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Min-Zhan Lu’s
Shanghai Quartet, one of the books we’ll use for this course
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Writing Takes Practice. . .
 O.K., you think,
I can write, and I’ll do it well when I need to. But good writing takes a lot of
practice. And here’s the rub: as you advance in your curriculum and your
career, your writing tasks will become more challenging. Remember the joke about receiving
merchandise that requires a degree in engineering to assemble? Remember those computer manuals that make
sense only to folks who don’t need to read them?
Good writing in any
field takes commitment to high standards.
It takes discipline. In college
(as in the “real world”), deadlines sneak up.
It’s tempting to do work at the last minute, to do just enough to get
by, to turn in something with errors because you feel that it will be “good
enough for a grade.” Think of the
practice you’re getting if this is the way you’re operating: you’re learning to procrastinate, to
produce a sloppy product with a minimum effort, to just get by. These are hardly credentials you want to
take to an employer (imagine that
letter of recommendation!) Instead,
you’ll want to learn how to break a complex writing task into manageable
parts, how to save enough time to perfect
your presentation down to the individual word and sentence. That’s what we expect you to do in ENG
102. Hard work? Absolutely. But then again, nobody said that graduating
from college and receiving a professional degree would be easy.
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