Barbara Tomlinson uses many metaphors to describe the process of writing in “Tuning, Tying, and Training Texts”. Though I understood mostly all of her metaphors, the one about “refining ore for casting” jumped out to me the most. It seems like whenever you start off with writing, you have this uncovered jumble of ideas, though they may be good are not ready for final submission. You need to polish off or “refine” to get that final product that you are looking for. The View History tab in Wikipedia enables us to view the previous submissions are articles. We can learn valuable information from the view history tab, we can see a constant revision process going on there. I feel like the saying “you learn from your mistakes” fits in perfectly for this particular section in Wikipedia. I feel like this section helps me take criticism about writing. It was a little frustrating at first, but all in all the scrutiny faced on the discussion board aided my revision process. I mean if we sift through the view history pages, we can see what is left and what was taken away. This in turn enhances our ability to recognize what the Guardians of Wikipedia are looking for, and staying within our own writing style.Tunm
I like your point about the revision board on a wikipedia article being a useful tool for 'smelting' the ore of the article. It makes sense if somebody takes out a particular part that you would want to leave it out - you wouldn't toss in some extra slag into the furnace when trying to coax ore out of rocks, it's just counterproductive. However, writing is much more arbitrary when it comes to value than smelting ore is. Smelters easily agree about the end goal of the exercise, get some iron, whereas writers may persuade and change people's opinions about what is and isn't valuable to include in the final product.
ReplyDeleteI am the same way when I start writing. I have all these ideas in my head, but it's just a matter of putting them to words and organizing those thoughts that's difficult. When it comes to your wikipedia point, I think you can tie in what you said about Tomlinson's "refining ore for casting" metaphor. Like you said, "we can see a constant revision process going on," so can't that mean the first draft is the "ore" Tomlinson describes? I think so. Everything else that happens after the first submission is the tweaking and beautification of the ore.
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