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September 6, 2006

Learning how to write

An anecdote from one former student. I graduated with a physics major in 1998. At the time, I wrote horridly, if at all. I can't say I ever learned anything about writing from writing a lab report, or even my capstone project. Several years later I did very well on the MCAT writing sample. What happened? In the intervening years I had four profound influences.

In 2002, I was standing in a very long line at a half-price book sale at a Border's Books in San Diego. After 20 minutes, out of pure boredom, I lifted a slim silver volume off a nearby shelf, thinking, based on the title, that it might have something to do with how to dress. Over the next 45 minutes Strunk and White's Elements of Style changed my life.

From 1998 to 2005 I had three consecutive jobs that required immense amounts of edited writing. Once you have the rule book, that is, Strunk and White, then the humility of being edited, and then the humiliation of further editing on resubmission, is profound. In the Navy, the junior officers write virtually every official document (letters, briefs, memos, instructions, manuals, guides, plans, radio messages, etc), but only senior officers, usually those who have had command, are authorized to release anything for distribution. Thus any given junior officer writes their draft, hand walks it to their department head, who chops the draft, while the JO stands there, then the JO goes back and makes those exact pen-and-ink editorial changes, prints it out, takes that to the executive officer for chop, until, finally, the Captain decides it's good enough. Needless to say, this creates a desperate desire, for the sake of not only efficiency but promotability, to improve one's writing. I probably got even more of this experience than most as my particular trajectory included stints as a ship's legal officer, an executive assistant to a senior officer, and then a staff officer at the Naval Academy. However, these almost daily treks between staterooms afloat and offices ashore did not improve my writing—perhaps I'm incorrigable—until I got my first copy of Strunk & White.

Heeding the advice that only the very brightest are cut out for a career in physics, when I got back to shore in 2003 I started taking med school pre-requisites. I found the biology and chemistry professors were using some strange software called PowerPoint. Perhaps you've heard of it. These biologists can go for years without touching chalk! I had no idea how to learn from this sort of lecture. I had to go learn about learning. Turns out very few people write about learning from a student's perspective. So I did what I'd done in intelligence work: I read what the enemies wrote to each other. I read about teaching. Which led me to Edward Tufte's books. After reading the Visual Display of Quantitative Information for about the third time, I was really starting to think in terms of crafting arguments in paragraphs on pages, and considering paragraphs within the scheme of the entire document, in the context of pages and figures and titles and notes.

Eventually, you find questions Strunk and White left unanswered, and that's what motivated me to find the Chicago Manual of Style. I have grown quite a reference shelf of style manuals, dictionaries, and assorted reference works. In some cases I bought duplicates for home and office. A gem that physicists may appreciate is S Katzoff's internal NASA booklet Clarity in Technical Reporting.

Nevertheless, in my humble opinion, Strunk and White should surely be a required text for any technical writing course, or any course in technical writing. If I were to conduct a writing workshop for undergrads, a daydream I entertain regularly, I would walk to the front and set down on a desk at the front of the room something simple, something that could be seen from the back of the room. A stick. A stone. A brick. I would tell them to write, for the rest of the hour, about that thing. I would take up their work at the end of the period, and work furiously to edit all their work, in red ink, by the next class session. I would return their writing samples and then I would tell a lie. I would tell them their entire grade for the course, A or F, hinged on returning, at the third class period, with a copy of Strunk and White, no matter how worn, and on the publishability of their corrections. I would answer no questions. At the third class period, I would account for their copies of Strunk and White, take up their writing samples, and again, dismiss them. Again I would have to work furiously to edit their writing samples. On the fourth session, I would again return the writing samples. No doubt most would still bear red ink. All Fs.

After a pregnant pause, I would say "That sucks, eh? Can't tell you how many times I've had that experience on the job. Turns out, the world really does have high standards. Makes you want to write well and never write again, all the same time, yeah? No worries, just an exercise for you all." Then I'd pass out the real syllabus.

I suppose if it was a physics class I might bring a meter stick to that first class, drop the brick from, oh, 0.73 meters, and tell them they'd get an extra chance at rewriting if they could, on a separate sheet of paper, predict the brick's velocity when it hit the ground and if it had been dropped from the same height on Phobos.

Posted by Niels Olson at September 6, 2006 8:31 PM

Comments

Posted by: Maria at September 7, 2006 7:52 PM