The Writing Process: Sentences, Paragraphs, Edit, Repeat

Why do we need instructions on a shampoo bottle? After only a few training exercises, any three-year-old can operate a shampoo bottle. Yet every bottle of shampoo I can find has instructions. The sequence, “lather, rinse, repeat,” became such a well-known instruction that it took on meme status in culture. Brian Regan has taken on a similar set of instructions on a Pop Tarts box. If you haven’t enjoyed his take on the ridiculous nature of obvious instructions, you should take a moment to watch it here on YouTube before proceeding. I will wait. (And while you’re there, you might as well watch Jerry Seinfeld’s take on Pop Tarts.)

The instructions on shampoo bottles and Pop Tarts boxes seem silly. The inclusion of the word “repeat” on shampoo bottles adds a metaphysical quandary. Have we just entered an infinite loop? How do we know when we’ve finished washing our hair? Instructions on consumer products and bits from comedians have much in common. Both are attempting to be extremely precise in their use of language. The economy of words on the shampoo bottle is almost elegant.

Did you watch the Brian Regan video? He gets lots of laughs. It looks almost effortless. Comedy also requires precision with language. But behind Regan’s bit stands hours of work honing words and sentences to optimize humor. Now I want you to watch another video. This is Jerry Seinfeld describing his writing process. (I linked to his Pop Tart video above if you want to see the finished product.) Again, I will wait.

Previously I wrote about the aims of writing. Students should learn to write for an interested audience and to produce perspective. I think we hear both of these at work in Jerry Seinfeld’s writing process. But in today’s article, I want to dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of writing. If my previous article addressed the why question, this article lays out the how.

Defeat the Internal Editor

The hardest part of writing is staring at a blank page. The biggest hurdle is putting pen to paper or fingers to the keyboard. Making the cursor move forward is a major victory. What is it that keeps us from starting? It is the internal editor. Before we’ve even begun writing, our internal editor is already criticizing our work.

Young students can also get locked up with the mechanical effort of writing. Their hands get tired. Some students find the effort of thinking tiresome as well. Other students find it difficult to convert their thoughts from speech to writing. For each of these situations, doing small and frequent writing sessions will help build up strength and stamina. Transcription can help a child with weak fingers. Go for well formed letters done with sufficient speed, so that when it comes to writing their thoughts down, they aren’t hindered by a slow hand. You can record a student speaking his thoughts, and then have them listen back and write those thoughts out. The goal here is to establish the link between thought and writing.

Once students get past these more mechanical problems, they will eventually have to confront the real dragon. The editor that exists in all our minds wants to review and revise our words whenever we speak or write. Effective writing, though, best occurs when we turn off that internal editor. We should teach our students to put words down on the page, any words, even if the words don’t represent our best work. I think this is best done in the classroom, but only if the proper atmosphere has been established.

We can build a writing atmosphere by doing several things regularly. First, students should learn in an environment in which discussions occur. Being able to put ideas out through speech builds a sense that the environment is suitable for expressing and exploring ideas. Discussion transfers to the written word. Putting ideas on the blank page is really not different than putting ideas out into the classroom. Second, writing should be a part of everyday life. Being called upon to write shouldn’t be a new and daunting event. If students feel like writing is an everyday thing, it becomes more and more natural to express oneself in writing.

Writing is such a vital tool for life, we need to bravely challenge students to cultivate this mode of expression. Writing enables us to see thought. Writing words on paper forces us to slow down our brains through the act of composing our thoughts. And then once our thoughts are written down, we can actually look at the thoughts our minds have produced. Seeing this written record then enables us to interact with our thoughts. Without this tool, we often spin our wheels never gaining clarity in our minds. We do this with our shopping lists (think about how difficult it is to hold a week’s shopping in our heads). How much more should we do this with great ideas from literature, history, philosophy, science and mathematics?

Resurrecting the Editor

Okay, so we defeated the internal editor so that we can just get words down on the page. Great! But we actually need that editor if we’re going to take our mere words and shape them into something with meaning and purpose. Very few people can write their best during a first draft. Yet, we often allow ourselves and our students to write in first draft mode as if it is final draft mode. Editing has to be part of the writing process. Yet editing doesn’t come naturally for most students; it’s also not always intuitive how best to teach the editing process. Let’s look at two major layers of editing: solidifying sentences and processing paragraphs.

Editing Layer 1: Solidifying Sentences

Sentences should be the first layer of editing. Each sentence should be examined carefully in three units. Begin by identifying the actual subject of the sentence. By actual I mean that we frequently bury the subject in the back part of the sentence. This is quite natural, since when we write in free flow the mind needs some filler words to get going. Editing now takes those loose words and reorganizes them so that the true subject can be placed in the subject slot of the sentence.

A different way of approaching the subject slot of the sentence is to think about the grammatical subject in the most concrete terms possible. Students should learn to avoid vague terms, especially pronouns. A pronoun introduces vagueness, which is the enemy of both clarity and succinctness. The subject slot, by the way, does not have to be the first grammatical element of a sentence. Transition phrases and adjectival qualifiers can add to the quality of a sentence. But a student should be able to reorganize any sentence so that it can begin with the subject phrase, even if there are good reasons to choose a different sentence structure.

A key goal to note thus far is intentionality. A student should learn that there are numerous ways of expressing the thought in a sentence, but that an intentional choice to use one particular way of organizing a sentence is based on sound reasoning. Learning how to make these choices increases the student’s power of expression.

Next we consider the verb. Having secured for ourselves the most concrete form of the true subject, we want to pair the subject with the most active verb possible. Many teachers focus on eliminating passive verbs and linking verbs. Sometimes, though, a linking verb or passive verb best communicates the state of affairs relative to the subject. A better way of approaching what I think these teachers are getting at is the idea that verbs communicate action. Therefore we should devote time to consider the most active verb possible. Notice the difference between these two sentences:

• There is a congress consisting of two chambers in which laws are made.

• The bicameral congress creates laws.

The second sentence both eliminates the vague pronoun, condenses the true subject to a powerful three-word phrase, and finds a more active verb.

Lastly we deal with all the remainder of the sentence. Two decisions need to be made. First, are the predicating words and phrases in their proper order and using their best expression? Much of the back end of a sentence can be rearranged, so play with the arrangement to make sure the flow assists the understanding of the reader. In addition, stylistic flourish and interesting vocabulary are well placed after the subject-verb complex. The reader has been assisted with a clear subject and verb, so the latter part of the sentence can be used to expand upon the topic at hand. This leads to the second decision. Has the sentence become too complicated? A long sentence isn’t necessarily a complicated sentence. But if someone gets lost in the syntax far removed from the subject, clarity is lost. Consider chopping off any unnecessary clutter or divide the complicated sentence into several shorter sentences.

Editing Layer 2: Processing Paragraphs

Students differ greatly in their conception of paragraphs. Some have lots of tiny paragraphs, some produce complete essays without ever breaking it up into paragraphs. Paragraphs are about developing one topic. In academic writing the convention of starting a paragraph with a topic sentence is sound. The structure of assertion and support is another helpful concept.

Jason shared with me a ten-sentence paragraph structure that I find immensely helpful. The paragraph begins with a topic sentence. Three pieces of evidence are used to support the assertion in the topic sentence. Each piece of evidence is introduced with a transition sentence. Then the evidence (most often a quotation) is laid out. The evidence is then followed with an explanation. This rhythm of transition, evidence, explanation should become engrained in students’ minds. Evidence should never be presented as self evident. It always needs explanation, with the explanation driving home the relevance of this evidence to the assertion made in the topic sentence. With three sentences per piece of evidence added to the original topic sentence, we arrive at the ten-sentence paragraph. To this can be added an eleventh concluding sentence.

The rule of three is an ancient rhetorical strategy. There’s something about sequencing ideas in groups of three that resonates with people. Pastors learn about the rule of three in homiletics courses. Comedians use the rule of three to create jokes (premise, premise, punchline). The knock, knock joke follows the rule of three. The ten-sentence paragraph operates with the rule of three: three pieces of evidence packaged in a three-sentence structure. The rule of three can now be used to expand an essay by having three paragraphs, each with its own topic sentence and support. Another iteration can be used to create three groups of three paragraphs. Students can start thinking about section headings (for some reason it feels more like academic or professional writing when you can use the heading tool in a word processor).

Once we start building multiple paragraphs, our attention can turn to arrangement. Have students reorder their paragraphs. Ask them how different sequences feel when the order is changed. Once students see that they’re not locked into one way of arranging their ideas, they gain new freedom to revise their work.

Editing becomes less about finding spelling errors and actually becomes part of the creative process. In this article I tried rearranging sections, placing the paragraph section before the sentence section. I decided to stay with the sentence-paragraph order. However, the exercise enabled me to see that there isn’t a strict order here. A teacher may want to work with a class at the paragraph-building level first and then zoom in at the sentence level.

Many Smaller Essays

One insight about the editing process is that smaller writing samples enable students to get practice editing at both the sentence and paragraph levels. The more practice they get free writing and intentionally editing helps them use the tools needed to expand to long form essay writing. One of the detriments to effective learning is writing long essays that become unwieldy for both the teacher and the student. Learning how to edit effectively takes repeated practice.

Short pieces provide more scope for practice on sentences and paragraphs. Long essays hinder the editing process for two reasons. One, the sheer amount to be edited can be overwhelming. Teachers receiving lots of lengthy papers understand the feeling of overwhelm. It takes time and concentration to give substantive feedback. The same holds for students working even on their own written work. If the editing process can’t be applied effectively for lengthy pieces, the students won’t fully learn the process. Two, writing long pieces before editing skill has been cultivated and honed means that students are getting lots and lots of practice writing suboptimal essays. It would be like swimming long distance with bad form. Every swim just reinforces the bad form. and the swimmer never learns the efficiency and freedom of proper swimming form.

An additional benefit to shorter essays is that you as a teacher can be more involved in providing substantive feedback more frequently. In some upper level classes where a lengthy essay is assigned the amount of feedback a teacher can provide is rather limited. Plus the time needed to mark multiple long essays means there’s a significant gap between initial composition on the students’ part and the feedback they receive. One method for solving this problem is to divide the long essay into shorter episodes that accumulate to a full essay over time. I have worked with several teachers now who have overseen senior theses, and each of them approached this massive project by dividing it into bite-sized pieces.

Hopefully this article helps stimulate your thinking about teaching writing in your class. Not everyone will become devoted to their art the way Jerry Seinfeld or Brian Regan have. They are virtuosos in their field. What we can learn from them, though is that writing is a process. We confront the blank page and get our ideas down. Then we hone our work until it really shines.