If you teach writing, you should write.
Composition professor Maxine Hairston offered this "elementary but radical insight" in an article published 25 years ago in the journal Rhetoric Review. "The writing teacher who doesn't write," she said, "is in no more position to diagnose difficulties and offer advice than a soccer coach who has never played soccer."
But Hairston acknowledged that this basic principle can be difficult to put into practice. After all, serious writing demands hard work, and the all-consuming job of teaching students how to write leaves faculty with little time for their own writing.
Yet it can be done, she insisted. And despite the inevitable frustrations, the effort to write can be exhilarating and rewarding.
To encourage teachers (and, by extension, all would-be writers), Hairston provided these 10 practical suggestions:
- Start small.
Reduce the risk and ease your anxieties by starting with a piece of nonacademic writing. Offer to do the newsletter for your homeowners' association or for the local chapter of the Sierra Club. You're guaranteed an interested audience, and it will get you started producing something. . . . - Write from interest.
[B]rainstorm to find some professional issue or hobby that you would really like to write about rather than try to think up some new angle on a currently popular topic. When you are trying to get started writing, you don't need the extra handicap of working on a topic that bores you. . . . - Trust your subconscious to generate material for you.
Remember that your subconscious has stored a wealth of material for you to harvest through the act of writing, and finding out what is in that storehouse is one of the joys of writing. . . . - Don't take beginnings too seriously.
Write anything in order to lay down tracks to run on, as James Britton calls it. Words are cheap and you know lots of them--you can throw them away if they don't turn out right. . . . - Start out with low standards.
Expect to stumble along, having a hard time finding the words you want and not liking much of what comes out. Don't despise those banal phrases and lifeless sentences. You can come back and tinker with them later. . . . - Expect to be slow.
Be satisfied to do a little at a time. If you finish only one paragraph or page in an hour or a morning, that's one more paragraph or page than you had when you started. . . . - Make yourself write at certain times every week or turn out a certain number of pages even if you don't have a specific project.
Don't worry if you don't see any immediate form or purpose--just work with your words for a while to see what is going to happen. . . . - Get help from your friends.
Try to form a writing community of three or four people who want to write and help each other by brainstorming for ideas and commenting on each other's drafts. . . . Even if you can't get together a writing group, find at least one fellow writer to give you feedback. - Don't berate yourself about occasional spells of procrastination.
Almost all writers have them, and they can actually be productive if you don't let yourself panic. . . Give yourself a day or two of rest and start again. The words will come. - Have confidence in yourself.
You are an educated and intelligent person with something to say and the tools to express yourself. You have only to pick up some of the journals or thumb through feature sections of the paper to see that people with no more talent or resources than you are managing to write and get published. It's not that hard. It takes staying power more than anything else.
Hairston spent her entire teaching career at the University of Texas at Austin and, among other leadership roles, served as chair of the Conference of College Composition and Communication. She wrote several major textbooks, including Successful Writing (now in its fifth edition), and in 2002 some of her former graduate students published Against the Grain: A Volume in Honor of Maxine Hairston (Hampton Press). She died on July 22, 2005, at the age of 83.
