Suggestions on Self-Assessment

The following are some techniques for improving your writing style, and for assessing how well your efforts are succeeding. Not all these strategies will work for everyone, but many writers find them helpful.

READ YOUR TEXT ALOUD TO YOURSELF

This strategy may be particularly helpful if your writing is intended for oral presentation, but can be useful for other genres as well. Hearing your own words, as opposed to looking at them, may provide you with a very different impression of them and expose weaknesses such as pretentious-sounding terms, wooden dialogue or rambling sentence structures.

FOCUS ON THE WHOLE AS WELL AS THE PARTS

Any time you add or revise an element, reread what surrounds it to ensure that everything still fits. Often, a change in one place will necessitate a change in another. Naturally you must focus on each line as you create it, but as soon as you have the first draft in place, back up a few lines and read through the earlier text again. You will frequently find that the latest addition does not fit in quite as it should – perhaps it restates a point already made, or does not make a smooth enough transition from what came before. As you form each new sentence, keep going back and rereading it from the start to ensure that all its elements mesh together. As you form each new paragraph, keep rereading it from its first line to see how its senten­ces fit together: Perhaps the topic shifts enough that the paragraph should be broken up, or perhaps a particular word is repeated too many times within a short space.

PUT YOUR WORK ASIDE FOR A WHILE AND THEN COME BACK TO IT

You may feel you have polished your arguments into their final form, only to find that when you look at them a little later, problems jump out at you: illogical connections, clumsy sentence structures, a strained-sounding tone, subtle grammatical errors. A lapse of time enables you to come back to your work with a more objective eye. A day or more away is ideal, but even a few hours can make a difference.

HAVE SOMEONE ELSE LOOK YOUR WORK OVER

Any writer – no matter how skilled – can benefit from getting a sec­ond opinion, because by definition one is always too close to one's own work. Given that your writing is ultimately intended for other people's consumption, it only makes sense to find out how other people perceive it. The individual whose opinion you seek need not be a better writer than you: The goal is not to have this person correct or revise what you have done. Rather, it is to provide you with feedback on how your points and your tone are coming across. If your critic does not get your jokes, or finds a character you meant to be funny and sympathetic merely irritating, or cannot follow some instruction because you left out a step you thought would be per­fectly obvious to anybody – take all this seriously (and do your best to remain on speaking terms afterward). A professional editor is ideal, but if this is not practical or affordable, try to select someone whose opinion you respect and who represents your intended readership as nearly as possible.

And finally, draft, draft, draft. Write and rewrite. And then rewrite again. This strategy is not an option or a suggestion, but a basic part of the writing process. No professional writer expects to get away without revision; the only question is, how much will be neces­sary. The act of writing, after all, does not involve simply transcribing ideas inside your head into words on paper: It involves developing and articulating those ideas in the first place. As you write, you can expect to shift your priorities; to change your mind about what information goes with what; to choose a different tack in order to drive some point home. Resist the temptation to hang onto passages that you laboured long and lovingly over, if they no longer fit.

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Дата добавления: 2015-10-30