Writing to Perform versus Writing to Communicate

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Figuring out What to Say and How to Say It, and Why You Shouldn’t do Both at the Same Time

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Fun with Footnotes

This post has given me some trouble—partly because it’s a very big topic with a lot to cover and I didn’t know what to include or cut out, but also partly because I think my other posts already touch on this in some way or other. That said, the connection between this and my older posts might only be so obvious in my head, so this might be worth mentioning on its own.

When talking with students, I often find myself summing up essay-writing—or what it is, or what it’s about, or something similar—like this: you’re telling me stuff, and you’re telling me why you think that stuff (1).

You could probably phrase this much more formally: something like “expressing in clear terms your original thoughts on an important matter.” I like to keep it simple, though, because I try to demonstrate in the definition the very thing that I’m trying to get students to do: communicate, not perform.

Lots of first-year students (and older students, too) seem to regard writing for their professor like a performance of some kind, as if they have to get everything right or “correct.” They often worry that they have to make a choice between writing something that interests them and writing something that will get a good grade. What they fail to realize is that writing earnestly and thoughtfully about something that interests them usually is the way to get a good grade.

It’s a sort of tension between form and substance. Students worry that they need to get the form just right, but they don’t realize that the form can only fall into place in the process of trying to convey the substance.

To put it another way, here’s a piece of advice I have given (probably literally) hundreds of times: never worry about what to say and how to say it at the same time (2).

By “what to say,” I mean the ideas you’re actually trying to convey to the person to whom you’re writing. By “how to say it,” I mean the actual words, paragraph structure, sentences—i.e., the form—that you’re using to convey what you’re saying.

Do not try to figure out both of these at the same time when you are writing an essay. Each one is a very complicated thing.

Take the what to say part. As I mentioned in my post on separating out your ideas, the ideas that you’re working with in college essays are not simple. It will take basically all of your concentration to work out the shape of those ideas in your head.

And as for the how to say it part…well, how many people do you know who, when they open their mouths, know every word that’s going to come out?

To everyone whose answer is “None,” I say, “Yeah, me too.”

To everyone whose answer is “One,” I say, “That sounds like a very impressive person.”

And to everyone whose answer is “Two or more,” I say, “Liar.”

The point is that figuring out how to say things is also going to take up pretty much all of your concentration. And that means that, if you’re trying to figure out what to say and how to say it at the same time, then you’re trying to do two things at once, each of which requires all of your concentration.

So…good luck with that.

Now, how does this tie into the whole “writing to communicate” versus “writing to perform” divide? Well, I find that when students are obsessing over how to say things before they’ve even figured out what they’re trying to say, they’re often doing so because they think that they’re job in writing an essay is fundamentally to put on some kind of academic performance or show. They’re trying to appear as if they’re fully fledged academics (whatever that means).

This means that these students don’t let themselves do the bad writing that is a prerequisite to good writing. In their heads, there’s no reason to put down any words that don’t sound academic, because the whole point is writing an essay the checks the boxes of what an essay should look like. Meanwhile, the real and interesting ideas that these students have—the ideas that most professors actually want to hear—never get worked out thoroughly. In short, the student is too focused on figuring out how to say things that he never pays enough attention to what he’s actually trying to say in the first place.

Below is a short dialogue that represents a conversation I’ve had with quite possibly hundreds of students. It’s a sort of aggregated or generalized version of the conversation, but the variation from one student to the next is often startlingly small (3).

Me: What’s your thesis statement?

Student [eyes glazed over, trancelike]: By comparing the two texts by the authors… No, by evaluating the effects of literary devices in the texts by…

Me: Okay, stop. Look…what are you trying to tell me?

Student: Oh, just that when you look at these two texts together, you can see that one of them is employing the same devices as the other, but it’s just using them for different purposes.

Me: Okay…why not write that?

Student [after a stunned pause]: Oh.

To be fair to the students, here, I am pulling a bit of a trick when I do this, if only to help them see what I’m trying to get them to see. By first asking for their “thesis statement”–such a loaded term, isn’t it?–I’m trying to trigger their performing habit. Then, by just asking them, in a more casual tone, what they’re “trying to tell me,” I’m hoping to get them to shift mindsets into just explaining to me…well, what they’re trying to tell me. After all, that’s all a thesis statement is.

The point of doing this is to show students that if they come at their writing in a spirit of performing, they’ll get bunched up as they focus too much on how to say things. By contrast, if they come at their writing in a spirit of communication, the form will fall into place. In other words, you’re actually getting in the way of sounding good if you worry about sounding good first. This is why you shouldn’t go around putting carts before horses; neither the horse nor the cart can go anywhere like that.

And, really, this touches on one of the biggest secrets of writing that no one is actually trying to keep a secret, but which everyone who knows it is apparently terrible at sharing: bad writing is a prerequisite to good writing. Or, as I like to say it, all writing sucks before it’s done (4). In the dialogue above, the actual phrasing that the student came up with when he was just trying to communicate might not be great academic prose, but he can work with it. Moreover, that talked-out phrasing will probably be a hell of a lot closer to great academic prose than what he wrote down when he was obsessing over writing great academic prose.

Does this mean that things like good grammar and style are pointless? Of course not (5). What it means is that, although grammar and style are necessary considerations, they should be your second concern. Your first concern is figuring out what you’re trying to say in the first place.  

Anyways, the moral of the story is that you should bother your roommate into letting you explain your essay ideas to him/her. Turns out that people are much better at using language to communicate when they’re actually trying to use language to communicate, instead of to perform.

Footnotes

(1) This is the most important line in the entire post. Now stop dawdling down in the footnotes and get back to reading…unless you’ve already finished, in which case what are you still doing here?

(2) Yes, I bolded this line, because it’s the most important line in the entire post.

(3) This happens all the time, especially in writing center conferences. One of the things I’ve had to do as a tutor over the years is figure out very condensed ways of communicating complex writing lessons, given that the average writing center conference is only an hour. This little trick is one of the oldest and most reliable I’ve come up with. I like it particularly because it gets the student to notice the shift in their own mindset as it happens. Like I mention in the post on separating out your ideas, one of the difficult aspects of a lot of writing-thinking problems is that you don’t notice they’re even happening. This little maneuver is designed to force students to notice the difference in how they feel when they’re trying to sound good versus just trying to communicate.

(4) Yep, bolded that line, too. It’s the most important one in the entire post.

(5) Nor does it mean that you should take any grammar errors on this blog post as an excuse to be lazy in your own essays. If you want the privilege of publishing essays without thoroughly proofreading them, pay for your own WordPress blog.