Write regularly yes, but quantity does not lead inherently to quality. You have to hold a higher and then higher standard for what’s good
back
1 comments
I disagree. If you're putting effort into writing, writing often and on new themes/ideas is much more likely to lead to better habits and learning to write more effectively.
It's like drawing 100 one hour drawings vs one 100 hour drawings - same effort in terms of time but you're far more likely to learn how to be a better artist by learning to start quickly and progress further each time within the given amount of time. The traditional way of learning to draw is often subdivided into multiple 2 minute, 5 minute, 15 minute, and then longer form practice pieces. You can learn to start an artwork more efficiently with just two minute sketches that you would never get to practice if you only did long effort works.
Writing more often is even better than that, since you develop better habits compared to writing less often. It's like drawing 100 one hour drawings vs one 25 hour drawing, instead. Consistently practicing as often as you can be productive for is how you learn skills of all kinds.
Not really disagreeing- just stressing that there is a large literature on what’s called expert performance, which shows a powerful function for what they call deliberate practice. Stressing the explicit effort to get better. Not like some who play golf for 40 years yet never improve.
I think my point is that practice should stress 'deliberate practice' but also consistency, frequency, and also quantity. less deliberate practice is going to be worse than more deliberate practice. deliberate practice doesn't preclude quantity, and in fact quantity is a good measure of your ability to put out words.
I'd rather get 500-1000 words an hour and go back to edit, than get 250 perfect words that I'm likely going to have to go back and edit anyways. The standard you talked about is related to the final draft, and the product of writing is rarely the product of the first unedited draft. Quantity has a very large value in learning to write.
One very poor practice in higher ed and universities is that people rarely go through an editorial process where they can see how much early drafts can be improved through re-writes. So students write 100 essays, submitted and graded, with not a single polished work. At least that was my experience as a student and teacher
The idea of draft and edit was taught to me in high school but my high school english teacher was an author so perhaps they had better insight than most english teachers - I can't say since I only had the one teacher and they knew how to write.
I think in university the issue becomes largely one of limited time and effort budget. I was an engineering major and took some economics courses for a minor (which I never got in the end) that involved essay writing. The issue wasn't that I didnt know i could improve it by editing, it's that each piece of homework competes against each other piece of homework for time and attention. The goal is 'how good can I make it in the time I can justify putting towards it'.
I'm sure I made some boneheaded errors in some of my work but I was already doing 'homework triage' and leaving the least valuable but time consuming assignments to when I might be able to get to them.
Writing a work you intend to publish rather than submit to a teacher is a different exercise. It's hard to practice in an environment where you're already racing the clock to get your 4-6 hours of homework out of the way each night.