i CAn'T C WhAt yOu SeE

I got a C+ on a paper that I thought deserved an A. My professor said it was "too emotionally charged" and I should have edited it before handing it in. My feeling is that editing is too clinical and takes away from the emotions. I WANTED the paper to be emotional. If I had edited it, it would have come out boring. Here's a line that he calls "too vague": "The beautiful stars filled me with hope." Stars ARE beautiful. I mean, what's wrong with that? –Insulted and Confused Honor Student

The best writing advice I've ever had is the following: "There's no such thing as good writing; there's only good rewriting" (Professor Paul Dolan, SUNY @ Stony Brook), and it's been my motto since the moment I first heard it 17 years ago. However, to edit or not to edit depends on your audience and how much you care about it. If your only audience is you and you're writing a personal journal, do whatever you want. Seethe and burn and scream out your emotions across the page, scribble bad words, rip it up; it's your own business.

However, if your aim is to communicate a precise vision or point of view that won't go up in smoke or turn into Pablum during its transition from your brain to the reader's, then you're duty bound to edit yourself as well as your writing..

Let's take the word "beautiful" from your sentence and toss it into the editor's net:

A few years ago, I was teaching a class of ESL students to write descriptions without relying on adjectives, especially following linking verbs (verbs that identify the subject). One student wrote: "The flowers smell beautiful." Okay, he was only a third-grader for whom English was a second language. There was nothing wrong with his sentence, except that I didn't know what he meant by beautiful. The class, which comprised third- to sixth-grade students from different parts of the world, talked about that word "beautiful" and discovered it is, indeed, a vague word, because it can be applied to everything from a racehorse to a Swiss watch to a pas de chat to a veggie cheeseburger with onions to the sheen on a poison ivy leaf to an Irish lilt to the way my dogs smell after their bath.

The trick is to show "beautiful" to your reader. In other words, your task as a writer is to paint a lexical portrait for your reader (again, unless you're your only reader). This is what third-grader Sebastian came up with:

"The flowers are trying to touch us with their perfume."

Fourth-grader Dominika began her description with: "It's freezing outside."

On revision, she wrote:" The icy wind is slapping against the windows."

Back to your sentence: "Hope" is a concept that your reader can't see, imagine, or touch; therefore, it doesn't have the wherewithal to fill anyone or anything. We can see corn filling a bin or water filling a basement, but we can't see an idea or a feeling.

In rewriting, you have the opportunity to clarify what you want to say in a manner that moves, not impresses, your reader. Writing is not such a lonely occupation as people say it is, because, if you care about your audience, it's always your prime consideration, and it stands by your side during every stage of the writing process, especially during the editing stage.

So, if you want to keep a diary, then keep one. It's easy to spill words across a page. But, if you want to communicate your ideas, you have to remember that your audience has its own way of seeing the world. If you're willing to do the hard work of writing, the beauty of the stars won't just fill you with hope; perhaps, instead, it will gather starlight from the eons and spread it like a shimmering carpet along the journey of your life.

Thank you for the question.