Posted 3:59 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025
Writing in English Studies
The Write Here, Write Now blog invites writers from the University of Wisconsin and La Crosse communities to respond to a series of questions that shed light on their writing lives. As readers of the blog will discover, learning to write is an ongoing, life-long process and all writers, from first-year students to career professionals, benefit from reflecting on the writing process and sharing that process with others.
Name and Title: Dr. Virginia Crank, Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center
Department, Speciality Area, and Classes Typically Taught: I am in the English Department, and I specialize in writing pedagogy: teaching writing and the teaching of writing. I teach first-year writing (ENG 100 and ENG 110), Introduction to English Studies (ENG 300), Writing, Genre, and Style (ENG 313), and Intro to Teaching Writing (ENG 433).
Current Writing Project: Because I'm retiring, Dr. Thoune asked me to give the keynote address at the College Writing Symposium this year. So, for the past month or so, I've been working on that -- a script and visual presentation reflecting on my career as a writing teacher, specifically in first-year writing. I've been digging through files and materials from the last 37+ years to trace how innovations in the field of Rhetoric and Composition have been reflected in changes to my first-year writing courses. My audience is a mixed group, but mostly students in ENG 100 and ENG 110, so I've spent a lot of time thinking about what might interest them.
1. What are you currently reading?
I am an avid novel reader, and I just finished reading This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub, and I've just started on The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I've also been dipping in and out of two non-fiction books: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman and Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up by James Hollis.
2. What type(s) of writing do you regularly engage in?
The great majority of my writing is related to teaching. I write assignments, I write schedules, I write class plans and handouts, I write responses to student writing, I write emails, I write recommendation letters, I write to-do lists. I also do a lot of admin-type writing, like meeting notes, reports, by-laws and policies, tutor schedules, etc. This semester, I've also been writing up procedures and informational guides related to the Writing Center to share with the next Writing Center Director.
3. When/where/how do you write? What are your “writing necessities”?
I can sort of write anywhere; I carry a small notebook with me so that I can jot down ideas if I'm out and about. Mostly, I write on either the computer in my UWL office or the computer in my home office. I used to write really smoothly and quickly by hand when I was a student and younger teacher, but now I find that I feel most comfortable writing on a keyboard. I guess that's the tool that helps me write the most -- a full-size desktop computer keyboard. Other than that, I think my greatest "necessity" is just a bit of empty time; if I have even just fifteen minutes of unscheduled time, I can sit down and get some good writing done. In fact, sometimes the most words pour out of me when I have a defined block of time available, like just an hour. If I have a whole day free to write, I can get really wound up in the thinking or researching part of the process and end up without very many words on the page. Those are important parts of writing, too, but sometimes I'm grateful for the deadline or the time constraint.
4. What's the best writing advice you've received?
I had a professor in grad school who pushed me to be a better writer by saying, "Don't just take me on a tour of the topic; say something." I had been getting by with good, clear writing that was occasionally superficial in its analysis -- like, I'd drop an interesting claim but then not unpack it -- and she pushed me to think more about the "so what?" factor.
Because I'm a writing teacher, I've read tons and tons of research and advice about writing, and all of that has accumulated in my head -- things like, just keep writing; don't edit too early; think about your audience but not too early in the process; use your authentic voice; be okay with the process being messy; get feedback from readers early and often; write with passion and edit with detachment; trust that you have something to say; reread your work a lot; read your work out loud.
5. How does your discipline, background, and/or life experiences affect your writing style?
I think, as I said above, that being a teacher/scholar who studies writing, I've just been thinking about writing every day for my whole adult life. How do people write? What's their process? How do they make choices? How are those choices influenced by circumstances outside them and by memories and feelings inside them? What makes someone unable to write? How does writing work? What does it do? Being a part of that disciplinary conversation influences how I write, and not just in content but also in style. Many Writing Studies scholars write in a very natural middle style, so their theories and research are accessible and pleasant to read, and I think that has also affected how I write.
I guess a big part of my writing style must also be a result of spending so many years writing so many things for audiences outside my scholarly field: students, fellow teachers, administrators. Writing clearly and engagingly is really important for making complex ideas easy to understand. We can't be effective if no one cares to read our work.
And of course, there is the long-known truth that someone who reads a lot writes better. I've been reading for hours every day since I was ten years old; I had to have picked some things up along the way!
6. What is your best tip for getting started and/or for revision? How do you avoid writer’s block?
For getting started, the best thing to do is just do it. Make yourself jot down some initial ideas or questions, in any format or style, as soon as you get the assignment prompt (or the jolt of inspiration). Then, any time you have any thought about the writing task, write it down -- even if it's just a question. Once you have a document started -- even a document that's just a bunch of disconnected ideas or phrases -- it's so much easier to keep going back and tinkering with it. And, above all else, don't strive for perfection; just get the words and ideas out.
7. What do you think students need to know about academic writing?
There's no one type of writing that you'll do for college; there's no monolithic "college writing" that will serve you universally. All writing happens in discourse communities (groups of people who share particular ways of talking and writing about the ideas and topics they share interest in), so you have to learn what writing DOES in that discourse community and then figure out what the expectations are for it. So, you have to learn how to write like a historian, or how to write like a chemist, or how to write like a recreational therapist, and you'll learn all these various ways of writing in those classes and on the job.