Well-chosen words influence worlds. They move governments, shape wars, and stir hearts. Conversely, a haphazard approach to words negates potential impact. Dull knives don’t cut cleanly. They must be sharpened and resharpened. Words must be written and rewritten.
In this essay, I argue that high school students should build the habit of self-editing their written work for three reasons. First, excellent outcomes depend on intentional actions or habits. Second, excellence in writing requires self-editing. Finally, expert writers model self-editing. Teachers should embrace these three drivers as they help students develop this critical skill. Like a coach helping an athlete reach the next level of performance, teachers can help students reach the next level of excellent writing.
The Great Conversation
We can safely assume that editing has always accompanied writing. Frustrated writers have discarded stone, crumpled paper, and slammed computers. Both professional writers seeking publication and amateur authors seeking an A in English know the grief and groans of searching for the right word. Hemingway admitted that he rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times, but the figure is believed to be even higher (“Ernest Hemingway”). I’m currently editing a printed copy of this essay with a red pen in hand while waiting in a car shop. I doubt I’m the first or the last.
Our digital age has not produced better writers.
Our digital age has not produced better writers. Penmanship pundits bemoan the writing of today’s teenagers. Illegible handwriting combined with poor sentence structure frustrates exhausted educators and worries watching parents. Michael Carter and Heather Harper lament, “Unfortunately, a slew of empirical studies conducted over the past thirty years have provided ample evidence that those who believe that writing continues to decline are indeed correct” (285). Students need the skill of self-editing. And they need teachers who will help them develop the skill.
Excellent Outcomes Depend on Intentional Actions or Habits
Habits matter. Logan Fiorella, professor of educational psychology, exposes the power of habits in academic work: “Many academic . . . outcomes depend on frequently repeating the same behaviors in the same contexts (e.g., reading, studying, sleeping, exercising, or healthy eating). This suggests habits, in addition to motivation and metacognition, play a critical role in student self-regulation” (611). Student success and excellence require intentional habits.
This shouldn’t surprise most teenagers. Student athletes understand that excelling at a sport requires regularly showing up to practice. Musical teenagers know that skill demands practice. Excellence in every field, artistic, athletic, or academic, depends on purposeful repetition and practice.
Excellence in every field, artistic, athletic, or academic, depends on purposeful repetition and practice.
Excellence in Writing Requires Self-Editing
In writing, practice may take the form of self-editing. Students grade their own work with the teacher’s eagle eye and red pen. No page skipped and no ink spared. They critique essays and paragraphs, sentences and word choice. Self-editing is the act of editing your own work in preparation for submission. This self-induced scrutiny sharpens the written work.
Consider one mark of excellent writing: clarity. Students lacking clarity stumble over their words and ramble through a speech. They reach a word count without ever making a point. Writing expert William Zinsser warns, “Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other” (8). Thus, students must pursue clarity in their thinking and writing. They go hand in hand. Zinsser explains, “The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest component” (6). Similarly, Brandon O’Brien, the director of content development for Redeemer City to City ministry network, advises, “For the sake of clarity and your own sanctification, I recommend you delete all the words you can” (106). He provides practical ideas: simplify redundancies, beware of prepositional phrases, trust your verbs, and ruthlessly eliminate jargon (106–7). Unnecessary parts of a written work are unhelpful parts of a written work.
Clear writing powerfully communicates the author’s thoughts and serves the reader. Professor Belle Rose Ragins explains,
The beauty of clear writing is that it creates nearly effortless reading . . . for the reader. Clear writing may be elegant, but it is never pretentious. The goal is not to show the reader how smart you are but, rather, to take the reader with you on a journey that is clear, logical, and direct. Clear writing is about writing simply, but it is not simplistic. (494)
Such writing requires self-editing. After pushing keys or putting letters on paper, the author takes the time to examine what they have written with the reader in mind. Jumbled thoughts don’t become clear merely by being written. Clear words emerge through the process of revision and rewriting. Further, clarity matters to Christian students as they seek to communicate the truth. Author Andrew T. Le Peau warns, “Without a rigorous commitment to clarity we . . . fail in an important way. We fail to tell the truth straightforwardly” (83). Christian students put in the work of self-editing as an act of love for their neighbor-reader and love for the truth.
Teachers, Set Your Students Up for Self-Editing
The natural bent of most students is more likely to finish, submit, sleep, repeat.
Students who write as an act of love need teachers to help them fine tune this discipline. Self-editing rarely comes naturally. The natural bent of most students is more likely to finish, submit, sleep, repeat. Who has time or energy to self-edit?
But teachers draw the best out of their students. This is one of the chief joys of teaching. We get a front row seat when the light bulb turns on and the student finds a subject they love. We get to fan into flame the educational embers that just might grow into a passion or a career. Many of our heroes credit a teacher for the early stages of their love for learning a given topic.
So, teachers, are you setting your students up for self-editing? Are you helping them understand the difference between the right word and the almost right word? Are you confronting them with the intentional word choice of the apostle Paul and Athanasius and Augustine and Martin Luther? One way we can do this is to continually introduce them to great writers.
Expert Writers Model Self-Editing
Expert writers model self-editing. These prose pros have enough self-awareness to know that their first draft won’t be the final draft. They’ve embraced the process of self-editing, and we get to enjoy the fruit of their labor. They chose not to serve the first meal they cooked, and most of us are thankful for their restraint. Stephen King, C. S. Lewis, and Anne Lamott provide helpful examples of self-editing.
Stephen King is known for terrifying readers with words. To do so, he revises. King explains,
I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day . . . fifty the day after that . . . and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. (125, emphasis his)
King amends a catchphrase: “To write is human, to edit is divine” (13). Editing is not only divine but difficult. King commands, “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings” (222). Editing requires verbose writers to pick up the surgeon’s scalpel and get to work. It will hurt. It may feel like death. But only the sharpened knife cuts. King recalls feedback he received as a senior in high school: “Not bad, but puffy. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd draft = 1st draft – 10%” (222). This is a formula that may prove helpful for high school writers.
Christian writer C. S. Lewis also emphasizes the importance of self-editing. In 1959, C. S. Lewis advised a young writer, “Take great pains to be clear. Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn’t, and a single ill-chosen word may lead him to a total misunderstanding” (4). A single word can derail the communication process. This means that we must print out our work, grab our red pen, and examine every word. You can’t scroll your way to effective editing.
Lewis further drew a connection between clear writing and clear thinking:
You must translate every bit of your theology into the vernacular. This is very troublesome, and it means you say very little in half an hour, but it is essential. It is also of the greatest service to your own thought. I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning. (122)
American novelist and writing instructor Anne Lamott both practices and preaches self-editing. She knows that first drafts are rarely, if ever, final drafts. Lamott explains,
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy. (24)
Lewis calls us to examine every word and Lamott calls us to examine every tooth. The experts agree: every word matters. In light of Lammot’s insight, high school students should determine never to submit an unedited first draft. If it’s the first draft, you know it isn’t good. That’s okay. What’s not okay is to submit it without serious self-editing.
The experts agree: every word matters.
Counterarguments
Some—particularly educators aware of clocks and calendars—might argue that requiring students to complete self-editing exercises would take too much time. We need to cover the following ten chapters before the marking period ends. We have standardized tests looming. Who has time for a second or third round of self-edits? Requiring self-editing exercises indeed adds another task to an already full pedagogical plate. However, the conversation regarding quality versus quantity deserves consideration. This is an abridged version of this article. To read more, subscribe to Christian Educators Journal.
Dr. Jeff Mingee (DMin, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) serves churches in southeast Virginia with the SBC of Virginia. He teaches Rhetoric as well as Research and Writing at Covenant Classical Community School in Hampton, Va. Jeff has authored several books including Digital Dominion: Five Questions Christians Should Ask to Take Control of Their Digital Devices. Jeff and his wife Lauren live in Newport News with their son, Carter. His oldest son, Aiden, is at West Point USMA in New York.
Works Cited
Carter, Michael J., and Heather Harper. “Student Writing: Strategies to Reverse Ongoing Decline.” Academic Questions, vol. 26, no. 3, 2013, pp. 285–95, doi.10.1007/s12129-013-9377-0.
Clear, James. Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results; An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones. Avery, 2018.
“Ernest Hemingway: 47 Farewell to Arms Endings Published.” BBC, July 10, 2012, www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-18769231#:~:text=Hemingway%20famously%20revealed%20that%20he,campaigns%20of%20World%20War%20I.
Fiorella, Logan. “The Science of Habit and Its Implications for Student Learning and Well-Being.” Educational Psychology Review, vol. 32, no. 3, 2020, pp. 603–25, doi.org/10.1007/s10648-020-09525-1.
Gibson, Richard Hughes, and James Beitler III. Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words. InterVarsity, 2020.
King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: Contributions from Joe Hill and Owen King. 20th ed., Scribner, 2020.
Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. 2nd ed., Anchor Books, 2019.
Le Peau, Andrew T. Write Better: A Lifelong Editor on Craft, Art, and Spirituality. IVP Academic, 2019.
Lewis, C. S. On Writing (and Writers): A Miscellany of Advice and Opinions, edited by David C. Downing. HarperOne, 2022.
O’Brien, Brandon J. Writing for Life and Ministry: A Practical Guide to Writing for Publication. Moody, 2020.
Ragins, Belle Rose, ed. “Editor’s Comments: Reflections on the Craft of Clear Writing.” Academy of Management Review, vol. 37, no. 4, 2012, pp. 493–501, doi.org/10.5465/amr.2012.0165.
Zinsser, William. On Writing Well: The Classical Guide to Writing Nonfiction. 7th ed., Collins, 2021.
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