While in the lunch line yesterday, Maureen Barton and I began a conversation about Anne Lamott's varied writing styles.
This is a piece I use with my senior composition and rhetoric students each year, but it most definitely applies to teaching journalistic writing as well. Heck, it applies to all of us writing our first drafts of our articles we are working on for Monday.
Where Steve gives us the advice of "barfing it out" on paper to get initial ideas strung together, Lamott suggests that every writer begins with a a "shitty first draft" or a down draft.
Here's a link to the article taken from her book Bird by Bird. Not only does she give great advice, but she's pretty darn hilarious in her delivery of it as well. Actually, Lamott kind of reminds of me Steve.
"Not one of them [professional writers] writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her."
Adrienne Forgette
Northern High School
Owings, MD
What are some of your SPECIFIC ideas to get your students to "barf" out this information? What are some techniques?
ReplyDeleteThats a relief because my first draft of the story about that lovely guy had a ton of pen marks. I am glad most writers write first drafts that may be comparable to my own
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