Self-regulation (Part 1)

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Writing requires many different kinds of self-regulation. The problem is, this term hides shocking complexity. But let’s try to get a handle on a specific piece of the self-regulation puzzle: time management.

Time management itself is complex beyond measure. You have probably heard the platitudes: writing happens best with steady effort. But most writing happens under less than ideal circumstances. Odds are that if you are writing in a burst, you are doing so specifically in response to the stress of not quite enough time. So all the platitudes about time management function as additional guilt in many real-life writing situations.

One simple fact that might help you write: the act of writing takes up a surprisingly small amount of the energy required to write. Before writing we have to plan, have an idea, rough things out, find a slot of suitable time to actually get down to it, do some procrastinating because writing is anxiety-provoking, take breaks and avoid procrastination during those breaks, roll with the unavoidable interruptions of the modern, always-online, plugged-in life. All those things drain energy. Different pieces may drain different people differently, but they are all preying on our limited, precious daily processing cycles. And after writing we need to rest, let it settle, revisit some awkward places, and do some light editing. Pre-writing and post-writing take up the most writing energy,

By way of a specific tip, we think many writers neglect putting things on the back-burner. We tend not to trust our unconscious processes to come up with something in time for whatever deadline is looming, and so we try to burst through our avoidance with nothing but power and discipline. Unfortunately, doing this too much can lead to fixation and keeping our focus too narrow to allow ideas to breathe.

So, we should not neglect the importance of roughing things out and leaving them on the back burner for days. I typically write blog posts by making three or four barely sentence-length point form notes and leaving them to sit for at least a week. I then write the blog around the prompts a week later.

This does not work for everyone, especially for the busy and overwhelmed. But we all need to find ways to let our ideas breathe.

Psychological Research and Writing Strategies

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All writing teachers and coaches have a toolbox of strategies, tips, and tricks for helping stuck learners. Practical experience is key, but academic studies offer another helpful perspective. At the very least, psychology can flesh out our intuitions and convictions.

science works

We recently read an academic paper that is a “meta-analysis of meta-analyses” about writing intervention strategies. Meta-analyses are papers that take a pile of studies on some effect, summarize them, and analyze them to determine, roughly, how big or important that effect is. They are a great way of opening up vast and sometimes inaccessible academic literature on a topic.

This paper goes a step further and summarized twenty summaries on writing interventions in elementary and high school students. (And here we will summarize this summary of summaries!) It is a good survey what hundreds of experiments and intervention actually say about what works.

Empirically validated writing interventions

So, what works? In a way the results are not surprising. The most robust effect for improving student writing is teaching writing strategies for planning, drafting, revising, and editing. Informed students can make best use of their time and effort. Interestingly, the most effective and reliable way to improve student writing was to supplement teaching the strategies with what the authors call a “self-regulated strategy development model”, which basically means teaching the skills that allow students to actually plan, draft, edit, and revise when they need to. The results vindicate importance of building skills around motivation, which are very different from just knowing the procedure.

Equally important is knowing what doesn’t work. While most of the strategies that teachers use are at least somewhat effective, one strategy that was mostly ineffective, and possibly counterproductive, was explicit teaching of grammar rules. This speaks to the disconnect between knowing about writing and actually implementing the process of writing. In general, process-focused strategies fared quite well.

As editors and writing consultants, we take this work to vindicate parts of our approach. For adult learners, the trouble is usually not with lack of knowledge of planning, drafting, revising, or editing. The trouble lies one step back, as it were. Getting better at writing usually means having the skills to do what you know you should do, and often we need other humans to help us out of our bad habits.

Further reading:

Graham, S., & Harris, K. R. (2017). Evidence-based writing practices: A meta-analysis of existing meta-analyses. In Design principles for teaching effective writing (pp. 13-37). Brill.

Challenging Ableism in Writing

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Every writer has bad habits. As with any complex skill set, there’s no point at which we become perfect writers. Growing as a writer should be a life-long process, but many of us hit plateaus in our development.

So, which attitudes that stand in the way of recognizing that learning is an essential part of writing? It’s complicated, of course. But one important piece of the puzzle is internalized ableism. What does this mean?

Internalized ableism as an obstacle to growth

The term “ableism” originated in discussions of disability and the rights of disabled people. At its simplest, it means discrimination against disabled folks, analogously with sexism, racism, and similar terms. More recently, its meaning has expanded to include ways in which people often fail to account for the impacts of folks’ disabilities on their everyday lives. For example, telling a person experiencing depression to “just snap out of it” relies on a lot of presuppositions about which actions are available to that person. In this case, a depressed person is usually unable to simply improve their mood and energy, especially on another person’s timeline. The attitude that they should improve at all is itself an instance of ableism.

And we all internalize ableism. In fact, we use this internalized ableism as a way of shaming ourselves when we label our writing habits as “bad.” This happens because we all internalize cultural scripts and expectations, and the cultural scripts around writing work are often profoundly harmful and this harm often plays out unconsciously. For example, we think of writing as a solitary activity. We think about it as coming from some semi-mystical place of inspiration. We sometimes think of top writing skills as the province of some mysterious, innate creative genius.

Illusions about writing are often ableist

These cultural scripts about writing are all misconceptions or half-truths. And when we internalize them, we become our own worst critics. To us as we keep trying to write, sometimes our inability to write, or the occasional clunkiness of our writing becomes evidence that we lack inspiration or that spark of creative genius. And sometimes we turn on ourselves, which further diminishes our ability to get the words we need or want to onto the page! Over months and years the process builds on itself, to the point where our otherwise reasonable abilities to motivate ourselves become an inner form of ableism. We become dissatisfied with ourselves for not producing more, or for not expressing ourselves clearly immediately, or for dreading the task of writing. 

Countering internalized ableism is hard because there are many sources and moving parts to these scripts. But it can be done. First, we have to first recognize the harmful ableist scripts we’re repeating to ourselves, usually just at the edge of our awareness. Then we have to gently let them go. And then we have to internalize a few counter-scripts.

Finding new scripts to counter our internalized ableism

First, writing is fundamentally a social activity. Second, writing and inspiration have a complex relationship; instead of waiting for inspiration, we must build habits that make inspiration more likely to arise. Third, most writing skills are learned, not innate.

This is a lot of work, but it’s worth it! Changing our attitudes to writing makes the process more enjoyable and rewarding. The first step, however, is recognizing which attitudes are holding us back. So, what’s the script that most blocks you? How would you talk to a close friend if they were saying these words to themselves? Therefore, how can you be a little kinder to yourself around it?

Standard English and its Problems

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Being editors is a strange business sometimes. We are dedicated to upholding standards of clarity while also knowing that some standards people use to judge proper English are arbitrary, discriminatory, colonialist, or racist.

Getting it right on this point is very important to us, and we will revisit this issue many times. Coming to us with editing work is often a profoundly vulnerable experience because writing, personal style, and personal voice are all woven together. For this reason, holding up standards without flattening personal preferences is an important responsibility for any editor.

One of the ways we deal with this tension is to be clear with all our clients that “Standard English” is upheld within institutions as an ultimate truth, but it’s just one type of English! Within these institutions, too, they are looking for particular genres of writing. It helps to have an understanding of these genres, when writing a research paper or a cover letter, and to not treat it as especially personal. Different genres expect different buzzwords, sentence structure, and sometimes even punctuation. Typically, our normal speaking and writing voices are full of striking phrases, grammatical inversions, and playfulness. Sometimes that is perfectly reasonable. But typically when writing to a mass audience we shave off some of the more striking edges of people’s writing.

(We think this is a slight misuse of this meme format, but the point is that we do not want editing to lead to the situation depicted above.)

The bottom line is that as long as people are able to convey what they mean in a way that feels seamless to them and the people they are writing for, there is nothing wrong with their writing. People’s voices are unique to them, and standing out as individuals is important in most situations. People’s writing voices are personal, vulnerable things, and it is always a danger that one can steamroll over someone’s unique vocal stylings in search of an arbitrary notion of Standard English.

Ultimately, there is no Standard English! English as a language has, from its start, been a patchwork. This is a great strength, in fact, despite the ways it is sometimes taught. This is our basic attitude. We aim to help you to write clearly, without being overbearing. And that’s tough sometimes, but always worth it!

Join us as we discuss, clarify, and struggle through this issue. It’s a multifaceted one!

Writer’s Block

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Hello world! In this blog series we will explore the many ways in which writers search for, and typically fail to find, that elusive concept of clarity. Along the way, we hope to furnish your toolbox of writing tricks, no matter what your level of writing skill. We will touch on ideas like mindsets, coherence, cohesion, (in)ability, expectations, standards, some fun bits of cognitive science, and hopefully also the joy, flow, and zen of writing as well!

Today we are going to meander a bit, touching on some key ideas that we hope to explore in good depth down the line. The ideas in this blog are drawn mainly from our own struggles. In addition to being therapeutic for us to write, may they find you and help you in your time of need!

Today’s topic is writer’s block. Writer’s block is an almost universal experience. We should say, though, that it is more of a constellation of experiences. What all of them share is that distinctly unpleasant feeling of simply being unable to translate thoughts into words on a page.

The inability to go from thoughts to words conceals many more specific problems. One problem might be that the thoughts are tripping over themselves. Maybe we are over-caffeinated, harried by deadlines, or distracted. Another problem might be that the thoughts are like molasses. Maybe we are too tired to really get going. Maybe there’s something more important preoccupying us, like worry, hunger, or an insistent cat!

This unpredictability of thought raises a crucial point. We often cannot control the circumstances under which we write. We must get good at recognizing our inner inclinations in a given writing session. And, just as importantly, we must let go of a lot of judgments that we bring to bear on our sometimes unruly thoughts. This is a practice in itself, and we hope to explore how to do this in a way that takes into account the full picture of people’s circumstances, abilities, preferences, strengths, and growth areas.

Those are pretty general thoughts. Fortunately, other problems that make up writer’s block are skill-related. Sometimes we have some giant, brilliant-seeming thought. We have that flash of inspiration. And we try to write it down, and then it rather rudely poofs! There are, on occasion, practices we can do to lose less of these moments. An important initial one is to just develop a habit of free writing consistently. This can be every day, every few days, every week, as one’s life allows. It is shocking how trainable our writing habits are. And it’s just as shocking how quickly we can lose them. But the good news is that writing skills are cumulative. This includes writing stamina.

So how do we gently trick ourselves, or hack ourselves, into experiencing less writer’s block, or less intense writer’s block? Stay tuned!