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Timothy Grills

Dr. Ashby

ENG 405

12 December 2018

Best Practices for Writing: An Overview

A freshman students stays up all night to try to complete a paper that he has been

working on for days and days at a time. Only, most of his work has been done in his head and he

has little written down on the page. Under a fluorescent light, he pushes the ballpoint pen down

onto a small notebook and presses as hard as he can to write two or three words, take a break for

ten minutes, and start all over again. This was my ritual before each paper that I turned in during

my freshman year of college. The night before something was due, I often had nothing written

down. There was no plan and no work done to complete what I needed to complete. Instead,

there was stress: a lot of it. Stress became my best freshman friend, but I also knew that

procrastination was something that I needed to conquer over time. My own experience at the

Noel Studio at Eastern Kentucky University helps me to understand writing as a process, rather

than a product, and that my writing is better when I don’t wait to procrastinate.

Because I work at the Noel Studio, I have learned a lot about the writing process. Even

being at the studio for only a single semester thus far, I’ve made my writing process a crucial

aspect of my writing. Instead of staying up all night and doing papers the night before they are

due, I find myself starting much earlier and creating more drafts. Calling attention to writing

centers, Neal Lerner, author of “Writing Center Pedagogy” in A Guide to Composition

Pedagogies writes that “Given the wide variety of potential encounters in a writing center—

between disparate disciplines, native and non-native English speakers, undergraduates and
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graduate students, students and faculty—the writing center is a window into a variety of issues”

(305). Though I previously worked at a writing center before, it was the Noel Studio that cracked

open the hard shell that was my writing process. Suddenly, I was working with non-native

English speakers whose own difficulties with writing gave me perspective on mine, faculty

members who supported me in my writing endeavors, and peers who have helped and continue

to help me develop as a writing center consultant. As a writing center consultant, I also

emphasize writing as a process.

However, writing has only become a process to me recently. As mentioned before, when

I first started college, I did not know that writing was something that you should do over a long

period of time rather than in one sitting. Because I was homeschooled through my entire

childhood education, the notion of “product” informed my writing. Whenever I wrote, I always

wanted to have a finished product while never looking beyond what that really meant for me as a

writer. Instead of focusing on my own growth, writing was solely focused on what I was

creating. When I began to work at the Noel Studio, I became more introspective of my own self

and my writing. When Chris M. Anson, author of “Process Pedagogy and Its Legacy,” references

learning “by trial and error” when he mentions “What students did to get from essay prompt to

final text happened on [the students’] own time, usually without support,” he writes about

students like me (215-216). Even beginning with regular college freshman college classrooms, I

did not have much support in my own writing. Some of my professors would assign large

projects and then not offer any support to students even if they had classrooms of only fifteen

students at a time. While students should absolutely be focused on writing, the work that

pedagogues put into prewriting processes with their students can drastically change the outcome

of what pedagogues want and expect from students.

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Of course, emphasizing process means that pedagogues need to work harder for their

students. Because activities relating to the writing process focus on the learner rather than the

product that the learner might be creating, pedagogues must focus in on individual learners to see

what kinds of writing processes work for them. For example, a prewriting technique that works

for another student may not work for me. In prewriting, I enjoy freewriting. Erika Lindemann,

author of A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, notes that “freewriting … offers students a risk-free

way of getting words onto a page without having to worry about their correctness” (115). In the

classroom setting, my own experiences with freewriting have been positive. Though most of the

freewriting that I have done in the college classroom setting have involved some form of

feedback, there is no risk to a freewriting. For example, during my Shakespeare class at Eastern

Kentucky University, we did freewriting to learn about the sonnet that we were going to be

reciting for the classroom. When I received my grade back, my professor noted that it would be

wise to have a meeting with her to figure out, line by line, what my sonnet was all about without

chastising me for not having the information in the first place. I would also state that freewriting

has been the best practice for me at home, as well, because I can get as many words down as I

need to on paper without worrying about correctness as long as I start early enough.

Further, something else that I have found myself doing because I participate now in the

process of writing is trying to reflect on my past writings. When I write something, I will look it

over and think about the strengths and weaknesses of what I have written. Instead of trying to

look at my writing as something I can perfect, I try to look at my own writing process as

something that I can continually hone. Though I don’t think I will ever be a perfect writer, I can,

at least, recognize where my strengths and weaknesses lie.

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Reflection, then, is a metacognitive strategy that helps students learn from their

weakness. By being vulnerable with my own writing and thinking about where I struggle, I learn

from my past writings. Taggart, Hessler, and Schick, who wrote “What is Composition

Pedagogy?”, note Kolb’s “cycle of reflection” and how, without reflection, experience is useless

(7). If I, as a learner, do not find myself reflecting on what I have learned, it is impossible for me

to gauge whether or not I have learned anything at all. Writings that focus on reflection of myself

as a writer allow for me to think about my own writing processes and encourage me to think

critically about them. When I think critically about my own writing processes, they change—

such as in the instance that I recognized that my procrastination pattern injured my writing and

had to make a change to better myself.

Of course, my best practices shift depending on social, academic, and work needs. When

I post something on my social media accounts, for example, I may not work to try to make

corrections in the text. In fact, with social media, the ability to post something quick and loose is

valuable such as on Twitter where you can only post 280 characters. Further, my writing to my

family tends to be quite informal because I am not trying to impress them in particular with

anything that I write to them on a personal level. Sometimes, I might craft a piece of creative

writing for my family to keep; however, instances of professional writing in my personal life are

few and far between.

Contrarily, my work writing has been much more formal. As a consultant, I write to

students daily about scheduling and appointments. Because I use e-mail, I always try to stay brief

and precise to students in ENG 101 and 102R classrooms. Furthermore, I also know that, as a

student myself, checking your e-mail is a pain if the e-mail you are trying to avoid reading is

long. If I send an e-mail to fellow student, I try to send them as briefly, and as professionally, as
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possible. Something else that has really helped is remembering the names of those that I e-mail

at work and putting their name at the top of the e-mail to address my audience directly. I find that

the response of the person I am e-mailing is more personable since I’ve learned to address my

audience directly in the work place.

Over time, I have found myself gravitating more toward the art that is academic writing.

While I started off as a student that was not confident in his own ability to write and, thus, pulled

all-nighters to write in my own mediocrity, learning that writing is a process rather than as a

means to an end has been a blessing. Further, writing with an audience in mind, whether it be my

family, friends, or mentees has been crucial in understanding my own writing. In particular,

metacognitive reflection has been a much-needed tool in my pedagogical arsenal; without it, I

can’t say that I would have learned anything at all. Of course, through my experience at the Noel

Studio on campus, I consistently work confidently in my writing rather than trying to just get a

piece of writing done and move on. Like writing, my own understanding of writing has also

become a process that I engage with.

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Works Cited

Lerner, Neal. "Writing Center Pedagogy." A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, edited by Gary

Tate, Amy Rupiper Taggart, Kurt Schick, and H. Brooke Hessler, 2nd ed., Oxford

University Press, 2014, pp. 212-230.