Milk Duds, Anticipation, and a Bleeding Thesis

The next installment in the MALS student guest blogger project comes from Kari Roueche. Kari, whose concentration is in Archival Studies, is finishing up her program this semester and is currently working hard on her culminating project, which features a Web site built around a family archive. Kari has become quite a prolific writer above and beyond her coursework, presenting a paper at the 2012 Regional Graduate Liberal Studies Conference, held here at ETSU last April, and documenting her archives practicum experience at the LDS Church History Library and Archives in Salt Lake City through her own blog Archiventures. Kari has been gracious enough to share some of the advice she’s received that has had the greatest impact on her as a writer:

The first good piece of writing advice I remember receiving was when I was still in high school, but it wasn’t from a teacher. My friend Kathy’s Mom had gone back to school to finish her bachelor’s degree in public relations. I had her read several of my essays and stories. When she returned one of them, I remember her saying that just when she was wondering about something in my story, the next paragraph answered her musing. She told me that the key to writing is anticipating your reader’s questions and answering them at the right time.

During my freshman year in college I had a graduate student for an English teacher. Her name was Ruth Ann Porter and I have never forgotten her. One of the things I learned from Ruth Ann about non-fiction writing was never to edit a quotation or passage in a way that supports your argument if it changes the original meaning. You want to gain your reader’s trust early on; not lose it. For fiction, she stressed writing for all of the senses so that your reader can imagine themselves in the character’s situation. How does something feel? How does it smell? If a situation was hard, what made it hard? Don’t just write that it was hard. Ruth Ann gave our class tools that we could use and that made writing enjoyable. Also, she loved Milk Duds.

The next piece of advice is advice I have given, rather than received. I noticed during my first semester of grad school, that every essay with a good grade had a margin note on it that said, “good intro” below the first or second paragraph. I learned from this that it is important to put your best writing upfront. If your introduction is interesting, your reader will stay interested. I used to tell myself that a day in which I wrote my title page, my reference list, and my introduction was a good writing day and I shared this tip whenever a classmate asked me for help.

The last piece of advice came to me through a talented writing consultant name Kit Hayes. When she was assisting me with my 5400 seminar paper she told me that I was bleeding little bits of thesis for pages into my essay. Having courage to state a thesis for a 7-8 page paper is hard enough, but boldly stating a thesis for a 20-plus page paper seriously takes guts. The real advice here is that it is worth having an impartial reader edit your paper to help you rustle up those wandering bits of thesis statement so that your argument can be clear and concise.

There you go! Advice from three experts and one well-meaning student. I hope some if it will be useful.

Oh, Kari, you flatter me so, but I think the moral of the story here is that we spend our whole lives becoming better writers, and we don’t do it alone. When we’re caught up in the thick of that 20-page seminar paper, it‘s important to remember our past moments of triumph. Recalling the words of those mentors who have contributed to our success as writers encourages us to keep pushing through. While perfection is impossible, progress is inevitable so long as we remember our achievements even as we learn from our mistakes.