by Michael Stefanou, Geography

I have never considered myself to be a strong writer. Throughout high school and into college, writing was something that I would try to avoid when possible and was never fully confident in my work. It has always been a long and often difficult process for me to get my thoughts down on the page in a way that I am happy with. In college, I came to terms with the fact that being an effective writer is an important skill, and the sooner I developed it, the better off I would be. My writing became something that I put a lot of focus and intention into with the goal of getting better. While I am still reluctant to call writing a strength of mine and it is still a slow process that I have to actively work at, I am now in a place where I am much more confident in my ability to communicate ideas in my field.

It at first felt somewhat ironic to me when I learned I was going to be a writing instructor as I still feel I have a long way to go with my writing. After my initial surprise, I realized this was a sign of the progress I have made and an opportunity to guide students who may be in a similar situation I was in during undergrad. While still early in the process of working as a WIP TA, I have learned a lot about how to teach writing. As I reviewed the first set of writing assignments from my class, I quickly found myself in the trap of over-commenting and wondered how I would ever be able to provide feedback for longer assignments in a reasonable amount of time. I also questioned whether the feedback I was giving was helping students. However, once I started to better apply what I had learned during our WIP seminar, the process started to go much more smoothly, and I improved greatly at providing feedback. I try to think carefully about what kind of comments would be most beneficial to me if I was the one writing. If a student’s work still needs a lot of revision, I will try to pick out a few points that I think can be readily addressed and will have the most impact as it is nearly impossible to try and fix everything at once. On the opposite end, if a student has a particularly strong early draft, I try to avoid leaving a comment that may not actually improve the student’s writing in a meaningful way.

It was not until working as a WIP instructor and looking more deeply at the writing process that I have been able to internalize that the first draft will likely not resemble the final draft.

I quickly learned that working as a writing instructor will also help me further develop my own writing skills. Looking at so many examples of writing on the same topic has made me think about how I may approach that topic or prompt. Often there is something a student may have done that I liked and could implement in my own work. The most important thing I learned, however, is the process of revision. I have always struggled to put words on the page before I have thought out and developed the sentence or paragraph in my head. It was not until working as a WIP instructor and looking more deeply at the writing process that I have been able to internalize that the first draft will likely not resemble the final draft. Drafting is still something I need to improve upon but, seeing just how far a paper can be improved throughout the drafting and writing process has led me to rethink the way I approach my writing.