CRITERION 12: PROCESS (typical feedback: hasty, rushed, misunderstood prompt/assignment, did not follow comments, anything that seems to have frustrated the prof)
To download my handout on Process in pdf, click here.

(NOTE: The lecture video embedded above is much longer than the rest — it’s a bit of a rant, or a sermon. A second, additional video is embedded below.)

When English professors have the rare opportunity to provide critical writing feedback directly to a student, the student’s response tends most often to be something like “Well, that’s what I meant to do, but I ran out of time.”  For a literature student to develop an effective writing process—notice that process is not product, and that I am not concerned here with getting you a good grade as much as improving your craft and ability—that student must think critically about, and resist university culture’s dominant understandings of, TIME and FEEDBACK.  

ON FEEDBACK:  

If you don’t generally read your instructor’s feedback very closely, you probably think it’s because you don’t have time.  It’s more likely a matter of ego or insecurity.  But the mature ability to receive and apply critical feedback on your work, without taking the criticism personally, is one of the most valuable lessons (and marketable skills!) that a university humanities education can give.  Don’t squander it—figure out what’s really bugging you about critical feedback, articulate it in writing to yourself, and think through ways to grow past it.  Seek out criticism eagerly.  If your instructor isn’t criticizing your work, ask for more criticism. 

If you have the chance to write again for the same instructor (and especially if the instructor gives you the opportunity for a rewrite of the same paper), go through every comment on the prior paper, one by one, as you work on your next paper.  Make sure you have responded to and applied each correction; if you have been unable to apply any correction, explain why—in the email to which the assignment is attached, or on a cover page.     

Even if you will never write for the same instructor again, you should still go through every comment!  Always read the comments your instructor has left on your essay.  Read them twice. English professors’ approaches to writing vary widely.  The best possible education you can get as a writer MUST come from writing for each of us in turn, and honing your work through critical feedback from such diverse, but eminently authoritative, sources.  Think of your essays from class to class as the building and shaping of an ongoing portfolio.  Keep those comments in a file you can return to later; each time you put a new set of comments in the file, compare them to the comments you have received before.  

If you do not understand any of the comments, follow up in Office Hours, even after the term has ended.

ON TIME: 

Students who say “well, yeah, if I had the time, I could write something worthwhile,” overestimate the amount of time professional scholars usually have to generate our work.   THERE IS NEVER ENOUGH TIME!  So the humanities scholar’s work, at every level, is to figure out how to make a sincere and real contribution to human discourse… in a limited span of time, even immediately, and sometimes under great pressure.  Incidentally, that’s also the work of a responsible, ethical member of twenty-first-century society.

READ PROMPTS AND SYLLABI WITH THOROUGH CARE.  

And return to them again and again during your thinking and writing.  Take care, even when rushing, to understand the conceptual frame of what you’re doing; then read assignments with engagement (see the Stakes page)!

HOW TO NOT RUSH.  

Do freewrite exercises.  They are easy, fun, and painless; do a freewrite once as soon as you get the assignment, then again as soon as you have chosen your subject, to at least get some ideas percolating early.  Set a fake deadline for yourself.  If your tendency is to procrastinate, own that—and compress your work toward a deadline at least three days from when it is actually due.  Then, when the real deadline comes, give the paper at least one last look; more importantly, have someone else read through it before you submit it. (See also Suzanne Akbari’s excellent piece on procrastination and her own writing process.)  Read assignments, from the start, with engagement (see the Stakes page).  Before any writing prompt is given, read deeply enough into assigned texts that you can already articulate complex ideas about them.  

HOW NOT TO RUSH.  

Don’t get judgey.  If you’re up against a deadline, welcome to the club; don’t let your haste trigger an inferiority complex, or you’ll be much less able to use the time you do have.  If you’re eligible for or deserving of accommodations, ask for them.  Don’t play it safe.  For work done in haste, a risky but messy paper will likely do better (and will teach you more) than a tepid, obvious paper.  Don’t write when you’re compromised.  A late paper often does better than an exhausted one.  Don’t sacrifice your health, because the costs to your craft will outweigh the benefits.   Don’t be shady.  Unethical choices in essay-writing often come at the last minute: many explode; all do serious, permanent damage to your craft. (See Ed Dante’s “The Shadow Scholar” to better understand some of the shadiest choices essay writers make—and to think about how university culture pushes them there.)

HOW TO RUSH.  

Evaluate late penalties strategically.  Often, taking a light lateness penalty will yield a net benefit to your grade.  Find your stakes before starting (again, see the Stakes page), even when you’re running late, because a paper you care about will always flow more readily.  Enlist help.  Keep friends and family nearby for last-minute proofreading and feedback.  Crave criticism; relish in mistakes.  When you’re pressed for time, your bad writing habits and misunderstandings come out more clearly.  If you see rushing as an opportunity to learn about yourself as a writer, you’ll be less likely to freeze up and more likely to succeed anyway. 

ESSAY-WRITING SPEEDRUN: AN EXPERIMENT IN HOW TO RUSH BETTER.

After asking my students to generate their own prompt, I asked my students to generate an essay prompt on any subject they wished, for a 1500-word paper, and post the prompt by noon the next day.  My hope was to get it done that day, but childcare duties stepped in at hour 7.  Still, I was able to produce a roughly 1500-word essay in ten hours, from scratch on a subject I knew nothing about previously, which I think would score a solid A in an undergrad class, I think (I welcome your criticism!). My hope is that the demonstration will provide an example, offered in good faith, of how you might rush—rush, but not hack—while still staying sincere and still getting something substantial out of the process. 

Here is what my rushed essay looked like seven hours into the drafting process.

Here is my final, submission-ready, rushed essay, produced in ten hours.

Here is a narrated video of my full ten-hour process (at 20x speed compression):