The Word Count Game

I call it a game. Others might not. Nevertheless, it is something that’s helped me improve my writing tremendously. In a nutshell, here's what you do: check the number of words in an essay, paragraph, or sentence, and then set a goal of how many words you want to condense it down to. So if you have a paragraph that is about 220 words long, you set your sights on getting it closer to 190 words, or maybe 150, or you have an essay that's 1200 words long and you want to get it down to 1000.

Now, this is not a matter of finding the least important sentences in a paragraph or essay and deleting them. This is all about training yourself to scrutinize your writing closely by forcing you to ask just how important every single word is. Suddenly, the individual words are not simply a cluster of words dealing with a central theme, but each one suddenly serves an integral purpose to the structure and presentation of the information. When you play the Word Count Game, every word is accountable for its role in the sentence, and if there's a sentence that can be written with fewer words without losing any important purpose, style, or emphasis, then revise it to have fewer words.

Here's an example from my other blog, Narrative Nuance post “A Brief Introduction to Theme”:

Survival is an abstract concept. Any instance where you have a narrative where the characters are placed in a situation where their main concern becomes one where they need to either find food and shelter or die, it is safe to say that you're dealing with a theme of survival. This abstract concept is a theme because it is shared with plenty of other narratives that don't unfold the same way, like The Lord of the Flies or Hatchet.

That selection of 79 words was revised down to 62 words as:

Survival is an abstract concept. Any narrative where the characters are placed in a situation where the main concern is to find food and shelter or die, is safe to say it’s a tale of survival. Because survival is an abstract concept and because it appears in other narratives, like Lord of the Flies or Hatchet, we can call it a theme.

This revised version removes unnecessary clauses and phrases like “where you have a narrative” and the third sentence is entirely rewritten, but, most importantly, it gives the same information.

There is, however, much more to this process than just finding unnecessary words or swapping out groups of words with fewer words. It is about a close reading and looking for the purpose of your essay. You shouldn't go about this asking yourself “what words can I do without” but rather, “is this the best way for me to say what I want to say?” It makes you go back and think about the purpose of every word, and as you think about the purpose of every word, you'll think of the sentence these words add up to, and from there, the paragraph. It can help eliminate fluff and tangents as you create a clearer, more streamlined piece of writing.

One of the best things that can come from it, though, is getting more ideas. Sometimes, I end up with more words than I started, not because I failed at the game, but because as I looked so closely at what I was writing about I came across ideas and concepts I didn't think of the first time through. The next thing I know, I put the Word Count on hold and explore this new idea I came across.

Writing Exercise: Reflection Essay

I was nervous the first time I stood in front of a classroom to teach. The chairs were arranged in an arc around the perimeter of the room, creating a stadium like atmosphere, cutting me off from the door. I was either the grand master, or the hapless victim.

Regardless of your definition, it would be hard to promote this to story or narrative. It sets the stage for something more, but as is, it’s pretty basic. If I were to continue and write about how the day went, my efforts to engage the class in a discussion, falling back on a writing prompt to take up time, and feeling like a fraud as I fumbled about, it would be a story. But what if this followed it:

I quickly learned three things. The first was about having to smile and feign being an expert in composition. It didn't matter that I had never taken a composition course before; everything I knew of it I had gained piecemeal over my years as an undergraduate literature student. The second thing I learned was I had the knowledge. I could answer their questions and, as scattered as some of the early ones were, put together a lesson. But most of all, I learned that I could teach.

This is the makings of a Reflection Essay. What separates this kind of writing from anecdotes or stories is you interpret the events you are describing. Hence the reflection. Reflective writing is when you think back to a time, instance, or experience – something significant in shaping who you are and addressing both the circumstances of the event and what you gained from that experience.

This means reflective writing can be an odd combination of creative writing and interpretation.

On the one hand, it is important to recreate the experience, and if appropriate, provide sensory detail to create the experience for your reader. Write about what you saw and heard, as well as what you felt (both physically and emotionally). The purpose is to relive your experience so that the reader can understand your position.

Other people may have stood in front of their first classroom with enthusiasm. A lot of people will never have that opportunity. Therefore, I need to let the reader know that I was nervous, and what it was that made me nervous (in this case, the fact I was teaching a subject I had never had a class in myself), but if I can give more description of the place, the mood, and most importantly, my mental and emotional state, it will make it easier for my reader to understand my interpretation.

The interpretation makes a reflective essay what it is. After giving the details to set the scene, whether physical or mental, internal or external, you have to consider what you gained from this experience: how has it shaped you into the person that you are? In a “and knowing is half the battle” sort of way, the interpretation is the moral of the story: what you gained from it and what you hope your reader understands as well.

We may not always know what we gained from an experience until we reflect on it. Sometimes, especially when we're in school, we don't take time to stop and think about where we are and how we got where we are. Reflective writing, whether required or not, is a valuable endeavor. It’s an opportunity to stop and think things through, and a chance to get to know yourself a little bit better.

Writing Exercise: The Annotated Bibliography

I will not mince words. Annotated Bibliographies are weird. They almost always precede larger research projects, are rarely published, and have a set of rules far apart from most every other form of writing.

Rather than the steady flow from paragraph to paragraph, each one building on ideas and concepts, Annotated Bibliographies list citations of research sources, accompanied by annotations of the important aspects of the research. Hence the name Annotated Bibliography.

They’re like archipelagos: scattered, separated, independent, but interrelated.

People who encounter them for the first time sometimes have a hard time figuring out just what exactly it is they’re dealing with and why they’re dealing with it. A lot of the major rules about writing - transitions, organization, and in some instances the valued thesis, introduction, and conclusion are tossed to the wind. But annotated bibliographies can be invaluable in a research project.

Part of the problem is that the requirements vary from situation to situation. I’ve assigned annotated bibliographies for five different courses at three different schools, and was assigned them as an undergraduate and graduate student. Each time the parameters have been different, but there are a few constants.

The main constant is the form. At its core, an annotated bibliography is a list of citations with annotations, i.e., a few paragraphs describing the citation. What these annotations contain varies.

The first, and most common, annotation is the summary, an explanation of the source itself. This represents the content of the source without any interpretation, criticism, or other analysis. If you can’t reiterate the main points of a source, then you can’t summarize it. If you can’t understand it well enough to put it into your words, you should sit down with your research and get to know it better so you can.

The second annotation focuses on the rhetoric, and is sometimes called the evaluation. Rather than determine whether or not a source is useful, this determines whether or not it’s credible and reliable, generally through a rhetorical analysis. This considers the quality of the source’s arguments, if the piece is properly written, whether or not the author is credible.

The third annotation is an evaluation of the sources’ usefulness and can sometimes be called an assessment or reflection. Here, the writer gauges how helpful and relevant the research is. This is an opportunity for the writer to move from the research alone and consider their project in the long run. Sometimes determining a source’s usefulness calls for references to other pieces of research, but the main thing here is you can identify what you expect to do with the source.

There are certainly more out there, but these seem to show up the most.

Different circumstances will call for different approaches. Sometimes you may only need a summary. If it’s for a class, some teachers may be more interested in their students deciphering rhetoric than applying the source to a larger project. The purpose though is largely the same regardless of the situation. Annotated bibliographies exist so we can put aside a lot of the issues that come with writing a research essay and just focus on the research.

Outlines Make Everything Better

Usually when I discuss an essay draft with a student, I ask if they’ve written an outline.

This isn't because it’s a routine question.

It almost always comes after some discussion about the status of the essay and the student's concerns.
Many of the problems I have encountered in writing – that of my students and students I have worked with as a tutor – stems back to issues of organization, which can be resolved or improved with an outline.

Outlines seem simple. They're lists of information and subjects to be discussed in an essay. A lot of people ignore this step though, because they already have a collection of paragraphs or they have an idea of what they are going to write and so don't worry about making a list.

But an outline makes everything clearer.

A piece of writing is a mass of words running left to right, and hundreds of them can fill a page without much to say where one point ends and another begins. Writing an outline is a way to take that mass of information and express it clearly, simply, and succinctly.

Seems easy enough. The first benefit is a list takes the task of writing an essay and turns it into a series of topics: one daunting task is now a list of manageable tasks. Second, because you have a series of specified points, it is unlikely you’ll be blurring topics in a single paragraph. Third,  because you have sorted the ideas, it is easier to understand why you’ve put topics where you have and what they have to do with the whole. Each paragraph should have something to do with the paragraphs before and after it, and having an outline makes it easier to recognize those points. From there, it makes it easier to find, remove, or repurpose tangential sections or paragraph. Fourth, once each paragraph is in a logical place, it becomes easier to transition from paragraph to paragraph.

Overall, an outline helps your essay become more refined, specific, focused, and easier to follow.

Outlines aren’t a panacea though. They still require attention and detail, and can themselves be a couple of pages if the essay is longer.

You also may start with a solid list, but things don't always go according to plan. Enter, one of my favorite tools, the reverse outline.

Reverse outlines are outlines you do after you've written an essay. Go back through your writing, and identify what's going on in each paragraph. Chances are they’re not what you planned or expected them  to be. This can be illuminating for the same reasons doing an outline is a good first step. It helps you figure out what you've addressed and where the essay has grown as you come up with new ideas. Maybe you discovered you need to address a certain topic in a different place or the topic of a paragraph changed from what you intended. Basically, you discover you need to reorganize a few things. So the next step is to make a new outline as a guide to what you need to do with the next draft..

How many outlines? I would say there should be at least one, maybe two for every draft.

Here's how to use this tool:

• Put together an outline before writing, if you haven't already.
  
• Then write a draft and make an outline based on what you wrote.
  
• Revise that outline to fix whatever issues you came across while making your outline.
  
• Use that revised outline to revise your essay, and then, put together another reverse outline.
  

Outlines give you a way to look at an entire piece on just one or two pieces of paper. Everything whittled down to the bare necessities. Whether it’s the start of a project, or just one in need of revision, taking a step back and transforming your essay into a list is clarifying.

The Six Journalistic Questions

Sometimes known as the 6 W's or the 5 W's and an H. Just go with whatever helps you remember it, asking yourself these six questions can help improve your writing process.

One of the easiest ways to figure out what to put into a piece of writing is to list out your specific topics. But it can be difficult to know what exactly should be identified or how to identify it. Thankfully, the Six Journalistic Questions give cues as to what to look for:

Who?

What?

When?

Where?

How?

Why?

Ever since a colleague shared a simple powerpoint about these gems with me they have become integral to how I teach composition. They are useful in thesis development, research, organization, introductions, conclusions...or just about every where. Each one stands apart and helps a writer identify and connect every topic with every other topic, helps ensure each topic is addressed, that there aren’t any tangents, and makes a piece of writing more specific.

I'm wary to say there's a panacea for bad writing or for teaching composition, but this is the closest.

The responses to these questions can be broad or specific and sometimes just identifying them can help you see how broad or specific your topic is. Some elaboration:

Who – What person or group of people are you writing about?

This deals with demographics. This could focus on an individual, like a biography. It could be a broad political demographic like New Yorkers or an ethnic demographic like Caucasians, or any other way to group or organize people. I had one student who led me along for half the class thinking he was writing about red-headed people.

Note: This is not your audience. This is whom you are writing about. Not to whom you are writing.

What – What things, physical or intangible, are you writing about?

Think nouns. Are you writing about a chair, or about the moon? A specific chair, or chairs in general? This opens it up to whatever objects or concepts you want to, and not necessarily physical ones. I like to read about narrative. I can pick up books or movies, things that tell and represent narratives but, narrative is an intangible concept. Nevertheless, it still goes in here.

When – What time frame are you writing about?

This could be broad or specific. A Geologist will deal with millions of years at a single stretch when the chemist or physicist will look at events that transpire in seconds or even less. It’s about determining when in history to start and when to end. Depending on the discipline, this may not even be bound by history: the historian will assign years and the chemist will merely want to know how long something takes to happen.

Where – What place or places are you writing about?

This could be a geographic location, a cultural location, or a political location, or even some combination thereof. Like the rest, this can be broad or specific or anywhere in between. The head of a pin is a place and so is a building, a country, or the universe if we want to get really big.

The last two get interesting and help to bring the rest together.

How – Are you writing about how something works?

A lot of scientific research focuses on figuring out how things work and how things operate. How looks at the interactions among the other elements in the first four W's and explores what they have to do with one another and how they contribute and lead to something.

Why – To what end does something happen?

Sometimes it goes right alongside the how. We may know how something came to be, but why? This doesn't even have to be all philosophic, but can be the end result of a+b=c. It can identify a solution to a problem or the roots of a problem itself. Sometimes it's the easy question to answer. Sometimes it’s the hard one to ask.

In a way, any piece of writing, academic in particular, is really a matter asking how

Whether you start out sorting through these or pick them out of a piece you’ve already started to help you better formulate and structure it is up to you. But no matter when or how, give it a try and see how it stacks up.

Writing Exercise: The Literacy Narrative

My first foray into fiction writing was in fourth grade when my teacher gave us creative writing assignments. Fostered by a childhood of C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia and story-centered video games, I took to creative writing. It was a constant in my life through the unpleasant times in middle-school and high school, and it prompted an interest in stories that turned me to literature and film studies and finally into English education. The decisions of my life have been shaped by that one teacher allowing a class to write creatively. Sure I could have done something else with more prestige than being a teacher, but I love what I do. I love writing, I love literature, I love composition, and I love my life.

That's a (very short) Literacy Narrative. Most people encounter writing assignments in composition and English courses like this, and they force you to evaluate your relationship with literacy, words, and reading and writing. Not everybody gets involved in the classics like Dickens, Melville, Gilman, or Derrida; but most people have some relationship with reading and writing, regardless of skill level. The Literacy Narrative is a way to get beyond the basic premise of “I love/hate/am good at/enjoy writing/reading” and explore the reasons and the history behind it: why do you have this relationship with words?

For me, it was a fourth grade teacher's assignment, a favorite author, and a small collection of video games, most of which were my brother's. The right cocktail of instruction, books, and visuals pointed me towards story. It's never as simple as “I was always good at it” nor “I’ve always hated it.” I'd rather have a student tell me their laundry list of bad experiences with English teachers or they can never seem to figure out writing than have someone say “I love to write!” and then have nothing else except a proud grin.

Ask yourself, why is writing important to you – what shaped your relationship with it? What prepubescent events led you to or away from shelves packed with books, or made your endorphins rush or your happiness fade when you find a pen in hand and a blank page before you.

If you have a negative relationship with writing, then writing can be a cathartic way to help resolve tension or anxiety and help you move forward. 

If you already have a positive relationship, have you ever felt like the oddity or wondered why other people don't feel that creative rush? Give this a try.

I'm not going to say a Literacy Narrative will turn everyone into great writers or make words their passion, but it is, if nothing else, a helpful bit of introspective and a little self-exploration.