by Will Shine
Success in higher education and life itself, as many of us came to believe, was contingent upon ‘good writing’—that is writing well (never good). When I was a freshman in college, I was required to take a writing-composition class. Now this wasn’t some sort of unique prerequisite for bad writers; unless you’d taken AP English in high school, it was compulsory for first-year students to take freshmen comp. As brand-new college students, we were tasked with getting our writing right. In theory, we would resolve whatever deficiencies we carried onward from high school and emerge from the course ready to tackle every writing task for the rest of our academic and professional lives. I did pass this class, though it might be better said that I briefly passed through the one and only writing-focused course of my undergraduate education. Moreover, it was the B I received for this very early and only assessment of my writing capabilities that cast a long shadow: I wasn’t a bad writer, but I wasn’t a good writer either.
Sixteen years later, freshmen comp is a blur. Feedback I did or did not receive on writing exercises began fading into obscurity the first day of winter break ’06; soon after, all I could remember about the course was its resulting B. Fast forward to this past year, I found myself back in school, and I had felt it necessary to offer my professors a disclaimer about my lackluster writing chops. Thinking of myself as nothing but a B writer (on my best days), I had allowed myself to believe three falsehoods that, until recently, crippled my will to improve:
- Writing is something some people do with ease, and it comes naturally to them. The inverse is true, as well.
- I have inherent limitations and unfixable tendencies as a writer. The B is where I B—long
- One day, if all the stars align and I really focus, I might arrive as a good writer. From then on, it will be nothing but smooth sailing and Pulitzer prizes; until then it’s tough sledding and more B’s.
Because (believe it or not) I’m in a writing-intensive field, it didn’t take long for one of my professors to call my self-diagnosed propensity for Bs out as BS. It was in an advisory meeting when I had started to deprecate my writing abilities that she very gently reminded me that good writing takes practice. In so many words, she suggested that good writers become good writers not because they’re born with an innate ability; they become good writers by working at it. For that matter, good writers are always becoming better writers the more they do it. While this may not seem too profound of a revelation, it was the kind of immediate confrontation and encouragement I needed to move beyond the B.
Writing well is an act of constantly becoming.
Writing well isn’t just a mindset. But there are mindsets and internalized beliefs that can function as barriers to good writing. Whatever you think is true about your abilities as a writer now, especially in the absence of helpful feedback or opportunities to actually write, remember that good writing takes practice. Writing well is an act of constantly becoming. I have been able to move beyond the B not because I belong somewhere better, but because I am now willing to become a better writer.