Category: Editing

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Academic writing Editing Memoirs Paragraphs Writing style

Writing Without Fear: Finding Your Voice

  • Mark Twain pondering at his desk
    You don’t have to be a Mark Twain to allow your personal voice to come through as a writer.

At an art college where I used to teach, students were required to go on a field trip. As an incentive in my class, they had to write a 250-word report that would count for 5% of their final grade; I also guaranteed they would basically get an A on this assignment if they just finished it and handed it in. Interestingly, some of these reports were better written than their term papers. Freed from the necessity of conforming to their preconceived ideas of what an academic essay is supposed to be, they allowed their real abilities as writers to surface. More importantly, their personal voices came through.

Allowing what you write to reflect who you are and what you believe is a perennial balancing act for students and academics alike. But it is also an issue for people in a wide variety of situations—the businesswoman giving a keynote address at a dinner or writing copy for her company’s brochure; an aggrieved citizen writing a letter to their local district attorney; or an immigrant for whom English is a second language trying to write their resume.

Some editing services advertise they can transform a piece by an ESL author to make it read like it was written by a native speaker. To some extent, this is what we also do. But I don’t think it should be done at the expense of neutering who that person is. As a professor, one of the joys of working with international students was the added perspectives they brought to the classroom. And as a magazine editor, I likewise found the pluses of having contributors from around the world far outweighed the extra effort that may be involved in working with them.

Writing without fear can be especially hard for high school students writing their personal essays when applying to college. The hypercompetitive atmosphere surrounding the process can be very scary, which can lead applicants to be overly conservative. The resulting essay might seem to fulfill all the school’s requirements except one: the clear sense of who the applicant is. In other words, a lack of a personal voice, a quality admissions officers really do look for.

The one type of writing we have worked with that does not really suffer as much from artificial constraints is the personal memoir. These can be rather fun to work on. For instance, we once got a book written for family and friends (it was to be self-published). As such, the prose was casual and unforced, so we could concentrate on things like grammar and structure to allow it to breathe better. In this case, the author did not seem to understand how to break up their text into proper paragraphs (i.e., he made paragraphs that went on for pages, or run-on paragraphs). The results were very gratifying, and our job was made easier because the writer was speaking from his heart.

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Academic writing Editing Structure Writing

Writing is Thinking: There Are no Shortcuts, Including the 5-Paragraph Essay

Click on this image to go to Jonathan Lang’s excellent post on “Unlearning the Five Paragraph Essay.”

There are misconceptions out there about writing, and one of them is that writers have talent and the rest of us don’t. Schools try to “teach” writing and just leave most people with a distaste for trying to express themselves with the written word.

Many of us had our writing styles ruined by education. I’m one of them. After eight years of full-time grad school trying to turn out PhD-prose, I became a horrible writer. Constipated and verbose at the same time. It wasn’t until I discovered new ways of writing qualitative research that things started to get better. People who tried to help me, editors at journals, colleagues, were at a loss.

I had to struggle through it. Writing poetry actually helped. Reading the new ethnography helped. A mentor would have also helped. But I was too embarrassed to ask, or even think of asking, or pay for a coach. After all, I was supposed to know how to write.

If you’re having trouble, it’s probably at least partly the fault of mass education. In particular, the five-paragraph essay formula is devastating to good writing. And that’s what schools teach, because busy high school English teachers with 200 students a day don’t have time to mentor beginning writers.

I’m going to say that having ideas is the most important part of writing. Writing is a process of thinking them through to find meaning. I often say, “I don’t know what I think until I write.” You may want to start with an outline, which can help organize your thoughts, but be prepared to let the writing go where it wants to. You can fix it in the next draft.

I generally disregard the conventions of mapping out an entire article or essay beforehand, because the process of writing unearths ideas and connections I didn’t know were there, what we call, “writing straight ahead.” (An outline can come after, when I’m struggling to figure out what the hell I just wrote. As I said, there are no shortcuts.)

I urge the struggling writer, at any level, to find someone who has time and patience to point out where you are successfully communicating, and who is able to help you identify and bring your ideas into the sunlight of the printed page.

Yes, to some degree this is a plug for our services. But even if you don’t want to pay for our help, or you don’t think we are the right people for you, it’s worth finding an editor you can trust.

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Editing Paragraphs

Paragraphs

Frontispiece illustration from part 2 of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, by her sister May Alcott. (AC85.Aℓ194L.1869 pt.2aa, Houghton Library, Harvard University, via Wikimedia).

As editors, one of the most common issues we deal with is that of overly long paragraphs. While there are no hard and fast rules, when a paragraph goes on for one or more pages, it’s probably too long. The reader can sometimes get lost, even when the writing itself is otherwise thoughtful and to the point.

My Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a paragraph as “a subdivision of a written composition that consists of one or more sentences, deals with one point or gives the words of one speaker, and begins on a new usually indented line.”

The always useful Purdue OWL notes that, “To be as effective as possible, a paragraph should contain each of the following: Unity, Coherence, A Topic Sentence, and Adequate Development.” In other words, a paragraph is usually focused on one specific aspect of your article, term paper, thesis, dissertation or book. As an author, it’s important to always think of each paragraph as an organic part of whatever you’re writing. Unfortunately, when students are taught to write stand-alone paragraphs in school, they are taught formulas: Write a topic sentence, give three supporting sentences, and then a conclusion sentence. In reality, it is not necessary to come up with a conclusion for each paragraph in an essay or book chapter; just end the paragraph in a way that completes the thought.

While it is common to quantify the number of sentences a paragraph should have (for example five, as mentioned above), in practice, this is not a hard and fast rule. Paragraphs of one or two sentences, depending on circumstances, can be more than adequate, though your professor might think otherwise. One of the most common uses of short paragraphs comes when dealing with dialog.

Screenwriters and playwrights don’t think twice about writing dialog in a rather straightforward manner, without any modification other than setting the scene. In writing prose, whether fiction or nonfiction, some sort of commentary is usually added. This can be as simple as something like “he said” and “she replied.” To illustrate a more literary approach, here’s a random sample from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women:

“That is the prettiest wedding I’ve been to for an age, Ned, and I don’t see why, for there wasn’t a bit of style about it,” observed Mrs. Moffat to her husband, as they drove away.

“Laurie, my lad, if you ever want to indulge in this sort of thing, get one of those little girls to help you, and I shall be perfectly satisfied,” said Mr. Laurence, settling himself in his easy-chair to rest, after the excitement of the morning.

“I’ll do my best to gratify you, sir,” was Laurie’s unusually dutiful reply, as he carefully unpinned the posy Jo had put in his button-hole.

It’s not uncommon in modern fiction for writers to use even shorter paragraphs for dramatic or poetic effect, such as this excerpt from Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief:

Just as the Führer was about to reply, she woke up.

It was January 1939. She was nine years old, soon to be ten.

Her brother was dead.

In this instance, each paragraph, despite its brevity, represents a complete thought, which would not be the case if all three were merged into one.

There’s nothing wrong with writing paragraphs of different lengths, whether short or long. Just make sure and be careful to make sure they contribute something to the overall impact of what you’re writing. In any case, if you’ve created long paragraphs that seem to go on and on, look for places to break them up.