Finishing my advocacy letter took a lot longer than I initially thought it would.
It wasn’t long before I realized that I wanted to write my advocacy letter to my middle school English teacher. She was a massive influence on me in terms of how I decided to major in English in college, and provided me with an incredible amount of support and guidance during the time that I was in her class. She is someone that I often look to when thinking of what a model educator should be for English and writing: someone that is knowledgeable, patient with their students, willing to go to lengths to allow students to develop their own voices and styles, and genuinely supportive and caring both inside and out of the classroom.
I wrote a first draft which Dr. Geller gave me feedback on, and then started to get to work on my second draft…which underwent a lot of changes, and then eventually got changed again to leave me with the most recent draft that I am calling the final one. I’ve revised and edited a lot of this letter, and I think that it’s one of the pieces that has undergone the most revision in recent memory. I’ve worked pretty hard on it to say the least, both just thinking about what to say, writing, revising, and so on. But it’s the least that I can do to both say thank you to who I believe is really an amazing educator, and to advocate for things that I think we desperately need more of in classrooms.
The thing that I think I struggled the most with during the entire revision process, at least from my own point of view, was how can I write this letter, thanking her for all that she has done, and sound sincere? How does one write with sincerity?
This may sound like a stupid question, or something really odd to struggle with. After all, I just spent a lot of time writing about how much of an influence she was on me, how much good I feel she had done. And I felt like I had so much to say. But every time I would put words on the page, it would just come off not at all like I wanted it to. Really generic, or bland, or cliché. The question that I had all going through and what was constantly on my mind is how can I speak from the heart?
Well, if you have a lot to say, at least in my case, then say it. Free writing helped to get everything that I had in mind in some form on page, and after that came revision. Condensing ideas and short little blurbs into phrases and then sentences. Then taking those sentences elaborating more until the ideas and emotions and feelings that you once had have become something like writing. In my case, it was less of saying how great a teacher she was, and more of talking about specific instances, how being in her class made me feel, what moments did I remember that really stood out, what sets her class apart from other classes?
Sometimes in order to really find the words that our hearts are searching for, we need to really meditate with what we want to say for some time, and write, write, write some more, until we finally get the words right. Otherwise, I think that we often fall into writing words that just don’t really sound like what we truly feel.
There will never be a “perfect,” way to say what you are truly feeling. I think that our emotions transcend language in that way, that writing can often evoke powerful emotions, but never serve as a 1:1 connection between the reader and the author’s true emotional feelings.
But our job as writers is to try to get as close as possible, no matter how many drafts that might take. Might only be two, might be twenty, but something that I’ve learned both through this class and just in general is that “good writing,” can come in many forms and styles, and shouldn’t be restricted to one standard. But one unifying factor through all of these styles and choices, is that good writing takes a lot of time, and that if we allow ourselves to slow down, process, reflect, and write, it will show.
Tom Talks (and Learns) About Writing 