate student to develop their communication skills, [both] verbal and writing. We are talking about writing here, so my comments will be limited to that. They should do everything they can possibly do, be creative in ways to get some feedback on writing. They should take every writing assignment, whether it’s a lab report or a homework assignment or a large semester assignment that may be a large report of some document, they should take it really seriously and seek feedback. Ask a faculty member to read their document or their writing in advance, get some feedback so they can learn and then learn from the feedback. See what the revisions are. Have the professor, if it is in a word processor, do so that the changes can be tracked and they can actually see what the professor did rather than just forget what the professor has revised or suggested and then go on their merry way without learning from that process. There will be nothing that will have greater leverage in their career, I think, than their communication skills. Their technical background, they will be competitive with anyone else, the difference will be their ability to communicate in writing or orally.

Susan Meyer: I would say seek it out—don't assume you're going to absorb it by osmosis. Most everybody has to learn how to do it well, it doesn't just happen. Don't count on a word processing program to make your writing good, or even to correct your spelling. Don't rely on those things, write stuff and let other people read it and critique it. Don't be sensitive about it, that's how you learn to write well—have other people read it and tell you how it can be better.

Just encourage people who say I can't write to know that anybody can learn to write better or at least write reasonably well and it's a major source of satisfaction when you can write well. People shouldn’t just push it away.