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WritingMD: A Comprehensive Guide to Treating All Your Writing Sicknesses by Winslow’s Writing Warriors of T.O. CORE 111 2 Table of Contents Introduction......................................................4 Chapter 1: Start-up Sickness..........................6 Chapter 2: Clarity Congestion.......................16 Chapter 3: Structural Strep Throat...............24 Chapter 4: Evidence E. Coli..........................38 Chapter 5: Analysis Allergies..........................45 Chapter 6: Boring Writing Boo-Boos...........83 Chapter 7: Mechanical Mono.........................88 Conclusion.........................................................96 Bibliography.......................................................98 3 Introduction Kylie Eiselstein The doctor’s office is a dreadful place. As a child I resented my yearly check-ups at the doctor’s office, as most do, because of the fear of shots, the medicine-y, sterile smell, and the mere inconvenience of it all. Today, I avoid going to the doctor because of the mere inconvenience of it. Life usually gets in the way of a lowly check-up appointment, which are inevitably put off until we get an actual sickness or problem. Of course, when our doctor tells us that our ill condition is preventable, we’re left conflicted: dang it! we say. Why didn’t I just go to my check-up?? Experiences with writing can be much the same way. When we’re faced with a problem, a “writing sickness” – writer’s block, lack of clarity, difficulties with structure – we often learn after we receive our cure that it could have been easily avoided if we had known the proper steps. With writing, the trouble is not so much figuring out that you’re sick; it’s knowing where Dr. Writing is to get medicine, check-ups, and eventually preventative steps in not getting sick again. This book was created by eleven freshmen students at the University of Southern California in their Honors The- matic Option 111 writing course with the intention of creating a source for writers to turn to when they’re plagued with problems. Our concise, short “cures” for the sick- 4 nesses that ail writers are crafted from the knowledge we’ve gained throughout our first semester of college. All of the sicknesses are ones we’ve felt ourselves, whether in the past or present. Throughout our course, we found some helpful remedies and recommendations that we wanted to share with other writers. Unlike other writing books that just tell you to be a better writer, this book seeks to know you problem and then answer it right away. Each sickness is a different aspect of writing. Like going to the doctor to get a cure for a spe- cific illness, you need not read the entire book; just flip to the certain thing that is currently causing you trouble. The book also serves the other side of our doctor analogy: it can be a means for checking-up on yourself. Knowing the cure not only helps your present condition, but it can also allow you to prevent future conditions. So. What’s the reason for your visit today? 5 Chapter 1: Start-up Sickness “The scariest moment is just before you always start.” Take it from Stephen King: starting a new piece of writing, whatever the reason, can be a daunting task. When you’re afflicted with a bad case of Start-up Sickness and simply don’t know how (or why) to begin, there are a couple things to consider that might help resolve the issue. In this section, we’ll try to identify causes, symptoms, and treat- ment methods to get over this first hurdle. Illness: Lack of “Pre-Writing” // Cure: Thinking Well: How a Writer Should Think..........7 Illness: Boring Analysis // Cure: Creative Analytical Writing..........9 Illness: Unsure of Where to Start // Cure: Getting Launched: Sparknotes Edition..........11 Illness: Writing Anxiety // Cure: Getting Started: Draft Zero..........13 6 Thinking Well: How a Writer Should Think Raye Cheng If starting up is giving you the blues, this will help get you in the right mindset. Learn how a writer should think: “Assume that your reader is just waiting for an excuse to tune out.” These words from John Trimble will completely transform the way in which you write. In his book Writing with Style, which has become an almost holy text in our writing class, Trimble introduces writing by first explaining how a writer should think. Too often, we write by merely putting our own thoughts down on paper. Trimble calls this “unconscious writing” as there is no intentionality in writing for an audience. After all, the point of writing is to provide new knowledge or persuade our readers of what we’re writing about. If there is no thought into how our reader will receive our text, we are not serving our readers and we do an injustice to our own writing. So how does one write to serve their reader? First off, consider ourselves. When we read, what keeps us engaged? Why do certain writings catch our attention? And how is that achieved? Reflecting on our own readings provides insight into how our readers might perceive our 7 work. At the core of Trimble’s book, Trimble challenges us to be other-oriented - to think of our readers and not ourselves while we write. Referring back to the original quote, Trimble asserts that readers are “just waiting for an excuse to tune out.” It is our responsibility and challenge as writers to not give readers that excuse, and Trimble elucidates how we can achieve that through empathy. When writing, or even thinking of writing, we must always be conscious of how we are serving our readers’ needs through our work. Here is a general guideline: 1. Phrase your thoughts clearly so you’re easy to follow 2. Speak to the point so you don’t waste your reader’s time. 3. Anticipate their reactions (boredom, confusion, fatigue, irritation). 4. Offer them variety and wit to lighten their work. 5. Talk to them in a warm, open manner instead of pontificating to them like a know-it-all Serving our readers entails being explicit about our thoughts and explaining the reasoning behind the thoughts. We must illustrate how our reasoning supports our claims in a way that is easily comprehensible by our readers while anticipating their responses and catering to those reactions. Varying our writing style, sentence structure, or diction are useful ways to keep readers enticed for the entirety of our writing. Most importantly, every human likes being treated as such, and doing our best to extend that empathy will go a long way not just in real life interactions, but through our writing too. 8 Creative Analytical Writing Raye Cheng Another cure for Start-up Sickness is to add creativity to your analytical writing. For most, formulaic analytical writing has domi- nated academic papers for the entirety of our education. We’ve learned how to structure a paper with an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. We’ve learned that we should have two to three pieces of evidence to support our claims. We’ve learned a rigid frame- work of writing that we should abide by, yet in doing so, one can argue that we’ve learned to write as machines. Personally, I hear many complaints from students wishing there were more creative writing assignments - assignments in which we could write about what we want to write about how we want to write about it. Though I won’t say that we should casually disregard the writing assignments at hand, I will argue that we can still find a way to channel this inner creativity within our formal analytical assignments. I defer once again to Trimble. In Chapter 6 of his book Writing with Style, Trimble agrees that writing can be “an intensively creative, pleasurable activity.” Further, he states “we all have imaginations; the trick is to use them.” Indeed, we often forget when we write that imagination and creativity are ingrained in us. We crave to express this creativity only to be embittered when we encounter the perceived restrictions of analytical writing, and thus, we relegate ourselves to the customary formulaic writing we’ve 9 been taught for years. But what if it is possible to be creative within analytical writing? Admittedly, there will naturally be a sense of con- straint in any given assignment, but it is possible to let our imagination flow within the context of these restrictions. Our chief concern in any writing is to educate and persuade our audience, and releasing our creativity is certainly a means of making our work more enticing and memo- rable to achieve this end. This creativity can manifest in the adjectives that we choose. Is he menacing, terrifying, or simply bad? It can manifest in the verbs that we choose. Did she weep, mourn, or cry? This creativity can even be expressed through whole ideas and phrases, not just single words. Trimble challenges us to “always be thinking in terms of ‘like.’ Such-and-such is like--what?” Truly embracing this challenge is when our imagination and creativity can run free. We can add depth to our analysis by creating our own analogies for the ideas we are trying to convey. Take my writing of this post, for example. I could say: I let my imagination and creativity run free as I write. Or I could say: I unleashed the inner child within me, allowing my child- like imagination to frolic through an expansive field of words. Though perhaps a little more wordy, the second sentence captures the essence of my writing more accurately than the first and illustrates a clearer visual for readers to un- 10 derstand my writing process.

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