Thoughts on Clarity

I’ve been talking a lot about clarity in my tutoring sessions lately. What makes this sentence unclear? What can you do to change it? What does it mean to be vague? I’m sure we have all encountered these questions at one point or another over the course of our writing lives. But when I really try to pinpoint the issues that surround an unclear sentence or passage I have to dig deeper than simply “it’s not clear.”

As American academic writers, we are used to the reader taking us by the hand and leading us to solutions. We want things to be easy to understand. We don’t want to look to the previous sentence or paragraph for help. We want coherence. The strategy I’ve been using so far with students is to cover their paper and ask them to explain a concept or passage in their own casual language, like they would a friend. What usually happens is these “casual” explanations are far more elegant than the jumbled words they have written in their word processor.

And I was here once too, not very long ago. A favorite professor of mine asked me to explain a difficult concept that I had garbled with academic jargon in an attempt to sound practiced and wise. I explained the concept, she smiled, and said, “why don’t you just write that?” She continued to encourage me to trust my own voice, to trust my ability to explain concepts verbally and to trust my own sense of clarity rather than what I thought was academically appropriate.

Now, I encourage my students to do the same in terms of their own intellectual trust. The truth is, our students are incredibly smart. They can do things that I can’t even dream of doing, they can write on subjects whose basic principles I struggle to grasp. They have a strong sense of their own intellect that, for whatever reason, gets buried in the pressures of writing that flawless academic paper, of making the grade that they believe they need. Just knowing that you, as a writer, have the capacity to generate clear and cohesive thoughts is a powerful weapon in combating all the doubts and academic fears that surround collegiate writing. I hope that my students are as encouraged as I was when I heard those words, “trust your voice. You know more than you think.”

DukeWrites Interviews Writing Tutor Shilyh Warren

Today we welcome Shilyh Warren to share her thoughts on tutoring and her other work at Duke’s Writing Studio.

How long have you worked as a writing tutor at Duke?
This is my 4th semester at the Writing Studio.

Describe your particular approach to tutoring.
I try to tailor my approach to individual writer’s needs, but there are some things I always try to keep in mind. Most importantly, I want writers to feel comfortable and safe during our session. This means I ask people how they feel about their writing, what else is going on in their academic lives, and what they need to feel more confident about their work. I also focus on trying to give writers tools that they can use after our session on future work, such as reverse outlining (my personal favorite) and revising for clarity and concision (my personal challenge). The truth is that writing is hard work, and it opens you to critique and engagement from a variety of sources. It takes guts to write, and it takes courage to share your writing with a stranger. So, my goal is be a compassionate and competent interlocutor for every writer.

What do you think are the most useful resources at the Writing Studio?
The people! We have a stellar group of people working at the Writing Studio. My colleagues are intelligent and dedicated scholars, who take their work seriously. I’m always impressed by sessions that I have the opportunity to observe or overhear. There are days in the Writing Studio where you can almost hear sparks flying between tutors and writers.

Tell me about your work on the Writing Studio’s newsletter.
The newsletter gives me the chance to write in a free and less formulaic way. Since I’m a young scholar, who is still trying to navigate the treacherous waters of academic publishing, I appreciate the chance to write short, pithy articles about a range of writing topics. I also love working on publishing software, where images and funky text bring the words to life. Each month the newsletter brings together diverse voices and features work that we do in the Writing Studio beyond our daily tutoring, such as events and contests. Check out our latest issues and tell me what you think!

Where can readers find the newsletter online?
Current and past issues of the newsletter can be found on the Writing Studio’s website.

What do you do when you’re not tutoring?
Juggle! Well, not really, but it certainly feels that way. I teach classes in film studies at NCSU, and you might also find me in Duke classrooms, where I TA and teach. Hopefully, you might also see me working on my own writing, since I’m busy these days applying for academic jobs and polishing scholarly articles on feminist film studies. I’m also the proud mother of two young boys, so I frequent Durham’s fantastic playgrounds, nature trails, and ice cream shops.

Handout Highlight: Closing Paragraphs

Oftentimes during tutoring sessions, writers express their troubles with conclusions, or closing paragraphs. Some writers have a difficult time articulating the significance of their paper’s topic. Others get confused because they think the closing is pointless because it merely restates the paper’s opening. This latter thought, especially, can hold writers back from ending their papers effectively. If you have ever struggled with writing closing paragraphs, or aren’t even sure of their purpose, have no fear! The Writing Studio has a Conclusions handout that discusses the purpose of conclusions, and how to write them.

Personalizing your Personal Statement

Today was my last day as a tutor at the Writing Studio, and as I sign out and lock up, it occurs to me that my time as a tutor has been bookended by appointments dealing with application essays. I’m a writer, so of course the delicious symmetry appeals to me, and I like the idea that as I say goodbye to the Writing Studio to continue my studies in the English graduate school here at Duke, I have hopefully helped (a little, a tiny bit, I hope) at least two people with pursuing their career goals.

When people come in with personal statements and application essays I always end up shaking the same sentences into life, ditching the same cliches, telling the writer to stop entering “flexibility” or “creative problem-solving” into the thesaurus and stop to think why, I mean really why, they want to do this thing they want to do. The people behind the desks, mired in a swamp of 500 word personal statements, know there is a demanding work ethic that you are eager to become immersed in. They know your longstanding admiration and commitment to their firm. I’d bet they can probably guess that you enjoy the collaborative atmosphere of a top-tier firm.  They know, hopefully, that you are interested. What they don’t know, necessarily, is if you are interesting.

Of course, you have a lot to cram in those 500 words. I’m certainly not suggesting that you refuse to talk about oceanography to the Marine Biology Department at Harvard and instead talk about your love of the films of Wes Anderson.  But I think that what is most often left out of the personal statement is the honest personal statement, a sentence or so about what makes you you. You are not only the things you have done. You are not only the list of words that you can get by typing “hard-working” “enthusiastic” and “creative” into an online thesaurus. When I applied to my MA program in English Literature at Oxford, I said yes I have a BA. Yes, I am interested in American Literature, more specifically contemporary science fiction and it’s impact on national identity. I said that Oxford was perfect for me because of this professor, and that specialist library collection, and that reputation. I was class president! But I also lapsed for a minute, and told them that Oxford had been part of my imagination since I was a child, the dust in the books and the snow on the benches and the curve of the Radcliffe Camera library. The cobblestones where you break an ankle if you aren’t paying attention, and the sidewalks where you will get mowed down by an irate cyclist if you don’t keep an ear out. Oxford is not a safe place to walk around with earphones in. I put down getting accepted (miraculous!) to the personal statement.

So, I guess I believe that injecting (a little) honesty, a little personal statement into the personal statement, is a vital trick that will make one application stand out from another.  The people who come into the Writing Studio to talk about their applications are so busy keeping their word count down to 500 (important), listing all their achievements since fifth grade (important-ish) and asserting their deep love for the firm/college of their choice (important ish ish), that they forget to include a line in there that helps out that poor exhausted man drowning behind his desk in the applications swamp. Throw him a little light relief! After all, no one wants to be the apple-head bowler-hat man, do they?

Better Late Than Never? Confessions of a Procrastinator

I’ve been thinking a lot about procrastination lately. In my most magnificent procrastination efforts I would rather clean my bathroom than start a writing project or edit my writing. Sometime procrastination comes in the form of productivity in some way, shape or form, and other times it is merely wasted time. I don’t think I have ever not been a procrastinator, but I have always seemed to turn in good work. Even though I know the flaws and faults in this habit of putting off work, I still manage to vocally discourage it in my students’ work. I ask for drafts and revisions, trying to manage the time they spend both the writing and the procrastination process. If only I could have spent the past several years putting into practice what I now preach!

The best weapon that I have ever been given against procrastination is this: “just start writing.” We find so many excuses not to write – it’s too late; it’s too early; I need to do more research; I’m waiting until I feel confident; my computer crashed; and the list goes on. Now that I know these vices and don’t really believe in these excuses anymore, I still put off writing, but am better able just to start rather than making up reasons for not starting.

If you are having trouble starting a project, I would suggest the following: Go to a quiet, comfortable place. It might be a desk, or a coffee shop table, or even a campus bench. Close your web browser. Take some deep breaths and focus on your thoughts. Then write, and don’t let yourself stop writing for a good length of time. It could be 10 minutes, or it could be an hour. Don’t worry about being perfect because you won’t be. But what you will have at the end of those minutes will be content and, more importantly, inspiration!

Treat your next writing project like a trip to the gym. Spend 5 minutes making excuses and putting it off, then get going. You will find that these exercises, like consistent trips to the gym, help flex your writing muscles and better equip you to stave off procrastination for subsequent projects. In the writing life, “exercising” in this way proves to be enormously helpful. Try it. Take that terse, semi-annoying little word of advice: “start.”

The Writing Studio and Scientific Writing

You may be wondering who exactly the Duke Writing Studio is meant to serve: undergrads? grad students? native speakers? ESL students? folks in the humanities? in the sciences? lions? tigers? bears (oh my!)?

The answer is: (almost) all of the above. While we don’t see too many lions, tigers, or bears (alas), we see everyone from first- and even pre-first-year undergraduates to advanced graduate students, from English, to Biology, to Engineering majors.

Recently, we here at the Studio have been discussing our relationship to the disciplines, particularly to those that aren’t as heavily represented by the students we tutor. The central question in this discussion sounds something like this: What can the tutors in the Writing Studio, the majority of whom are trained in the humanities, offer to students in the scientific disciplines? In other words, what can science students expect from their time spent in the Writing Studio?

These aren’t questions we’ve answered in any final sense, but we are continually restating and rethinking our commitment to an interdisciplinary, if not university-wide, vision. One thing that we keep returning to, no matter what “population” or “demographic” we discuss, is the importance of teaching, or better, guiding each writer we see toward prose (or poetry) that is both clear and concise. While most of us might not be able to discuss recent developments in neuroscience (although we’d love to ask you about it!) as experts or even apprentices in the field, we can converse with you about what works in your writing and what might require a little fine tuning, about how your sentences, paragraphs, and arguments are structured.

More than this, however, we can point you toward a number of resources, developed by and for scientific writers, that might begin to answer your discipline-specific questions.

As a way of whetting your appetite, here are a couple of the recent handouts on science writing, both of which can be found on the Writing Studio website’s main page:

http://cgi.duke.edu/web/sciwriting/index.php
http://cgi.duke.edu/web/sciwriting/resources/201108_DukeScientificWritingWorkshop.pdf

These resources are only a beginning, as the Writing Studio further expands its reach into the sciences. We are learning as you learn, and in this process of interdisciplinary collaboration, we hope to help you become better writers and to make the Writing Studio a more effective resource for everyone. So scientists (and everybody else), make an appointment and come see us sometime soon!

Strategies for Getting Started on a Writing Project

Do you struggle with starting a writing project?  Sometimes getting started is the hardest part.  Whether you’re writing in response to a prompt, or writing creatively, it can be difficult to begin.  Thankfully, there are also many strategies to help writers cope with this part of the writing process.  From talking aloud about your ideas, to freewriting, to mapping, to outlining, there are many ways to get started.  If you can relate to this dilemma, you can find solace in some of the Writing Studio’s resources we have about prewriting.   The Writing Studio website  also has other handouts that can help you target why you might be struggling with getting started on a project.  And if procrastination  is something you struggle with, the Writing Studio also has a handout to help with that problem!  Good luck!

2011 Halloween Haiku Contest

Happy Halloween! The Writing Studio has selected its winners for the annual Halloween Haiku Contest.  The winners this year are:

Sugar rush crime scene.

Plunder sweets from door to door,

Catch me if you can.

–Ashley Qian (first place)

Who am I this year?

Wizened crone or crusty pirate?

Mask on or Mask off?

–Nan Mullenneaux (honorable mention)

Winners from previous years:

Vampire’s mouth waters

Bobbing for blood red apples.

Vegetarian.

—Pallavi Kannan (2008 winner)

Gaping Wounds in flesh

Innards torn out and eaten–

Alas, poor pumpkins!

–Annie Rachapudi (2009 winner)

Interested in writing your own haiku?  Here’s a website that guides you through the process: http://www.creative-writing-now.com/how-to-write-a-haiku.html

In Defense of the Word “Impact”

I’m ashamed to admit that I defended a word on Facebook recently.  Yes, a word.  And not a grand word, or even a horribly controversial word (at least not to the general public), but a word nonetheless.  What’s the word that got me going?  Impact.  Yes, a word that people often associate with meteors and teeth.

Meteor image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net, contributor manostphoto, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1816

I’ve now encountered a total of two academics who dislike the word impact, who think it is “harsh” and even “ugly.”  Who thought a word can be ugly?  Not me until my recent online encounter.  I’ll provide an abridged transcript for your entertainment.  My friend’s original post was actually about a different, yet equally nerdy, topic—the misuse of semi-colons.  Amidst the discussions of inept semi-colon usage, my conversation emerged.

A: doesn’t trust a document in which an author misuses a semi-colon.

…

B: I try to stop reading if a writer uses “impact” (or even worse, “impactful”) because they’re too lazy to figure out if they mean effect or affect. (One FB “like.”)

A: I can never remember if it’s affect or effect (mental block) but I promise I’m not that lazy!

B: And I often can’t remember what nonplussed means!

Me: I’d like to speak up in defense of impact. I think it can be a great word choice. And I know the difference between e/a

B: I think that impact has two proper uses: describing what hammers do, and describing what happens to teeth.

Me: As valid as your uses of it are, the Oxford English Dictionary supports a wider use of the term. The second definition listed is: Now commonly the effective action of one thing or person upon another; the effect of such action; influence; impression. Esp. in phr. to make an impact (on).

Me: And I’ll add that the verb definitions of impact have a range of meanings, too Now, I will sit here depressed knowing that I’ve actually defended a word on FB. (sigh)

A: I love this entire thread. It elevates geekdom to a whole new level. I think we’re making it a sport. (One FB “like”)

B: I don’t think using impact in a non-literal way is ungrammatical. I just think it’s ugly and unnecessary. Am pleased to have goaded you into defending a word on facebook.

B: Oddly, I have very strong feelings about impact, but split infinitives don’t bother me at all.

Me: Ugly, really??? But you are ok with split infinitives? I find it amusing that you have such strong feelings about the “ugliness” of a word. And again, I’m questioning why I’m discussing word choice on FB. Perhaps my cheese has slipped of my cracker….

C: I’m enjoying this thread so much! (Two FB “likes”)

B: (To Me) touché.

By all accounts, that threat was ridiculous.  Afterall, the discussion didn’t take place at a writer’s conference, or even in the confines of a university writing center.  It took place on Facebook—a social media and networking site.  And one of my friends admits to not reading writing that uses a word s/he considers ugly.  Ahh, what judgmental readers we can be.

But regardless of the thread’s absurdity, it points to something that which all writers should be aware: the importance of proper word choice and correct grammar.  I’m amazed at the outpouring of pet peeves that come to the surface on Facebook when someone brings up grammar.  I recently learned about the common misuse of “hopeful” and “hopefully.”  If I were on trial, I’d have to place myself at the mercy of the court.

Writers will never please all their readers, and perhaps they shouldn’t even try.  Where’s the fun in that?  At  the end of the day, and end of the Facebook thread, I walked away knowing that I will continue to use a word some people hate.  And I’m okay with that.  I’m also okay with keeping this post anonymous!

DukeWrites Interviews Writing Tutor Heidi Giusto

How long have you worked as a writing tutor at Duke?

I started working here in January 2009, although I have not worked every semester.  All total, I have conducted over 500 appointments, so I consider myself a veteran tutor.

Describe your particular approach to tutoring.

I love treating each appointment and each student uniquely.  Generally, I tend to ask a lot of questions, and I do my best to make sure that each session addresses the student’s concerns.  I don’t have a “standard” tutoring tactic other than asking questions and encouraging writers to read their work aloud because I believe that most writers (including myself) find the exercise useful.

What do you think are the most useful resources at the Writing Studio?

I agree with Beth Long’s statement (http://dukewrites.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/dukewrites-interviews-writing-tutor-beth-long/) that the tutors are the most useful resources!  The Writing Studio prepares its tutors to work with all different students, from first-year students to international graduate students, and has equipped us with countless resources through the Writing Studio website (http://twp.duke.edu/writing-studio).  When I first started at the Writing Studio, I was a little overwhelmed with all the resources on the website, but now I feel like I know the website and our resources well.  I believe that my experience has enabled me to steer students in the right direction with the aid of our online resources.

Tell me about your work as co-editor of Deliberations: A Journal of First-Year Writing at Duke University.

Deliberations publishes some of the best writing of first-year students.  As co-editor, I have enjoyed working with students in the capacity of editor, and learning about the publication process.  I particularly enjoy getting to work with students throughout the revision process.  In contrast to most tutoring sessions in which I don’t get to read a writer’s final product, my work with Deliberations allows me to see a student’s project through to its completion.

What do you do when you’re not tutoring?

I have too many hobbies!  I enjoy gardening, cooking, baking, doing home canning, reading, hiking, boating, traveling, and spending time with my family.  I am also a Ph.D. Candidate in the Duke History department, and am in the final stages of writing my dissertation.

Where and when can writers find you this semester?

I work in Lilly library on Monday and Thursday evenings (7pm-10pm), and in Art building on Wednesdays (10am-4pm).