Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Getting High on EWW

Getting High on EWW

Last night I had bad dreams. I dreamed I was in flight school and flunked out. When I went to technical school I found I was a slow learner of things mechanical and what was natural to many of the student’s I struggled with. One of the practical weekly exercises was a series of stations and at one station the requirement was to identify the missing wrench. Wrenches usually come in sets of six to eight and for some reason l just couldn’t seem to come up with the answer in the time frames required.

Since I know this is an inherent weakness, I accept my slow learning disability and amble along doing my best. Eventually I wake up one morning and can do it. Like learning a foreign language, I memorize the vocabulary and syntax and one morning discover I can speak it.

I suspect that for many this is part of the struggle of developing into a good writer. You simply have to stay with it and accept slow but consistent progress.

Two of my students are repeaters. They took one of my courses and liked the process and came back for more. I remember reading some of their earlier works and after the passage of a year, get to see how they are doing now. There are some pretty striking improvements.

To sum it up the flow of their writing just seems more professional. Then of course I can see where they have begun applying the components of good writing to the lessons. Not just the lesson of the week but earlier lessons that focused on this or that tool that I now see being routinely taken from their tool box.

There are short work writers I read here at WDC who blow my socks off. They should be definitely published and while I haven’t read any of their longer works suspect the problem might be in doing the prep work. If they could only take a comprehensive outline, such as we wind up with in the Exploratory Writing Workshop and for each segment write in their compelling and lucid style, they would be assured of writing a publication quality work.