Educational Preparation
Transcript
Shanna Butler: My education at BYU was great. The journalism professors here are wonderful and they taught me a lot of good things about the craft of writing but mostly they just let me go out and write. They gave me lots of opportunities to write and I think that’s what makes you better: just doing it. The journalism program here makes you get an internship and I got my internship with the church magazines and eventually that’s where I ended up working, so in that sense it helped me a whole lot in my profession. For what I am doing now, it didn’t really help that much but the things that I learned in my profession kind of led me to where I am now and I can use the skills that I learned in school also here.
Susan Meyer: I had a great grade school education. I had a couple of teachers in grade school, I went to grade school in Canada and these teachers were British—very strict, demanding and we wrote a lot in fifth and sixth grade, it was a big deal to learn how to write in grade school. I had some talent for it and so naturally I thrived under that regime so that was good.
I didn't take any writing in college. Nope, I was already, and it’s interesting I didn't do a lot of writing in college. Its interesting, in the sciences, at least when I was an undergrad, you don't do a lot of writing for science classes. Which is good, because one of the bad pieces of advice I got in high school was "you are going to college, you don't need to take typing." Thank goodness for word processors or I would be dead in the water. I didn't write much in college, a few papers.
Fidel Montero: My education has been an interesting ride for me. I moved to, to the US when I was in 5th grade, so English is not my first language. Writing was . . . writing in English was foreign to me. In high school I hated to write and part of the reason that I really disliked writing was because I didn’t know how to do it and I was still developing as a writer.
I attended California State University, Chico for a year and a half before transferring to BYU.
I did take a writing course in Chico, at Chico State, and I’m sure it was a remedial writing class because my writing skills were extremely poor when I finished high school. And when I came to BYU I also took an introductory writing class that played a big role. What the teacher taught me in that intro course at BYU was to not be afraid to write because prior to that I feared writing because I always felt that my first sentence on the paper was going to be my last sentence. This particular instructor helped me to understand the process of brainstorming and writing and editing and she got me to feel comfortable with the idea that my first draft is only the beginning of that writing so that to me was a tremendous tool that I gained from her because it helped me to feel comfortable with the writing process.
My major in college was social studies and I had a minor in ESL, teaching ESL. I did a lot of writing in my history courses, of course, and also in my teaching courses. I had the opportunity to write to a great extent.
I earned my bachelors degree and my masters degree from BYU and currently I am attending Columbia University in NYC.
The more education that I get, my master’s program, now doing a doctoral program, the more that my writing has evolved. When you compare a paper that I write now to a paper that I wrote when I was a freshman in college, there is a tremendous difference in my style, in my voice and in my process so my education has played a tremendous role in my writing.
Susan Black: I went through high school, got a degree in political science here, and from there, took off time from schooling and then I went back, got a master’s in counseling but none of that said writing other than big projects. It was nothing that you would say I do it on a daily basis. I then became a single parent and the question was, “How do I support my family? How do I support my family by not leaving home?” I went back to check on other things that I learned how to do, and basically nothing was filling in. When I worked on my doctorate degree, I would go from professor to professor’s office and I would say, “Is there an article that you have been wanting to write, that you have done all the research and you just need somebody to string it together?” Invariably, many professors are gatherers and many professors are incredible researchers, but they can’t get it out the door. How I put myself through school for the doctorate degree was writing for other professors, but their name went on it, and I was a ghost writer paid for the experience. It wasn’t until I became a professor myself that I went “I am going to put my name on this.” That helped me incredibly through the process. I wouldn’t say through the schooling it was always jumping through people’s hoops, it wasn’t until I needed to financially support myself and my children that I had on the job experience. Not everything that I wrote was wonderful, but it did get into the journals of choice for different people.
James Christensen: I had the advantage of studying under some great people. J Roman Andrus, who was one of my art professors and mentors, felt very strongly that an artist needed to be literate. And so as part of my education I wrote a lot of papers, I wrote a master’s thesis. He was very convinced that literacy was part of what we did. And I appreciate that. It stayed with me for a long time. I’ve tried to teach my children how to speak correctly, how to write cogent papers, how to be literate people. And if young people come to me for advice and say, “Where should I go to school? What should I study? I want to be an artist.” I think that if I have made progress as a writer over the years, it has happened because I have simply learned to cope with my own . . . anxieties about writing. And found mechanisms by which I can, if forced into it, get a coherent paragraph out. I can write a paper if I have to. But I’ll be honest to your audience and say I don’t like writing. It’s a terrible thing to use on a DVD about writing, but I do it, but it’s not my favorite thing.
Claudia Laycock: I think I came out of BYU a very good writer, as an undergraduate. I came out of high school a good high school writer and took the AP test and got my way out of English 101 or whatever it was back then. And so I came in my freshman year and took the very first English 251 and did very well in that class and thought I was a superb writer. And then the next year I came in and I took 301 from Eloise Bell, and I got back my first paper from her and it had a Bon it and I was crushed. I just couldn’t believe she could do that to me. In grading papers, she would talk on a tape recorder. She didn’t make a mark on the paper so you had to listen to the tape to find out what your grad was and she didn’t say the grade till the last two words. And so, and in that first tape what she said was: you write well, but you… and you’ve got a lot of good opinions and you’re supporting your opinions but your organization needs a lot of work. So what I learned that semester was how to organize. I got better and better and better and by the time I finished the class I was finally getting A’s… I learned how to write from Eloise Bell. I took all the English major classes; I took both the grammar and the usage classes, which I think were extremely helpful, especially the usage class- that really opened up my eyes to a whole different way of looking at grammar.
I went into law school knowing how to write and I wasn’t in the top 10% in law school, I wasn’t the smartest at law school but I could write circles around anybody else in law school.
Abe Mills: My education prepared me to do the sorts of things that I am doing right now in, I think it did a great job of preparing me. Because, for instance, my first English class that I took at BYU the English 101 or 110. We had this project and it was a long project, a big paper. I think there were three people writing on it, and we wrote this thing. And I sware we spent tons of time and it must have been really bad because we didn’t do good on it. And we didn’t do well on it. See that English, right there, that prepared me. But our English professor basically came back to us and said you guys are way better than this, redo this, and I’ll give you the score that you get when you come back and so we went and redid it and we got a good grade. And so that prepared me in a lot of ways because lots of things in life don’t turn out exactly right the first time.
Geoffrey Germane: The background needed for the kind of writing that I do comprises not only my education, which has been very useful, but also my professional life prior to now as a faculty member where I was involved in publishing. Not only publishing but also reviewing a lot of theses and dissertations and a lot of editing and that sort of thing. That process has been invaluable in terms of what we do now. It has caused me to be more effective and efficient in producing the product we do now.
Terry Olson: I was blessed by a high school teacher who spent a lot of time helping us diagram sentences, the old diagramming. I actually knew something about subjects and verbs and objects and the difference between when you use an adjective and an adverb and it has served me well. Its amazing how that one high school class where we were relentless about diagramming has informed what I have done, at least technically and structurally.
I think that once I got my PhD I knew how not to do some things, but I had not yet learned how to do the things that needed to be done. That’s where the issue of practice, of redoing, of being willing to acknowledge that everything I put down on paper is revisable, redo-able, and changeable; it’s through that process that I begin to see how it ought to be done. My doctoral degree prepared me to avoid pitfalls and going down paths in writing that would not have been productive, but to do the right thing in the right way, in a coherent way, that’s something I learned afterwards and am still learning.
I do have to say that I enjoyed writing when I had something to say. I believe I rarely was worried about “oh, this is something that has to be done, and it has to be this long, and I got to fill up the page.” It wasn’t that at all, it was: “What idea do I want to propose here, and how can I do it?” I would do that first and then say, “How long is this supposed to be?” If it were short, I would say “What’s meaningful that I could put in here?” and if I were long I would say, “Oh, what could I cut?”