“Successful writers aren’t those who are simply able to write brilliant first draft”.
- Collin Brooke, Allison Carr
From what I have Learned by reading “Failure can be an important part of writing development”, by Collin Brooke and Allison Carr, is that about how important it is to fail at something in order to get better. With failure comes reflection and with that reflection comes knowledge. When at first you don’t succeed all you need to do is try again. Successful writers aren’t those who are simply able to write brilliant first draft; often, writing we encounter has been heavily revised and edited and is sometimes the result of a great deal of failure. The acknowledgement of the fact that failure is actually “an opportunity for growth” is very crucial in the writing process.
Collin Brooke and Allison Carr stated clearly that “the ability to write well comes neither naturally or easily”. Those who fail at writing often gives up quickly, counting themselves as people who will never write something worthy of praise but writing is the process which help us determine our weak points so we can get better because it is impossible to live without failing at something. Also, failure is a way of teaching us to learn from our mistakes when writing. Sometimes failure is not a bad things, it can be good things as well because you will get an opportunity to learn from the mistakes/failure. Anne Lamott once said, “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts, you just need to start somewhere”. (Lamott 1995, 303). As a result, the fear of failure can be increased by the fact that nobody wants to feel rejected. Writing is an act that helps us develop who we are, and much of the writing we do as students ends up being read by others.
As a student progress throughout their educational careers and the expectations for writing evolves from year to year and sometimes from course to course and that gives us an opportunity to try, to fail, and to learn from failure as a means of intellectual growth. Writing assignments helps us to learn from our experiences with failure in order to be better and to prepare for high stakes writing where the costs are much higher. Failure is just another name for much of real life: much of what we set out to accomplish ends in failure, at least in our own eyes. But failure is not everything, as long as you have courage to face and take that failure as an opportunity to grow.
Work Cited:
Read Book Club GIF, accessed via giphy.com
Lamott, Anne. “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts”, “Failure Can Be An Important Part Of Writing Development,” Accessed Via D2L required reading Week 8, pp 63, Oct 7-13.
https://myd2l.lcc.edu/d2l/le/content/228033/viewContent/5892621/View
Brook, Collin. “Failure Can Be An Important Part Of Writing Development,” blog post via “All Writers Have More To Learn” Accessed on 11/24/2021
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