Talking through your writing

I recently had the privilege of coaching two colleagues who are writing their dissertations.  Both of these scholars had a strong sense of the direction of their projects, how they were evolving etc.  They seemed to both benefit from talking through their work to an interested listener -a non-expert who could ask clarifying questions.  While my questions may have pushed their thinking a bit, I think that the broader contribution of listening and asking questions comes from just creating a space in which a writer can talk about her work and sit in the “expert’s seat.”


When you find yourself in the midst of a writing project, great or small, consider finding a partner with whom you can bounce ideas.  Or you can always drop me an email.


Happy Writing!

-Dr. Kirschner

Remember to dot your “i”s and cross your “t”s

Okay, so the title of this blog is a bit of a throwback to the world of handwriting.  Still, the point that you should meticulously comb your essays for the smallest of errors still holds.  Although you won’t get admitted to a college just because you had nice punctuation, not proofreading your essay shows a kind of carelessness that might put off the admissions officer.  There’s really little excuse for small errors.

So, I urge you to avoid counting on your word processing program to catch all of your typos and grammos.   If this is not your area of expertise, you should ask a trusted friend, parent, teacher or coach to go over your essays.  Do this only after you have done so yourself.  You don’t want to tax these relationships!


Happy Writing!

-Dr. Kirschner

Honor the supplements!

Sometimes students place great emphasis on their main essay at the expense of the short-answer essays.  Yet, these shorter essays provide colleges the opportunity to see the specific reasons for why you chose them among all of the other schools.  You can use these essays to really prove to a college that you have done your homework and you know their school.

 

I strongly suggest that you before you fill out the short-answer questions, you should do your homework about the school. Check out their website and get to really know the campus, their academic programs, their extracurricular activities, the arts, cultural and athletic scenes in and around the campus and some details about the community of which the school is a part.  Which teams are longstanding rivals to the school?  In which coffee houses do students hang out?  Which initiatives has the school promoted? What kind of relationship does the school have with its surrounding community? What are alumni up to? What’s the hardest/most interesting course in the major that you think you’ll be taking? What’s the name of the school newspaper/literary journal, etc.

If you know these details, you can incorporate them into an honest essay that shows the things that draw you into the life of the college.

 

Happy writing!

-Dr. Kirschner

 

 

Writing for the recycling bin

Writing for the recycling bin.

Many of us writers tend to censor and self-edit as we write. While this may make for well-polished prose, self-editing while you write can really stymie ideas. When you are writing, particularly in early drafts, you want to allow for as much of a free-flow of ideas as possible. I often urge my students to first make a mess, then clean it up later (hopefully after the ideas have had a chance to simmer). At its best, writing can be a messy, unwieldy process. It can’t stay that way forever (you will have a reader eventually and s/he deserves to have some clear direction of where you’re headed), but in the initial phases, it’s okay to write for yourself.

Better yet, write for the recycle bin. What I mean when I offer this advice, is that you should write as if your writing mattered to no one, not even to you. This attitude allows you to approach your writing with complete abandon. When you write for the recycling bin, you write without judging your work and yourself. You can approach your work with kindness and creativity. Sometimes you will recycle your work and the exercise will serve to stimulate your creative juices. At other times, you can keep your work –maybe sit on it for a while– and revisit it . When you revisit your work, I urge you to do so with great kindness and curiosity. “What are the ideas here?” “Where can I go with this?” “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” This detached approach not only allows you to be kind to your work, it allows you to be kind to its creator. Always a good thing.

Happy writing!

-Dr. Kirschner