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I am pleased to introduce my first guest blogger, Barb Osburg, my high school English teacher.

You'll see below that Barb brings a "Heart and Fist" approach to the hard work of writing well. She was a loving, patient listener, and a disciplined critic. She made me stronger. Enjoy her thoughts below:

Writing needs to have two aspects--drafting and revising.  To get a draft out, ask a question that is complex and can be productive of ideas.  A possible question might be, "How can I improve my writing?"  Then pretend that someone who adores you is in front of you waiting to listen (on paper) to everything you have to say about the answers to your question.  Imagine that the person in front of you will make no judgments, will not get bored, will not challenge you about your opinions and details, will--in fact--adore everything you feel like saying as you attempt to answer the question.  The purpose of this aspect of writing is two-fold:  the question generates power and purpose for your initial draft and the free-spirited, "I love everything you are saying" allows your mind to discover some ideas and even questions you had not known you had.  Once you have that long, unjudged draft, let it set for a day or two.  Then return to it with another audience--the most critical mind you can imagine sitting in front of your work and asking challenging questions about the details, the evidence, the logic, the clarity of the prose.  If you can make yourself sit with that judge for several sessions several days in a row (sometimes 15 minutes, sometimes an hour, depending on your proficiency as a writer), you will find that your new drafts get tighter, cleaner, more logical, more weighty with evidence.  If this piece is to be published, there will come a third aspect of writing--editing and proofing.  These require a particular style sheet provided by your publisher, one to which you must adhere and one which will determine certain punctuation rules, capitalization rules and even word choices (as in Ms. over Mrs. or Latino over Hispanic).  But most of your writing should be discovery--drafting--and assessment--revising.  One caveat--writing is a recursive process.  You may get to draft ten and find that you have developed a topic poorly and need to do another "I love everything you have to say about that topic" draft.  Sorry, but that's the nature of the beast of composing with words.

Barbara Osburg, Ph. D., is currently an English teacher at Saint Louis University High in St. Louis, Missouri.