Writing Leftovers

Usually when I’m revising, there’s a stage at which I realize I have to cut some stuff, either because it’s kind of tangential to the focus of a paper or because the draft has gotten too long. The writing I have to cut might be just a sentence or a paragraph or two; occasionally it’s multiple pages of text. It can be painful to just delete writing that I spent hours working on, that I think explores some good ideas, or that I just really like how I said it. So about halfway through my Master’s program, I quit deleting stuff I liked from my drafts. Instead, I save it for later.

I am not sure exactly how I arrived at the “freezer” metaphor. Maybe it was because I had recently been reading Plato’s Gorgias, in which Socrates compares rhetoric to “cookery,” and maybe it’s because as a grad student who liked to cook, I always ended up with a lot of leftovers. In any case, I created a folder named “FREEZER” on my cloud drive. It’s got a bunch of files with leftover writing that I’ve cut from various projects over the years. I try to label the files well enough to remember more or less what’s inside them, but some are labeled better than others.

Partial screenshot of a file folder labeled "FREEZER"
in all caps, with several MS Word files inside

My "leftover writing freezer" comes in handy in two situations: first, if I am searching for a new project to get started, I can look through the freezer for inspiration. For example, two of the files in the screenshot above have text I cut from other work because it needed to be its own project; I just haven't had the chance to get back to them yet. Second, sometimes when I am working on a project, I realize I’ve already written something related. I open up my “freezer,” pull out some of the contents, warm them up through revision, and use them. Having "leftover writing" can help me avoid writer's block. 

On the other hand, some of the stuff in my “freezer” is probably too old and stale to be usable anymore. Every once in a while, I open up that folder, check the contents, and decide whether or not to throw anything out. Since file space is cheap these days, I rarely throw stuff out, but when I do it’s because I no longer feel bad about tossing it. Putting bits of my writing in the freezer instead of deleting them is an easy way to make my writing and revision process more effective and less painful.

A Vocabulary (and History) Lesson

I teach college English--writing, mostly. Because it's college English, I almost never spend any direct instruction time on vocabulary. My students do develop their vocabulary in my classes, but mostly by doing a lot of reading and writing.

I do have one vocabulary lesson, however, which I will give if they ask and aren't satisfied with "read a lot; write a lot." It is this: learn affixes. Affixes are the bits we stick at the beginnings and ends of words to modify their meaning--in other words, prefixes and suffixes. If you learn affixes, your vocabulary increases logarithmically.

The word I most often use to illustrate affixes is "antidisestablismentarianism." Not only does it use a lot of affixes, it's also recognizable and generally regarded as a bit silly, which makes the lesson more memorable.

So I write the word on the board and ask my students to help me break it down. First, we identify the root ("establish") and note that it is a verb. Then we work our way outwards, identifying the affixes and their meanings, until they can successfully decode the word. I'll give you a moment now to try it yourself; the answer is after the break.

Image: A stack of LEGO blocks with the parts of the word
"antidisestablishmentarianism" written on them. CC0 Public Domain.

National Day on Writing

My photo of an ASU student. CC-BY 2.0

The National Council of Teachers of English created the National Day on Writing, "on the premise that writing is critical to literacy but needs greater attention and celebration." NDOW is celebrated yearly, on October 20th, and while I was serving as an assistant director of ASU Writing Programs, I had the privilege of organizing last year's celebration on the Tempe campus. Along with several colleagues, we planned to have members of our campus community share their responses to #WhyIWrite both on social media and on colorful origami squares. Over 200 people created squares for our quilts on October 20, 2015.

Photo by Bruce Matsunaga for ASU Department of English. CC-BY 2.0

The day's activities were cut short by rain, and we had to wait for the paper to dry out before our project's next phase. On October 31st, as Professors Shirley Rose and Maureen Daly Goggin chaired the annual Feminisms and Rhetorics conference on our campus, we began assembling these origami squares into "paper quilts," which we put on display near our Writing Programs offices.

My photo. CC-BY 2.0

As I sorted through these squares, selecting which ones to place in each quilt, I was profoundly moved again and again by the variety, thoughtfulness, and intimacy of responses. Many students wrote about using writing to learn, or to satisfy teacher expectations. But many more participants wrote about writing for self-expression, keeping in touch with loved ones, and preserving stories and traditions.

When I invited one university employee to share a reason why he writes, he regretfully told me that he doesn't really write--he is an accountant and only writes expense reports for his job. Well, that is writing! I told him. That kind of writing, which often doesn't get recognized as writing, is just as important as the kinds of writing we more readily recognize. I was grateful that he chose to make a square for our quilt.

Photo by Bruce Matsunaga for ASU Department of English. CC-BY 2.0

I was surprised by how many participants shared that writing helps them maintain their mental health. Sometimes, students wrote about how they use writing to create a better future for themselves and for others. A student who wrote "I write because 62 million girls don't have that chance" provided a sobering reminder that writing is a gift and a privilege not shared by everyone. That is why I am so proud to participate in the National Day on Writing. Through this celebration, we bring visibility to the importance of literacy and writing for everyone, regardless of their background, current circumstances, or plans for the future.

This cause is close to my heart. I invite you to celebrate National Day on Writing with me by sharing your responses to the theme of #WhyIWrite in the comments below and all over social media today.

Photo by Bruce Matsunaga for ASU Department of English. CC-BY 2.0 

My photo of Susan. Do not share without permission.

Writing Metaphors

One of my favorite teaching activities for the first day of class is to have students write a metaphor or simile for their writing, or for themselves as writers. Lately I've also had students add an image that represents their metaphor. The activity is a way to introduce some concepts and practice some technical skills right off the bat, but more importantly, it's a quick way for me to get some insight into how my students think about writing.

Here is the example that I made tonight:

Old-School Revision

Experienced writers know that the hardest part of writing isn't putting words on the page: it's revision. It's massaging and coaxing and wrestling and chiseling texts into the proper shape, the proper texture. I've been working on this article for a really, really long time. It's now in its 9th major revision, and it's 30 pages long, and last week, I realized that the bottom half of it needed some serious reorganizing. So I fell back on an old-school revision activity: the literal cut and paste.

It works like this. You take a printed copy of your paper (or in my case, thankfully, only half of it), and some scissors and glue, and you cut it into paragraphs. The glue is for pasting together the parts of paragraphs that span multiple pages. After your paper has been chopped into its component paragraphs, you mix them up and you find a large surface and you lay them out in your new order (this activity can be an interesting peer response technique too, if you let someone else rearrange them for you. Among other things, when somebody else tries to put your paper back together in the right order, you really start to get a sense of how important transitions are). Here's what my reassembled text-puzzle looked like:

Each column is a different subheading (though actually that first column contains two subheadings (one is transitional), and the remaining four are all sub-subheadings). The paragraphs with larger space between them are primarily transitional or meta-textual. The paragraphs on their sides didn't fit conceptually very well; that's my way of visually representing that they need to be heavily reworked or deleted (one of them was deleted, along with a bunch of bits of other paragraphs; the other three were reworked).

Using this method, I was able to get a birds-eye view or map of how my paper needed to be organized, which made my digital cutting & pasting much easier to manage. Of course I didn't exactly follow the map in the end. Reorganizing so many paragraphs required a lot of line-level revising too, and that in turn created alternate (and better, I think) organizational possibilities for the several paragraphs. It also gave me a better visual sense of how my sections were balanced than merely scrolling through a .doc could. And it offered me a fresh perspective on the text overall. After 9 revisions I was really having trouble seeing the trees for the forest; physically handling each paragraph individually was eye-opening.

I'm a proud tech nerd, but I have to admit that sometimes, low-tech solutions work better.

Now if only I could think of a better title, and a better conclusion for that beast.