A Common Enemy

Based off a few of my TA meetings with students and the last blog post, I've concluded that we create enemies out of things we don't understand or have some sort of personal connection or value to.

Writing doesn’t have to be your enemy.

One of my first meetings as a TA, a student came, plopped down in the chair next to me and said, "Can I just say how ridiculous I think this is. The teacher grades so that there is no way you can get a good grade the first time through, making it so I have to come in here."
I didn't quite know how to handle this. So I tried to reassure him that this whole revision process was going to be useful.
Weeks down the road, during our last conference, he said "I see how this can be beneficial. Sitting down with someone to figure out what's wrong with the paper is like having your own personalized grader. It's hard for the teacher to make all the grades for their students fair, but having someone help you one on one focuses more on each person’s needs."
I was stunned when I saw this person's transformation. I asked him a few questions to find out more of how he felt about the whole process. The conversation basically concluded with the idea that he always thought writing was annoying and not for him. But now he feels like it has purpose, and that it doesn't have to be a horrible experience.

One key point to this story is that he found a personal way to connect to writing. Hopefully the revision process can do this for you. If you don't understand, find some way to make writing important, meaningful, and/or useful in your life, and it won't be so bad.