By Daniel Zarakov
What does it mean to be a “good” writer? Does it mean you can pull off a twenty-five-page research paper in one evening and still pass with flying colors? Maybe there’s some “good writer” gene – some people are born with it, and others are not so lucky. Maybe it just means you’re really good at padding papers. Or maybe there’s no such thing.
I don’t believe “good” writers exist. But I also don’t think “bad” ones exist either. I believe that what makes a paper good or bad is the author’s attitude towards what he or she has written. Naturally, when the author is proud of what has been written, the paper comes across stronger. Likewise, when the author believes the paper is bad, it comes across weaker. I also feel, based on the conversations I have had with my students, that because they did not pass the Subject A exam they are, in fact, bad writers; therefore, they lose the confidence needed to have pride in what they write. I became a writing assistant to try to help those dubbed bad writers break free of this mentality.
I connect with those struggling because for years I lived with the mindset that I was a bad writer. I didn’t do too well on High School essays, nor did I feel like what I was writing was even half way decent. Even essays I did do somewhat well on never made me feel particularly proud because there was always someone who did much better than I had done. And it was not because I wasn’t trying. I spent days working on my essays, putting my all into each sentence. But each time my papers came back, I found the same comment sprawled in the margins: “Nice start, but you need to go farther.” What does that mean? I analyzed the topics as best as I could. I included quotations from the text to support my opinion. What more did they want from me? How could I go farther when I’d gone as deep as I could? Because of this trend, I lost all hope that my writing would ever improve.
Another blow to my writing self-esteem came my junior year in High School. I joined the school newspaper, and I was really excited! I felt that perhaps journalism was the kind of writing that suited me. Despite my lack of self-esteem, I still loved writing. I received my first assignment, and I made it as fantastic as I could. I spent weeks interviewing people, working on organization, making sure it wasn’t too long. After weeks of work on the piece, I turned it into my editor, expecting a movie moment – emotional music playing, balloons cascading from the ceiling, and my editor proclaiming to the world, “This is the best article I’ve ever read!” (all in slow motion, of course). It didn’t happen. Rather, my article was returned to me with “This is really boring” scribbled all over it in red ink. I was crushed. If there was ever any hope in my mind that I was not a bad writer, it vanished.
But that one experience also changed my outlook on writing. It hit me – she didn’t like it, but that didn’t make my hard work worthless. She found it boring, but would everyone feel the same? Why was I listening to her anyway? She had had one more year of experience than I had, but did that make her superior? No. I was proud of that article. I worked hard to make it good. Although her comments hurt, I realized that they weren’t necessarily the only response my article would generate.
I began to use this new mentality while writing essays for my classes, and found that my writing felt better to me. It seemed that my style emerged. I was no longer afraid of grades, or comments. I wrote what I believed, not what I hoped the teacher believed. I felt consistently proud of my work, and found that that improved my writing. I thought, “If I don’t think this is worth reading, why should anyone else? More importantly, why should the person grading it?”
This concept saved me. I no longer thought of myself as a bad writer. Rather, I thought of myself as a writer who always made a strong effort. If it wasn’t good enough, that was ok, because I gave it as much as I could. And most importantly, I was consistently proud of the work I turned in. I noticed my pride coming through in my essays. My writing became stronger because I felt so passionately about what I had to say. I carried this newfound idea with me to college.
I remember Core. Not my favorite class, but not the worst either. I also remember being nervous. Supposedly, college writing was incredibly different and much more difficult than what I’d been doing in High School. I recall my first essay. I wrote it as I would any other paper. I found a topic that interested me, took a stand, argued it, and gave it my best. I was amazed when I got my paper back, and the teacher had written very positive comments in response. I did well! And I continued to do well. I realized that I’d tapped into what it took for me to write strongly. This is what I tried to pass on to my students as a writing assistant.
The first question I asked each of my students at our first session was, “How do you feel about your writing?” I got primarily sketchy responses along the lines of, “Well, you know, I’m not that good.” Sometimes I just got a silent headshake, accompanied by a glare that screamed, “Don’t go there.” When I asked them why they felt so adamantly towards their writing, they couldn’t really answer. They simply said, “I’m just not good at it.” Some of them even said something along the lines of, “I couldn’t pass Subject A, so I must not be very good.”
However, as I read through the first few of their papers, I noticed something. The one thing missing was their voice – their opinion. I decided to focus on this while working with them. I gave my standard “you should always be proud of what you turn in” speech, but I felt like I needed more. It wasn’t that easy. I certainly couldn’t force my students to be happy with their writing. So I took a different approach. I looked at their prompt options. I knew that they always had the option of creating their own prompt, and I thought this might be a good way to get them into their papers.
With each new paper, I encouraged my students to create their own topics. Some students were less enthusiastic than others, but I still pushed them. To aid in the process, I would begin these brainstorming sessions asking what they enjoyed about the book they had read. I tried to figure out if anything had really struck them as interesting, and if that would be something they would want to write about.
Some students were more into this than others. I had some that always wanted to make their own topic, and others that just wanted to go with one the teacher had proposed to them. Yet I noticed a trend. Those students that stuck with the given prompts progressed much slower than those that wrote about their own ideas. I observed that students who went with what they wanted to write about as opposed to an assigned prompt brought their voices into their papers so much more. Their papers seemed stronger, more solid. They obviously cared about their chosen topic because they had created it. They really got into it, and it showed.
These students have continued to progress rapidly, and their overall confidence in their work is amazing. Granted, I’ve seen improvement in all my students, but the most has come from those who individualized their work. It’s fantastic to see, and I encourage everyone to use this method to get their students more involved in their papers.
As I said, I spent years thinking my writing was terrible. But by breaking out of that destructive mentality, I now feel that bad writers really don’t exist. A paper’s strength comes through the author’s ability to make it his or her own. People can struggle with structure, flow, grammar, but that doesn’t make them bad writers. As long as they have a voice and make it heard, they are beyond successful.
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