Practicing with Purpose
Every young athlete has heard that practice makes perfect, but that is not entirely accurate. Mastering any craft requires not only practice but practice in the proper direction. It is one thing to practice hitting keys on the piano for 10,000 hours, and it is another to practice hitting specific keys with the intention of playing certain songs on the piano for 10,000 hours. Proper practice requires formation, and formation requires an example.
In Stephen King’s work On Writing, he illustrates this tension, ”If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.” To become a writer, you obviously must write. You must practice and do the actual work. However, it is not enough to just write whatever thoughts jump into your mind. You must also read. King points out that he reads because he likes to read, but “there is a learning process going on. Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.” The road to becoming a writer has already been paved by those who have written. You can learn from those who came before.
The example, then, provides the framework or formation necessary for proper practice. To continue using King’s model, if a particular style of dialogue is effective in a particular book, an aspiring author might try to emulate that style. While absolute imitation is not usually very effective, there is value in learning how to copy those who have gone before you. Like practicing your cursive when you were a kid, you follow the forms and learn to do them properly. Teachers should not tell young people their own version of “handwriting” is correct unless it conforms to the forms; no one can understand a written language of unrecognizable symbols. Cursive is cursive, and you have to practice doing cursive for there to be a meaningful exchange of information on the page.
Something interesting begins to happen once someone becomes proficient with the forms. I never had perfect penmanship, and I never will. However, once I was proficient in cursive, I could advance to the next level of practice. I was able to write lines, paragraphs, and pages. I became better at it. I was practicing, based on the forms I had learned initially, but it was distinctively my handwriting. I was practicing and getting better, even though it was not perfect. Basketball players have different shooting styles. Some are more technically perfect than others, but the shots of basketball players are ultimately judged on their ability to put the ball in the basket. Shooting forms are derived from the theoretically ideal form but modified based on the individual.
Many of you who read this website are writers. Many of you are academics who want to (or already do) publish academic papers. When I was first entering this world, I did not understand the form of academic writing. I had practiced writing for many hours throughout my life in so many different ways, but that practice was not specifically in the direction I needed to go. It was not oriented toward the proper form, so the practice did not help me make beneficial progress toward my objective of academic publication.
It was only when I started to read more academic papers that I understood a little bit more of what I needed to do. I have not published much, but I have published a few things. If you read those articles, they sound like me, but not like the me in this post. It is a me that has been turned toward an academic writing style. It is my personal voice within the framing of academia. I only knew what the framing of academia was because I had read and learned the rules.
Practice is frustrating and takes work. However, realizing that you must learn to practice properly can be even more frustrating. Depending on the discipline, that can take months or years. You might need to find an appropriate mentor to help plan your practices. There might be a professor who can tell you what to read or a coworker willing to give you constructive yet pointed feedback. However, make sure that your practice goes in the right direction. When you do that, you are going to see the benefits and will continue reaching towards your potential.