About 850 years ago, when I was in college, my good friend Kim convinced me to work in the Writing Center at Douglass College (Rutgers U.). But first, in order to work there, we had to take a course called The Theory of Writing. We were both English majors but we had not had much training in rhetoric or theory of writing. It was a full 40 hours of coursework and it taught me a lot.
The course was really interesting to me, and I learned techniques that helped me help the students who wandered into the Writing Center, usually they were science or math majors who were experiening Writer’s Block, and couldn’t get started. But the things I learned helped me a lot too.
Two of the main things I learned from the course and applied were:
- Writing is creative and natural (and separate from editing)
- Editing is cultural.
What does that mean? It means that when you were forced to write all those essay tests in school, it was not such a good thing for your writer brain, because it forced you to create and edit at the same time. Many of us cannot do that and it’s bad training for your future.
Writing is creating, it’s your thoughts on paper (or screen). You need to honor this process and not edit until later. Do not censor your thoughts before they get out of your head.
