Monday, January 11, 2016

Well-Written but Under-Analyzed

As the title of the post suggests, Jonah Byers' strengths and weaknesses in academic writing are quite oxymoronic in their nature. You see, much of the critiques he received in the rough draft of his senior year literary criticism paper on Hamlet was that his analyzation was well-written, but the analyzation itself was lacking in depth and perhaps he should go back and read the text some more in the mindset of his topic.
As you could imagine, it was a bit crushing to Byers to hear his work so criticized. The compliments on his writing were encouraging, but he had felt that there was nothing more he could analyze from Hamlet that would add to his paper. Still, he knew that to make his final draft worthy of an A+, he should probably do what the teacher said and go back through the play again. As he did, he discovered the following:

  • His teacher had been correct (of course)
  • His analyzation had been severely lacking
  • There was so much more to be criticized and analyzed in terms of his topic
As you can imagine, that came as quite a shock to Byers. He had always hated the ideas of writing a rough draft, fully believing that one could do well enough on the first to never merit revising said draft again. How stupid he had been. What he came to decide about his own academic writing was thus:

  1. Never assume you've analyzed everything
  2. Always revise drafts with the new information you've found
  3. Revise the writing itself as well. Never assume your language is as perfect as it could be.
With these realizations, Byers came to more fully understand what he excelled at and what could be worked on some more. Far more qualities fell into the latter category than the former.

3 comments:

  1. Revision has been one of my pitfalls too. For a long time, I would "revise as I went" and call that good. I've since learned anyone can be an excellent writer with enough revision. Still, though for me, the better a draft starts out, (because of time) the better it ends up.

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  2. This is an excellent point and a good reminder. It is easy to believe that one draft is enough, but this really is a dangerous lie. It's important to review all your work and improve as you go.

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  3. Yeah, I went for a long time without ever writing second drafts. Through high school my writing (compared to the other students) was good enough to not need it. I have since learned better. I like that you took that experience and learned from it!

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