My oldest sent me this. My head just exploded. The first draft of my first 3000 word essay in uni was 8000 words long.
My history essays at uni were labours of love. I could never understand the concept of “pulling an all-nighter” the night before the essay was due. How was such a thing even possible? You had to do hours & hours of reading, note-taking, reflection…
And then write & write & write all that stuff that begged to be said, and then cull & cull & cull & then rewrite to knit the remaining pieces together fluently… And somehow end up with a piece that sent shivers down your spine & got you an HD.
Didn’t you? Or was that just me?
When teaching narrative writing to teens, I could only teach it in a formulaic way. I could only write formulaic model texts. They were quite good, with some character development, voice, interesting vocab etc, but the structure was formulaic.
I could never imagine myself as a writing a novel. Quirky short pieces maybe, but not a novel. And yet my oldest wrote their first novella as a teen.
I need to lie down. Oh, I am. It’s 5am and my cat adoption excitement has woken me. I’m discombobulated. Again.
@Susan60@actuallyautistic This one was really interesting. I remember in my school days, I struggled horribly with papers where I was forced to adhere to the "writing process" and be forced to show the teacher my work because I pretty much skipped doing any sort of outlining or note taking and went straight for the first draft writing the paper as I was still researching, and edited as I went along so it never really felt like I was writing multiple drafts of a paper. I just wrote the first draft as my final draft, often ended with a word count which was much higher than expected, and I usually wouldn't start working on the project until 2 or less days before it was due. And unless I was being graded on the writing process itself, my papers usually came back with As or Bs on them.
My uni essays were much better when I pared them back. Much more powerful, because the less relevant & redundant content had been edited out & the most pertinent stuff written concisely.
I learned to write more formulaic pre-planned stuff, but it was never as good, and still challenged me. ADHD didn’t help.
I literally can’t do it. I just don’t know how. I have to do the broader reading & note-taking to process that material before I can even start to think what to write & how to write it. On the one hand that process is what made it possible to write excellent essays & to perform well in exams, not that we had many history exams. But I couldn’t throw something together at the last minute if my life depended on it.
It’s not just about being nerds with high standards etc. it’s that we simply can’t do it any other way.
@Susan60@actuallyautistic I wasn't even close to being a star student but I knocked my arts degree over in 2.5 years and managed 1 high distinction, from memory
I probably would have done a lot better if I put more effort in, and spent less time at the bar lol, but it all worked out in the end
I was in my 30s, single parent & part time retail worker. Took 4.5 years for my arts degree, mostly HDs & Ds, but to have settled for a lower standard wasn’t possible. Assignments only came together in a presentable form at the very end. Pulling them together took hours, let alone all the rest of it.