Advice – Reader and Text

December 1, 2018December 1, 2018 by Brian Vargas - No Comments

Preparation For Success

Once you allow yourself to try and find yourself in a position of preparation, you must consider how to appropriately arm yourself with the tools to succeed—this includes the use of any previous experience and an interpretation of the position or opportunity you are about to approach. This preparation might range from general practice to insightful thinking about the reason you are pursuing this position and how it will help you grow; it would prove beneficial to think reflectively upon your goal.

For example, you might be applying to schools thinking about how to best prepare yourself for the environment you are about to enter. This might mean mental preparation for a new social environment or preparation for a less dictated environment—this means that you control your schedule and how you execute self-determined deadlines—much like the transition into college, which has more options than high school. Preparing yourself for a situation where you will have more liberty, will allow you to avoid large amounts of unreasonable procrastination and bad work habit, which might cause stress and stunt personal growth.

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November 19, 2016 by Cody Austin - No Comments

The Real-Life Application of “Reapers”

Admittedly, I have trouble going back and revising my writing. Growing up, I always kind of had a chip on my shoulder when it came to this. I was always allowed to submit essays without any real necessary needs for extensive revisions. Even recently, I submitted an essay early in my History of Theatre class, and managed an A the first time around, meaning I saved myself a lot of trouble in the upcoming weeks. However, when it came to my “Essay 1” submission for intertextuality, I cringed as I found myself deleting all but 400 words of my formerly 1600-word essay for revisions.

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August 29, 2016August 29, 2016 by Beth McCoy - No Comments

Jumping up and down about dissection

Yep, I literally jumped up and down in the classroom when the word dissect appeared in the class discussion about what, according to your experiences, students are often trained to do with literature (in this case, Jean Toomer’s poem, “Reapers”).

As you noted in class, dissection is often associated with the sciences, biology in particular.

So here are some questions that you could turn into a blog post if you so desire: Does the introduction * to Moran’s Interdisciplinarity help you understand talk about how dissection has ended up appearing so frequently in conversations about English classes? If so, how? If not, how not?

* There’s an embedded link to Milne’s e-book of Interdisciplinarity. To get to it, you’ll have to be logged in with a Geneseo username and password.

September 30, 2013September 30, 2013 by Paul Schacht - 1 Comment

Miscellaneous advice on writing

With papers coming due in my section of ENGL 170 between October 3 and October 10, this is a good time for some advice on writing. Here are a couple of suggestions from the experts and a link to one frequently updated source of interesting perspectives on the writing process.

First, if you find writing hard, you’re not the problem. Writing is hard. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who blogs at The Atlantic, speaks eloquently to some of the difficulties in the video below.

One of the writer’s hardest jobs is to make reading easy. It’s also one of the most important jobs, though some writers seem to forget this. Student writers, especially, fall prone to the fallacy that longer words and more complicated sentences will make them appear more intelligent. Not so, as this aptly titled article from the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology demonstrates with research (h/t @cjprender on Twitter). In fact, readers are most likely to impute intelligence to writing that exhibits lucidity, simplicity, and directness, as recommended in the SUNY Geneseo Writing Guide.

Self-consciousness about writing can make the process harder than it has to be. Rather than censoring yourself every few words, try letting yourself write out at least one draft without stopping to revise anything. Then put that draft aside for a bit — at least an hour, preferably a day or so. When you come back to it, you’ll find it’s not nearly as bad as you thought it was.

But it will still need revision. All writing does. And when you’re done, take some time to reflect on what it felt like to do this particular bit of writing. There’s a time and place for everything, including self-consciousness. You’ll write better if you have a good sense of what writing involves and strive to keep the whole process, with all its difficulties, in view.

One model of this good kind of self-consciousness is the Drafts blog at the New York Times website. The blog features writers writing about writing. Reading these writers’ self-reflections on their writing might give you some new things to think about in your own.