Re: Process kills the dot.com

[Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>]

Dan Emory wrote:

Bruce Byfield wrote

> >Yes, and after teaching first year composition at university for ten
> >years, I can tell you that most people learn a mechanical outline
> >that handicaps their writing. Many also found that they poured their
> >energies into the outline, rather than the writing.
> 
> Then your students were in a developmentally frozen state.

That's my point, exactly. All too often, an emphasis on process
leads to an over-reliance on it - or, worse, a blind following of it
that is worse than no process at all.

One of the fundamental problems in any type of writing is that it
requires two different modes: an analytical, logical mode (which I
call the editor mode) and an organic, gestalt mode (which I call the
writer mode). These two modes don't mix. In fact, they tend to
inhibit each other. Anyone who has seen students stuck on a couple
of lines, re-writing them and erasing them over and over without
getting any further has seen an example of this problem.

Outlining and process belong to the editor mode. If you
over-emphasize outlining and process, you tend to de-emphasize the
writer mode. Labouring over editor mode concerns, you simply aren't
functioning in a way that encourages writing.


> Of course as we gain experience we don't follow the original
> drill, whose purpose was to instill the concept, not to prescribe
> a permanent method. 

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. If you mean that, as we gain
experience in writing many different documents, we branch out, I
would add that we also branch out as we write a particular document.
While I don't want to deny the usefulness or importance of the
editor mode, I like to stress that the act of struggling to write
is, IN ITSELF, a means to understanding. Since your understanding
increases as you write, it's only fitting that your process changes
to reflect your deeper understanding.

> structure in actual practice. As a matter of fact, I've found that
> authoring structured documents (e.g., SGML) that conform to
> a well-designed DTD helps me maintain a constant awareness
> of structure at every level.

For me, this is an interesting comment. As an observation of both
myself and others, one of the hardest thing for writers at any level
to do is to develop and keep a sense of the overall structure of a
document. Very few people come out of high school with a sense of
structure that extends beyond the paragraph; in fact, many can't
perceive structure beyond a few paragraphs. Similarly, while I'm
able to perceive much larger structures than that, I run into
trouble when I'm tired and my perception of the whole starts to get
fuzzy. The next time that I work in a markup language, I'll have to
see if it allows me to hang on to my perception longer or more
easily.

-- 
Bruce Byfield, Outlaw Communications
Contributing Editor, Maximum Linux
604.421.7189 bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com

"Rats bite, bees sting,
Bullets strike and tigers spring
While love whispers, money talks,
But Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes must burn."
-Leon Rosselson, "Penny for the Guy"

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