learning one draft at a time
Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, p. 121:
A student graduated college as a skilled writer and then, as a first-year law student, wrote a paper that opened,
It is my opinion that the ruling of the lower court concerning the case of Haslem v. Lockwood should be upheld, thereby denying the appeal of the plaintiff.
I'm no legal expert, but even I noticed that the last clause is redundant — appeals are for overturning rulings, so if the ruling is upheld, the appeal must be denied. The rest of the paragraph was similarly full of obvious "filler" facts.
This was hard to reconcile with how well the student reportedly wrote in college. The book explains that the student wrote like this because he was new to law school and had yet to learn what obvious things didn't need to be stated or clarified in this new context. In fact, writing these obvious things in a first draft is a natural part of the learning process. The book thus cautions against judging people as poor writers based on redundancies like this; they may be fine writers new to the subject matter.
Personally, I suspect I'll mostly be applying this advice to my past self. It's strange, I know enlightened writers write without a destination in mind, that they allow their words to surprise them and learn from the process. This is not obscure advice. It's the kind you can find in an endlessly reposted Paul Graham essay. It's no big leap from there to suppose that the learning spans drafts and complete pieces writing. Yet for as long as I've been writing I've been reading my own writing from slightly earlier, and cringing at my younger self's naïveté — how juvenile, how callow! But maybe each naïve sentence is part of how I got here today.
More broadly, the book suggests, writers signal expertise and community membership less through what they write than what they don't write — what unstated knowledge they assume on behalf of readers. It's a pretty neat read overall. I got contrasting recommendations both for it and for Writing Science by Joshua Schimel, which is more focused on the kind of writing I do professionally; and am reading both.