Show Students Your Own Work

The best thing I did last semester was to show my students some of my own shitty writing. Previously, I had avoiding putting up any of my own work, not out of some kind of fear of student reactions, but because I didn't want to make the class all about me.

Still, about halfway through last semester, I got the impression my students were feeling all downtrodden and dismal about their writing. I wanted them to see that even though we grade "final" drafts, none of us, their teachers, think about writing purely in terms of product, either.

I'm a big fan of Anne Lamott's "Shitty First Drafts," like Rhiannon, and of Theodore Cheney's Getting the Words Right. Cheney's book has been invaluable for teaching revision. So often, I lacked a vocabulary or even examples for the kinds of changes I wanted my students to make. Cheney provides all of that and more.

Several years ago, I performed an exercise Cheney suggests, which is to reduce the redundancies and weak constructions in my writing. I wanted my students to see that clarity is ruined by extraneous words. So, I sent them a few paragraphs of Cheney's prose, and I met them in class with a PowerPoint full of my own shitty paragraphs.

The first one went like this:

Original (164 words)

This advice, found in a letter Sarah Orne Jewett wrote to Willa Cather in 1908, defines Jewett’s purpose and style as an author. The quotation followed Jewett’s suggestion that Cather change the sex of a dying woman’s lover from male to female, but the piece of advice designed for Cather’s story also applies to Jewett’s fiction. The phrase “done it as yourself” suggests self-sufficiency and capability, both in the general sense and on the specific part of women in love. Jewett’s reference to a woman’s capability to love in a “protecting way,” a way most often assigned to men, illuminates her belief that women could love in a traditionally masculine manner. However, the implication of a woman that both protects and nurtures (“[cares] enough”) implies that a woman may not only love as a man loves but can love simultaneously as both genders. Jewett’s resulting work shows women performing both gender roles not in a muddled androgynous manner, but as stronger, more well-rounded women. 

The following slide held a screen shot of my self-comments, labeling each instance of wordiness: redundancy, repetition, weak construction, unnecessary modifiers, and so on. I walked them through each instance, reading the sentence aloud and poking fun at myself and my undergraduate writing.

The revised version slide looked like this:

Revised (119 words)

This advice, written to Willa Cather in 1908, describes Jewett as an author. The quotation followed Jewett’s suggestion that Cather change the sex of a dying woman’s lover to female, but the advice designed for Cather’s story also applies to Jewett’s fiction. The phrase “done it as yourself” reveals the self-sufficiency and capability of women in love. Jewett’s reference to women loving in a “protecting way,” often assigned to men, illuminates her belief that women can love in traditionally masculine ways. The idea that women simultaneously protect and nurture (“[care] enough”) implies that women not only love as men love but can love simultaneously as both genders. Jewett’s work shows women performing gender roles not halfway, but androgynously.

No brilliance here, but the content isn't important so much as the sentence-level revisions. It also modeled a thesis statement that isn't a graduate-level argument, but is of upper-division undergraduate level.