The Write Fit

Some time ago I wrote about writing and the problems of not planning and how planning is, well, a boring task. I am not sure why so many of us have so little respect for the planning process, unless it reflects the alienation created by education, which too often is perceived to be an irrelevant process for the person made to undergo it. Perhaps we find it more fun to run into a battle, swinging our club around and hoping that we will hit our target, and therefore education and planning are both irrelevant and not fun, consuming time better used in watching television.

I once saw a video that showed one should always use colours for the plan, a different colour for each major branch, but I do not have any coloured pens or pencils and surely the colours indicate that I have already finalised the links between the elements of the plan, which is often not true until the plan is being utilised. Still, while the colours might be fun for some people, it does not grab me. Another video described using images on a plan, which is a good idea except their little cute images on their perfect plan were off putting because they were beyond my skill. I like idea or images, and it reminds me of one the planning packs I use on my students consisting of about 25 photographs of combine harvesters which they have to use to produce a plan from.

The main block seems not to be the methods of planning, of which there are many choices, but in the fact that it is so darn hard to get anyone else interested in your plans. 'Pooh' you can read on their faces 'what's the point in playing with that, I have better things to do'. We believe plans are boring, low value tasks, and therefore that is what they become.

Intuitive planning is where we know what we want to say, and have an idea how much page space we will need to achieve it. Sadly, getting our ideas to the right size takes practice, and many exam candidates fail to get their texts to fit and overrun the word count limit. Other related skills include the ability to drop ideas, no matter how fond we are of them, if they will take too long to describe or detract in some way from the rest of the text. If, for example, I had a great idea concerning planning that involved my cat and spent half this text describing that then the thrust of the text would change, becoming 'the cat technique of planning' rather than 'concepts relating to getting a text to fit on-the-fly'. Of course, if we are writing for our own amusement or for our own book, then we can change what the text is about because who is going to be even slightly interested in our original plan?

My planning involves having constant access to a small pad of paper and a pen, or an email account, or even the notes section of my mobile phone if I get really desperate. When that stray thought comes through, or the text feels like it is drifting off too far from my intention, I make a note of the thought and add it to the growing pile I have of them. Planning for one text, therefore, begins while I am doing something else, and begins to take shape in my subconscious as I compare it with other notes until a trigger situation happens when I remember the note - or I dig through my memory box of notes looking for something interesting.

Once the hot flush of inspiration has drained away and we are left alone with our text, now comes the time to read through it again. I used to hate this proofing check, and once when I was still at college I 'forgot' to do it and so failed to notice I had not added the figure numbers anywhere in the report. My lecturer was not impressed. I guess I did not want to go through the club waving exercise a second time, could they not see the dead body lying on the ground, was that not enough? The breakthrough happened when I started to write for my pleasure, I actually began to enjoy reading what I had written because it was sometimes funny and often more profound than I remember when I wrote it. Now other people seemed to like it, heh, so maybe it was worth crafting the text so that there were no embarrassing typos. it is worth remembering that it takes less time to read than it does to write, the effort of trying to wrestle that idea into a sentence can mean that you miss some poor grammar or fail to get the current sentence to match the previous one you wrote a few minutes ago.

Computers also help as they can help fix many problems with grammar and spelling, and you can always ignore their advice. Even my web browser, on which I am typing this, delicately underlines all the words it believes to be miss-spelled. I meet many people, from man-on-the-street to translator who pooh-pooh the grammar and spelling checkers, listing the the one time when it offered the wrong choice or suggested something that was wrong (in their opinion), like they never made a mistake. As a professional proofreader, he said, straightening up in his chair, I can generally tell who manually checks their texts and who uses at least the spelling checker - because those who rely totally on their eyes miss so many things. I recommend always using the checker for anything you will publish or want people to be impressed by, not as a replacement for manual checking but to check if you missed anything. It cannot find everything, but if it finds a pile of errors, then perhaps you are too tired to finish the job now and should continue tomorrow.

Some day someone might manage to combine a cheap touch sensitive screen with some software that evaluates the plan you draw out on it, and recreate it as the final linear one you need to write the text, maybe opening convenient text boxes next to each part of the plan where you can type in the idea in its final form. It might even be me, at which point do not be surprised if someone breaks into your local supermarket and steals the touch sensitive screen from the checkout till.