Last week one of my students read me her essay about Aristotle’s influence on Alexander the Great, and I almost cried with happiness. It was beautifully argued, beautifully structured. Did I mention she is twelve? Afterwards I handed back her previous paper, which was heavily bloodied with red ink corrections. She was not happy, and I certainly understood why. Therefore, I explained what editing is supposed to do.
Learning to write well is like bodybuilding. When you decide to develop your physical muscles, you go to a gym and lift weights. The effort actually shreds your muscles, which heal–and grow bigger–after you feed them protein and rest. Eventually you grow into a strong, wiry athlete. (In my own athletic days, an admirer once told me I resembled a Greek goddess. I didn’t tell the children that part.) The next-day ache of a good workout makes you feel good because you know the process is working.
Naturally it is a good idea to have an accredited coach to teach you proper form in weightlifting so that you don’t injure yourself. And when you are learning to write well, it is important to have a teacher who is herself a good writer. There are tips and tricks to discovering whether or not your teacher is a good writer, but that’s a topic for another day. A good teacher cares more about developing your prose–and your ear for prose–than being popular, so when she reads your assignments, she will thoroughly ink them up. She will go through every sentence with a fine-tooth pen and mark out everything wrong. This is the literary equivalent of a muscle shredding.
Read the Whole Article at http://www.overapplesandroses.blogspot.com