At the very least you could try to make your student essay mercifully shorter. Brevity is wit.
Of course that runs into the perverse incentives that sometimes happen in writing classes. If the assignment is to write 3-5 pages, and your first draft is 3 rambling pages, good. Then you tighten it up and it’s 2 pages. Bad! Stuff the padding back in to get back to the desired word count.
Except you haven’t written a good paper, even if that paper gets an A. You’ve padded a tight 2 page article into a shambling 3 page article. Next time write a 5 page article and tighten it up to 3 pages. Cut, cut, cut. Cut out adjectives, qualifiers, asides, non sequiturs, redundancies, commas. I guarantee you’ll have a better paper if you first write a 5 page paper and boil it down to 3.
I think and have always thought that I was a good writer. But in the process of writing my thesis I learned that I too produce a dirty, rough manuscript. My less-old-than-you-would-think supervisor insisted I printed out my drafts, so he could fill the margins with more red than a slaughterhouse. All in all, once all the sections were written, I’d say I had three complete edits; one that I hired a copy editor to do, since my thesis advisor was taking too long quibbling about punctuation, which vs. That, etc…and then another two by my supervisor. When I got to committee, they said it was one of the cleanest manuscripts they’d ever seen.
I’ve been converted to a draft believer, and I really do think they vastly improved the finished product I furnished. It was humbling experience, to be sure, going from a high school setting where you’re lauded for being the only literate one in your class, to a master’s degree where you’re told you’re writing is careless and sloppy and needs to conform to the Chicago manual of Style.
Any writing I do professionally is collaborative, even if one person is doing 99% of the writing. An author creates a draft, then sends it on to the next author for improvement. And back and forth multiple times until all issues are resolved.
Yes, of course. Purpose, audience, and facility with convention (i.e., “genre,” register, protocol, etc.) are the three legs upon which effective writing stands. All three interconnect, and shape each other, too.
It sounds to me as if people are using different definitions of what a draft is - a 2 page draft for a 3-5 page essay? I wouldn’t consider that an (interim) draft, but a final draft.
Of course, I can’t ever remember German teachers using the “minimum length/ word count” rule. Whether it was essay writing (discuss the pro and cons of protecting the forest) or story writing (write about your holidays), it was expected that the pupils would write what was necessary. A lazy student trying to pad his word count or write in big letter with lots of margin meant either that he didn’t enough arguments/ not expanded his arguments enough, or that he didn’t understand how to tell a good story. Both meant a bad grade and red explanation from the teacher to do it better next time.
It sounds to me as if a teacher who downgrades a good essay just because it doesn’t fit the page count rule is not a good teacher. But I would also say that brevity in itself is not an ultimate goal. Brevity can mean your essay is too short, leaving out important things, or your story lacks atmosphere, depth, description etc. Rambling prose or meandering without making the point is just as bad as telegram style story-telling.
Writing a draft for the sake of writing a draft is dumb.Writing a draft to be a draft, not with the goal of trying to make it a finished paper every single time, is like aiming for mediocrity. You don’t have to try for mediocrity, it happens naturally if you don’t take the time to polish something you thought was already finished.
I had a teacher who gave bullshit assignments in my first year of college. She graded the process, not the result. You had to turn in your brainstorming sheet or whatever thought generating technique she was teaching that week, along with your outline, and two drafts (with “peer review” notes), along with the final paper. It was torture, and it did nothing to improve my writing. I understood that she was dealing with a lot of kids who had never had to do any real writing before. The problem is that she was so inflexible about the requirements. I had outgrown most of those things back in middle school. It didn’t take me long to decide to drop her class before it gave me an aneurism.
I’m a pretty good writer naturally, but I’ve benefitted hugely from being properly taught how to revise. Yeah, I don’t do a lot of formal drafts. Like WhyNot, I do massive revisions in-place. I also do recursive revisions. It’s “finished,” but I come back to it in a few hours or days and take another look. Some pieces I thought were great ended up needing an extensive axing. I’ve cut more than half the words from a piece because I didn’t realize that my first run through was unfocused crap. I think anyone benefits from this kind of revision. You don’t necessarily have to print out a draft and mark it up. You can revise on the screen. But you should always, always revise.
I still have people check what I write when I can. Someone else sees things differently than you do, and having that different perspective can really help you to find the weaknesses in both your writing and your argument. I don’t always take their advice, but I do find it beneficial to have someone take a look and tell me what they think. It helps if they are also decent writers or regular readers, but even an uninformed opinion can be valuable since you may find ideas that seem perfectly clear to you are muddled and lacking background information to someone else.
