Emerald Oils and Editing
When I was in college I hastily chose an English class to satisfy my requirements and ended up, luckily, in Irish Literature. Our professor, whose name escapes me, was passionate, candid and ignited an interest in Irish literature in myself that I was surprised by. His advice to read Irish poetry with an exaggerated accent to emphasize the song like quality of the rhymes has lodged itself in my brain to this day. Pronouncing “I’ll” as “Oil” is my activation word for my bad impression of an Irish accent (both inspired by this class and “Whale Oil Beef Hooked”).
Another way in which this class ushered in some helpful habits for me is in the form of adjusting my writing style. In high school and college I became very good at the last minute essay. Typing furiously the night before to get word count, rarely editing for cohesion and often resorting to formatting tricks to reach page count*
*By selecting all of the punctuation and adjust the font size one to two sizes larger adds a surprising amount of space without suspicious amounts of kerning.
My most impressive act of eleventh hour essay writing occurred when I showed up to campus earlier than usually (about an hour before class) and met up with a classmate in the library. He was working on their computer and flipping through our textbook and I asked what he was so stressed about. He asked if I finished our essay to which I replied, “Essay?!”. I opened my laptop and let it rip, finishing the essay just in time to print it and turn it in. The fact that I got a slightly better grade on that essay became a running joke for the rest of class, and we’d often tag team essay writing for both of our benefit.
While I never turned in an essay at the last minute after that, my writing styled hadn’t progressed much since high school. My writing was conversational but filled with enough filler words to capsize an aircraft carrier. There’s a time an a place for writing like that, and it’s often best to deploy this writing style when sending out emails in corporate environment. I have used this technique ironically when the office was plagued with self congratulatory emails telling tales of custom service solutions for the whole department to see. Only after I sent out a five page email chronicling a surprise proposal at a restaurant using only nautical terminology (it was a seafood restaurant) did those emails cease for a few months. It brought me great joy when I settled on the perfect subject line: “Proposal Off the Port Bow!”.
But I digress.
The breakthrough came when I typed out an essay for the Irish Literature class and our professor made an announcement at the next class. “I will be having one on one reviews with each of you about the quality of these essays. Some were acceptable, others were not”. I assumed that my essay was not great but at the very least adequate. I was wrong.
We sat down for our meeting and my professor pushed the printed out essay across to me, “Do you think this is a good essay?” he asked. Put on the spot, I started to sweat. “I think so” I sputtered out sheepishly. “Do you think the best work you can do?” he continued. Faced with the reality that my essay was not adequate, I froze. “One of the worst habits I encounter from people starting out is that they have bad habits from high school, which were reinforced by good grades in entry level English classes. I have to read a lot of essays, and after a while when I read enough of them I get tired of reading the same cliches and filler phrases”. After a moment the professor pushed a red marker over to me, "Let’s try this,. You read your essay out to me and when you encounter a cliche cross it out and read it back to me”. I read the first sentence and crossed out the first five words. I read the latter half of the sentence and crossed out five more words. I read it back and a short but effective sentence. We proceeded to do this for the entire two page (double spaced) essay and I was left with, at most, two paragraphs. The professor leaned forward in his chair, “What you have here are the bones of a good essay, if you took time to edit this would have been a passable essay” I absorbed this as he continued, “If you turn in another essay like this I will give it the grade it deserves, a D at best” My college career thus far flashed before my eyes and ended with my future as a barrel wearing tap dancer on a street corner. I was very dramatic in college. “You don’t have to change your method of writing too much. Write a block of text but edit it. Chop it down and refine it”. I stared blankly at the essay as he finished, “I know you can do it”.
Our meeting concluded and I slumped back to the car and pored over the remnants of the essay, which now resembled a minimalist painting of the parting of the Red Sea, a solitary sentence stood in for Moses. Over the weekend I thought about this, growing frustrated that my usual method wouldn’t work. The next essay I turned in had gone through a flurry of edits. I spent a few hours agonizing over the process, adjusting to this new method of writing. When the essay returned with an A-, I was relieved. When the semester finished I had a passing grade. Probably one of the best grade I received in college.
The rest of my on campus college experience was spent wrestling with math (my worst subject), clashing creatively in film classes (my passion and chosen career at the time), and scheduling this all around my part time job, whose scheduler was hell-bent on my demise. I ended up dropping out of Trigonometry after taking it on a whim when I was trying to understand light science better. The lessons learned from that class and meeting are in my back pocket to this day. Even now as I type I find myself whittling away modifiers to get the word count down.
…
Recently I’ve been thinking about perfectionism and how that has had an effect on various aspects of my life. While I cannot pinpoint what gave me the confidence to think “I can pick up on things quickly” but for some reason it gave me the unfortunate side effect of thinking “If I can’t do it right the first time I’m no good at all”. I’m still at battle with that incorrect sentiment. To the point where if you were to ask me what I am good at, it takes a moment to come up with a short list. What I do know is that I’m often asked to proofread outgoing emails and fliers at both jobs.