Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
I met today with almost a dozen students during my Zoom office hours, and the essay drafts they shared inspired some writing advice that I will also share with you. Because some of this will be straightforward and obvious to some of you seasoned writers, I will also include a few quotable nuggets of advice from notable authors.
Enjoy!
Advice:
- Review first paragraphs for an indication of your point or emphasis.
- Often a topic sentence will provide this sort of content or structure, that is, a connection between individual paragraphs and the whole.
- “Editing means figuring out what you really mean to say, getting it clear in your head, getting it unified, getting it into an organized structure, and then getting it into the best words and throwing away the rest.” Peter Elbow
- Review all sentences for continuity and logic.
- Preview the 3rd C of Style: Connect (which we will also go over in class)
- Review all for flow.
- “To have the necessary momentum, that steady flow that is going to finish the book, you should wait until you feel the story welling up. This comes slowly during the development and plotting period, and you cannot rush it, because it is an emotional process, a sense of emotional completion, as if you felt like saying to yourself one day, ‘This is really a great story, and I can’t wait to tell it!’ Then you start writing.” Patricia Highsmith
- Review all for wordiness and repetition of overlapping content
- The content of the first page of one of your peer’s essays could have been communicated with 25%-40% fewer words. Is that also true for you? Make every word count.
- Review for 1st C of Style: Cut
- “Nothing is less real than realism. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meanings of things.” Georgia O’Keeffe
- Review the organizational strategy of the whole
- If your essay gets good only when we get to the evidence, ask yourself why your reader must wait so long to get to the marvelous engaging parts.
- “I tend to finish my research, clarify my thoughts, and organize my points before I begin writing books and essays. In other words, I judiciously prepare to write. If I haven’t completely finished my preparatory work, and I have to conduct research, clarify, and organize my thoughts while I write, then my writing is not as good. And when my writing is not as good, it is difficult to maintain momentum. It is difficult for me to remain inspired. Good writing inspires good writing.” Ibram X. Kendi
- Make sure your details function as evidence for your point or emphasis.
- Just as claims should be supported by evidence, so must details be connected to claims, emphases, or overall points.
- “Details are the Life of Prose.” Jack Kerouac
- Have all your topic sentences connect meaningfully to your point or thesis.
- Review your essay for unity.
- Make sure the entirety of your essay is about your topic.
- Cut out sections that do not contribute to your point or emphasis.
- “When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.” Stephen King
- Emphasize evidence and exemplification. Show your reader your experiences, rather than just saying that they took place.
- “I don’t think you could become a good writer unless you spend a lot of time immersed in text allowing you to soak up thousands of idioms and constructions and figures of speech and interesting words, to develop a sense of writing at its best. Becoming a writer requires savoring and reverse-engineering examples of good prose, giving you something to aspire to and allowing you to become sensitive to the hundreds of things that go into a good sentence that couldn’t possibly be spelled out one by one.” Steven Pinker
- Necessary categories of evidence include anecdotes / narratives and descriptions. Some essays also include dialogue.
- “There is no ideal length, but you develop a little interior gauge that tells you whether or not you’re supporting the house or detracting from it. When a piece gets too long, the tension goes out of it. That word–tension–has an animal insistence for me. A piece of writing rises and falls with tension. The writer holds one end of the rope and the reader holds the other end–is the rope slack, or is it tight? Does it matter to the reader what the next sentence is going to be?” John Jeremiah Sullivan
If you are in Davis tonight, please join us for the Pub Quiz at Sudwerk. Recruit a team, dress for a winter sunset when the temperature drops five degrees in an hour and a half, and join us at the beautiful outdoor patio where we have room for everyone. The rain is scheduled to have stopped by dinnertime, and the Sudwerk employees will gleefully prepare you room, as the Christmas carol says.
In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on the smell of roses, shorter words than “generative,” new club members, sad garments, neighboring cells, cities of the world, Lilies, famous doctors that are not actually doctors, places to grade, volcano slopes, fast mammals, Monty Python (you are welcome), people named Bob (unless we save that one for a future quiz — hello Bob!), zombies, executive producer candidates, geometry problems, malingerers, trials and tribulations, non-venomous snakes, female leads, national sports, sassy film sequels, iron spikes, medieval fashion choices, available occupations, sudden responses, colorful words with indeterminate syllable counts, current events, books and authors, and Shakespeare.
Thanks to The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, and others who support the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of supporters, those who are alerted to my bonus pub quiz questions on Patreon, such as today’s free question about gold mining and January 24th. I never expect to strike gold with my Patreon earnings, but I do I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine!
Best,
Dr. Andy
P.S. Here are some questions from last week’s quiz:
- Running Backs. Najee Harris plays for what AFC North NFL football team?
- Countries of the World. The official currency of Egypt is the Egyptian dollar, the Egyptian koruna, or the Egyptian pound?
- Know Your American States. The U.S. state with the lowest Covid vaccination rate at 16.1% produces more copper than any other state and is home to professional sports teams in the four major sports. Name the state.