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by ahmad19526
4295 days ago
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I'm now going back to my daily writing routine that I've scantily kept up with. But I have some concerns. How does one improve their quality of writing when they are not at school? What I mean is, I can write, write, write and I know after a period of time I'll "better" than I was before. But without having people who scrutinize your work, who critique your grammar, and do all the things that teachers used to do for us in our school years, we might only be able to get so good before we plateau. Am I wrong about this? How do you know you're writing "correctly" if you don't have the feedback mechanism that we had in our schooling days -- aka grades, peer reviews, draft 1, draft 2, etc etc... I plan on writing for myself and for my blog. But I also know believe that "Practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect". |
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I'd reconsider that position for a number of reasons. Not the least of which being that it is a logical contradiction.
Nobody is born knowing how to practice things. This is something we learn as we acquire skills, learn about goals, learn how to channel our energies towards meeting said goals, etc.
Thus practice is itself a skill that requires practice to develop.
Since our practicing of practicing will necessarily not be perfect, we will not be "practicing practicing perfectly". So we will never achieve the state of "perfect practice", and thus we will never be able to make our practicing "perfect".
Thus the statement "perfect practice makes perfect" becomes equivalent to "perfection is impossible, since we can never achieve perfect practice".
In my experience people who think like this end up paralyzing themselves with doubt and never produce anything of value -- not because they are incapable, but because they think themselves into a cage of inaction. They become so terrified of not doing things in the "correct" or "perfect" way that they just end up doing nothing at all.
You can't practice anything perfectly, as you unwittingly proved, so just do something. If you require external feedback to validate your work, put your work out publicly and feedback will come. The process is write -> publish -> critique -> polish, not become perfect writer -> publish -> everyone loves me.