A students writing process is the makeup of everything they do and concludes with the final product which is their finished piece of writing. However, just because the piece of writing is finished does not mean the writing process is finished. Failure during the writing process leads to much better writing and to an advancement in the writer’s ability to produce work. Throughout this course revision has been a key concept that continues to appear, and rightfully so. In Donald Murray’s Teach Writing as a Process Not Product, he details the rewriting, redesigning, and rethinking of a piece after it has originally been “finished”. Although this is a main part of the process, Murray states that there is an end to this process, “There must be time for the writing process to take place and time for it to end. The writer must work within the stimulating tension of unpressured time to think and dream and stare out windows, and pressured time the deadline to which the writer must deliver,” (Murray 21). However, I believe failure in the writing process does not end but leads into the writing process for whatever comes next. Having been influenced by other students in the class, the writing process to me is influenced by all of our experiences which includes all of our failures. This means that our failures in writing are especially important in shaping the writer we become; the end of one project leads into the start of the next no matter how long there is between.
Linda Adler-Kassner & Elizabeth Wardle describe failure perfectly in Naming What We Know, “One of the most important things students can learn is that failure is an opportunity for growth,”(Adler-Kassner and Wardle 185). I could not agree more with this, in writing as well as many other aspects of life, failure sticks in your mind much longer than success. As an athlete, I can barely remember the plays I have made to win games for my team but can recount in excruciating detail the fewer times that I have lost games or embarrassed myself making a mistake. Although the pain can be hard to deal with, if taken the right way it can motivate you to work to correct your mistakes and improve yourself. Naming What We Know also emphasizes the “quality of failures”, “As sites of language development, writing classrooms, especially, should make space for quality of failure, or what Lamott describes as ‘shitty first drafts,’ by treating failure as something all writers work through, rather than as a symptom of inadequacy or stupidity,” (Adler-Kassner and Wardle 185). Creating an environment where failure is both expected and accepted can be hugely beneficial for students who struggle with dealing with failure. It can also help the students who routinely exceed expectations because they can be exposed to failure and adversity early in their life which prepares them for when they face failure for the first time in the real world.
While learning from failure is a means to improvement, It’s difficult to teach the ways in which to do that. All of the professors I have had previously have only taught revision through corrections and feedback on essays. It is difficult for them to spend one on one time with each student to try and help them improve on their work. Even meeting with professors to learn from your mistakes or trying to figure out what was “wrong” on the previous project can be difficult when a teacher has so many other students. An experience that I have had with was during high school we were assigned a satirical essay and when I followed the prompt and wrote what I thought was a decent essay was given a D I was confused and scheduled a meeting with my teacher. My professor did not understand the science joke and “meme” that I was trying to satire, but when I explained he simply replied “oh okay I’ll take another look”. The next day I received my paper back with a B grade and no feedback. This was still a failure in mind because I had but in so much effort and met with the teacher on what I had already thought was a great paper. While this is circumstantial evidence and I am sure there are better teachers and professors, many students suffer from average and below average teaching that doesn’t help with these failures and hangs students out to dry.
For my job failure is integral to success. I work in data analytics and running tests with specific hypothesis is key to learning from what you are testing. Even if your hypothesis is incorrect you can learn about what you are trying to analyze. As well as hypothesis testing, writing the code to find correlations and causes of problems can be met with errors and incorrect searches. I use these as teaching moments to hone my coding skills and in coding once you have figured out how to run a specific section of code, it is helpful when running longer and more complicated scripts. So in a sense, the failure is just a building block for larger projects in the future. Even getting fired from a job which many consider a failure can be the stepping stone for progress. The saying “when one door closes another opens” is commonly used during this situation and, while cheesy, is perfect for this situation and other failures. In their own professions, many great entrepreneurs credit their failures for their most recent successes. They also look back at their early struggles as to what motivated them to continue their grind toward greatness.
While failure in the moment is difficult to deal with, since the writing process is ongoing, building off your failures is the best way to learn from your mistakes and better yourself. Revision is key to building from your failures but when it is not adequately provided it is on the students to make the most of the failure. This can be difficult for students but with work is the best tool for success.