Proof of Process

Two years ago, I wrote a rough draft of a journal entry for an education course. The prompt was to answer the question “Why read?” and discuss how I would promote reading among my students. 
 
When I finished writing the first draft of the assignment, I felt dissatisfied and icky about it. I knew that my draft was more dramatic and disconnected than I wanted it to be, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say instead. Having another person interact with it would help me figure out how to make my ideas clearer and more effective. I went to the Writing Studio.  
 
This blog post offers a glimpse of my writing process. I’ll break it down for you—maybe it will show how the Writing Studio can help you, too!  
 
Clarifying the Main Idea 
 
My Writing Studio consultant greeted me, let me pick a seat, and asked how I was. Then we read my draft aloud together, and I asked how it was coming across to him, my practice audience. He told me that he liked my main idea: reading makes new things and ideas accessible to others. He also told me that my train of thought was hard to follow. I jumped back and forth between analogies about elephants and inventions, and they didn’t connect in a way that made my main idea more meaningful. It made him think of Pong, the arcade game.  
 
In my personal writing process, loose connections are typical of first drafts. My thoughts are moving quickly and I’m connecting ideas in my head, assuming the reader will follow along. On paper, though, the connections often don’t show up. My reader, the consultant, couldn’t follow my thinking like I expected him to. He was confused, and my message wasn’t received.  
 
My consultant recommended removing the unclear analogies to replace them with a unified line of thinking that supported the main idea. I could explain the analogies to my reader instead, but for a short journal entry, it probably wasn’t worth the time. I wrote down his recommendation. 
 
Later, at home, I took the analogies out of my draft and pasted them a little lower in the document. This strategy removed the analogies from the draft but kept them intact, which allowed me to look at them and consider what I really meant when I first wrote them. Once I determined what I wanted to say through the analogy, I wrote a sentence that simply stated what I meant and then deleted the analogies entirely.  
 
Here is a portion of the draft I brought to the Writing Studio:  

I can experience something or relate to someone through reading that I might never have the chance to in my actual life. That’s why it was important that Marco Polo wrote about elephants. No one in Italy had ever seen one, nor could see one because they lived so far away. But they could read about them, and be mystified by the great gray wall that was impenetrable but moved and made noise all on its own. Those people experienced more of the world through reading. You do this too – have you ever seen magic? 
 
Reading stretches your imagination, too. You don’t experience magic, but imagining it gives rise to new inventions – I can’t glide two inches above the ground to get from place to place, but what if I could? And hey presto, hoverboards. Heelys. A connection between what could be and what is.  

This is what the same passage looked like after I revised it based on my consultant’s feedback:  

People can learn things through reading that they might never have the chance to encounter in actual life. Spoken communication and real experience are ways that people learn from each other, but those methods are limited by space and time. People have to be face to face and at the same time, tangible, to talk to one another. Writing and reading lets you volley ideas across borders and trickle thoughts down from history into the future, making immaterial communication something you can put in the mail.  
 
Reading provides a context for imagination to work within. Because it is a way of communicating, reading makes other people’s ideas accessible to you so that your original thoughts have the opportunity to interact with those ideas. That interaction inspires your mind with more material to enjoy and use to create new ideas, even ideas like compassion and computers, which become concrete things that improve people’s lives.   

See the difference? Using clear statements instead of analogies meant that I could organize similar ideas together, letting them support each other more effectively. Reorganizing ideas let me streamline my train of thought so that I was playing Frogger instead of Pong—making progress from point A to B instead of bouncing among ideas. The result is less whimsical in style, but a lot easier to understand. 
 
Checking for Bad Habits 
 
In addition to my unclear analogies, my consultant also noticed that I used five dashes in a short piece. I didn’t realize how much of a habit this was—not necessarily a bad habit, but my consultant pointed out that if I’m using a dash, it could be to repeat and clarify something in the sentence that I could have just said better in the first place. This reminded me to be intentional about my sentence structure.  
 
To show you what I mean, here’s the first sentence of my original draft: 

It’s important to read because of the connections that reading makes—connections between people, places, between topics in your own brain, between language and ideas and concrete things.  

See how I repeat what kind of connections I mean? I don’t really need the dash to tell the reader what connections I’m talking about. I could just say what I mean, like this:  

It’s important to read because of the connections that reading makes between people and places, between language and ideas and concrete things.  

No more dash. A small tweak that makes my sentence much more straightforward.  
 
I felt better about my work after revising it. My consultant’s notes helped me get around what felt dramatic and disconnected to me at the beginning and pointed out a writing habit I didn’t even know I had—now I think about every dash I throw in a sentence (I still like them, though—can you tell?).  
 
Process, not Perfection 
 
What do you notice about my revisions? I’m hoping you find that my ideas connect in a clear line of thinking and that I’m making progress in each sentence instead of circling around to repeat ideas. There are, of course, more things I could do to improve my piece. You probably still have a couple of suggestions for me, even though I turned it in two years ago! That’s also part of the process. My work isn’t perfect, but it’s better.  
 
My goal in this post was to show you what I started with, how my consultant helped me, and how I used his feedback to make my work better. Go see what the Writing Studio has to say about your writing!  
 
 
 
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Livia Meinz graduated from Concordia University Irvine in December 2022 with a degree in liberal arts: Spanish and a minor in Lutheran teaching. She worked in the Writing Studio for two years, and she loves that she gets to continue working with Concordia students through the Online Writing Lab. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and their new baby, and when she’s not OWLing or spending time with her family, she is knitting, cooking, or reading. She enjoys knitting, cooking, and languages because they are all ways to combine logical patterns with creativity. As a writing consultant, she hopes to help writers apply good patterns and creativity in their writing to communicate their ideas clearly and convincingly.