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3 Quick Lessons on Evaluating Your Writing · The Daily Writer

• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Rider.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Each weekday, we bring you a short lesson that helps you live out the four practices of a great writer creativity, consistency, courage, and connection.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Here on the weekend edition, we take a deeper dive into those topics through conversations with writers, as well as teaching that helps us apply what we're learning.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: For more, you can visit us at dailyriderlife.com.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: I've talked about this a few times here on the podcast before, but just in case you haven't heard, I left my teaching job at St.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Louis Christian College this past summer in order to focus full-time on ghostwriting and running my Daily Rider membership community.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, a couple of weeks ago, SLCC announced that it'll be merging with another school at the end of this academic year.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And after I heard that news, I started reflecting a lot on what I learned as a professor during their previous 17 years as a full-time teacher there.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the most important things that I learned is the value of assessment.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, assessment is a broad term for a set of practices designed to help you see if you're reaching your goals.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And most people in higher ed honestly hate assessment because it feels like a huge pain.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Assessment is time consuming and it often feels like busy work.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: However, being in this world of academics, it taught me the value of taking a detailed, honest look at how you can improve.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now, whether you call it assessment or evaluation or whatever term you want to put on it, it all really points to this same idea of looking at how you can improve what you're doing.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think one of the most important skills we can develop as writers is the ability to separate our personal identity from our work.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: And if you always base your self-worth on what other people think of you, you're going to be a total emotional yo-yo.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the big lesson for writers here is that we've got to evaluate, we've got to assess what we're doing with a critical eye.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: And we also need other people's help in doing so.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: So whenever we can separate our personal value and our sense of emotional security from our work, and whenever we can get other people's help in assessing and evaluating our work, that's when we're in business, because then we can look at our work, we can look at our writing or our business with a critical eye, and we can improve what actually needs to be improved without taking things personally.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself, but we can get so emotionally tied to our work that we get defensive whenever somebody criticizes it.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: But there's often a nugget of truth in people's criticism, even if we don't like the way they deliver it.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: So the question is, can we set aside our ego long enough to listen?
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Is there something we can learn from people who would give us constructive criticism?
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Do we even care about our work enough that we can see if there's any truth to it?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in the entrepreneur community, there is a huge emphasis on quote unquote doing things my way.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like that Frank Sinatra thing.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: I did it my way.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's a huge emphasis on doing that and sticking it to the critics and the haters and the doubters.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I totally get that.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: And this kind of attitude helps us move past obstacles and get things done.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's also, though, a kind of dark side to this approach.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever you push ahead at all costs and you totally ignore the critics and the doubters, it's really easy to become blind to your own shortcomings.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why we all need to surround ourselves with people who give us feedback and hold us to a higher standard.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, it's one of the reasons why I created the Daily Writer community, because we all need, we all need a sense of, hey, these people are here to support us.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: They can help point out our blind spots and they can give us feedback whenever we need it.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever I was a full-time prof, the college did a formal evaluation of one of my classes every semester.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: The academic office would always pick which course, so I never knew which one was going to be evaluated.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I also did a separate assessment of every one of my classes every semester for like the last 10 years that I taught.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And what I would do is I would ask students to answer a few questions on an anonymous form.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: And those responses would help me improve the class for next time.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I learned three critical things from having students evaluate every class every semester.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: And what I want to do in these next few minutes is share with you what I learned and how to apply these three lessons to our writing.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: So let's dive in.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Number one is the best ideas for improving a class almost always came from students.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: For example, I used to teach a public speaking class, and the way I taught this class for years was to focus on doing two or three big speeches like the second half of the semester.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: And we would work on these speeches for weeks and then they would deliver these speeches in class.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And each of those speeches was a pretty decent chunk of their final grade.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: However, one comment I would often hear is, hey prof, and they they would always call me prof Sanders, hey Prof.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sanders, we would really like to have more speaking practice in class instead of just doing two or three big speeches.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: So once I heard that that comment enough times, I was like, hey, I really need to start paying attention to this.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: So eventually I completely changed that public speaking course so that students were doing shorter speeches, but they were doing a lot more of them.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the result was that they had a lot more fun and there was less pressure on the students to make every speech awesome.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: And also a cool bonus was that they got to do a lot more practice up in front of the class.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a win in three or four different ways.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're the one who's creating content, either as a writer or as a teacher or professor, it's really easy to think of yourself as the expert.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, after all, you know more about your thing than anybody else.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: So why would you listen to somebody else's comments?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why would a professor who's got multiple master's degrees and all that or a PhD, why would you listen to college freshmen, you know, related to the course topic?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the truth is that we all get blind to all the ways that we can improve what we do.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: And oftentimes it takes a beginner's perspective to give us a fresh viewpoint on our course or on our writing.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: So make sure to listen to people who don't know much about what you do.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Your expertise might be blinding you to some obvious and simple ways to improve.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one little caveat here that I want to throw in before I move on to the next thing is that students would not necessarily volunteer these ideas.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: I had to do an evaluation first.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: I had to ask their opinion.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't going to go out of their way to give me their ideas for improvement.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: And this leads me to the second lesson, which is number two, I emphasize to students that I did not take any of their comments personally.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, what I told them, I said, hey guys, I want you to tell me what to improve.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not emotionally attached to this class.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: My only concern is to make this class better.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: So rip on the class, you can criticize me and my performance as a teacher.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: You can criticize my style.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: You can criticize the assignments, the textbooks, anything that you want about the class.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: My only concern is making it better for the next round.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: And this was really important because this gave this gave students the freedom to say what they really thought.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And without that freedom, they would hold back and they wouldn't tell me the full truth.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: And this is such a critical thing because many times in our writing, we want people to give us feedback, but it's like we don't we want feedback, but we don't really want feedback.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: We basically just want people to say, oh, this is so great and you're so awesome and blah, blah, blah.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: We love what we do and we put our hearts and our souls into it.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's hard not to take things personally, but if you're writing for an audience, that your writing is not primarily about your self-expression.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about your emotional release.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you're writing for an audience and if you want to sell books and you want to have success with writing, it cannot just be about your emotional release valve.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: You're writing, you're creating a product that people are going to purchase.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's a product that needs to be crafted well.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: It needs to speak to their pain points, it needs to tell stories well and all that stuff.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: So we have to separate our emotional attachment to our work from our own sense of self-worth.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I keep coming back to this theme in this episode, but it's really, really important.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: If we're going to approach our work like professionals, we have to maintain some emotional distance from our work.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: We can't get emotionally wrapped up in it.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: The time, well, actually that's not true.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: The time to get emotionally wrapped up is when we're drafting it.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then as we go back and we edit it and we involve beta readers and editors and all that kind of stuff, that's the time to kind of set our emotions aside and try to look at our work with a critical eye and with a colder eye.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I've I think I've heard it said you you write your first you write warm or you write your first draft warm or hot, and then you edit cold, meaning your emotions are are engaged as you're writing those drafts.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: You're getting it all out onto the page.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: You're uh you're excited about it, you're just kind of putting it all out there.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: But when you edit and when you're crafting the product side of it, you've got to think, you've got to think about it in a cold way.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: And you've got to maintain some detachment from it.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's very hard to do.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I I wish I could tell you that I did this perfectly.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't do it perfectly.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, the bottom line is that our work is ultimately a product that's either working or it's not.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And if it's not working, do we have the courage to ask for feedback and to take it seriously and not take it personally?
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: Very, very hard to do, but I think very important.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Then finally, number three here, the third lesson from this whole idea of assessment and evaluation is that as a teacher, I had to be willing to take the best ideas and actually change the class.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was so easy to do a survey and gather comments.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't really take any time at all.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: But once I had the data and once I had that feedback, I had to be willing to put in the work to revise and update the class.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have never taught a college course, let me give you kind of a little super fast crash course on what it means to actually revise a college course.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: This is not just a matter of changing a couple of things here and there or making a couple changes to a course syllabus.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever you do a substantial update to a college course, it involves several things like changing textbooks, changing assignments, changing your teaching notes, or throwing out your old notes and writing new ones, figuring out how to best meet your learning objectives, adjusting how your gradebook is set up, and so much more.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just it's it's a massive amount of material.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: So if you podcast or you do public speaking or you do any presentations, you understand how much work goes into crafting a 30-minute talk, or how much work goes into creating an hour-long presentation.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, imagine doing about 30 hours of that.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: So at my school, we would meet for an hour and 15 minutes twice a week for a typical in-person class, and we would have like 15 weeks in the semester.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: So you're talking, you're talking about a lot of class time.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's like 30, I don't know how many hours that is, but it's a lot of hours that you've got to fill during the semester.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: So whenever you're redoing a class, this is not a small thing, this is a massive thing.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, you're not lecturing the whole time, hopefully, but you're you're planning for, you know, two or three dozen hours of classroom time.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a lot of time.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it kind of makes you have a lot of respect for public school teachers who are doing even a lot more than college teachers are.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: So whenever you change a course, this is a big commitment and it it can involve, it can involve lots and lots and lots of hours, you know, over a hundred hours of work when it's all said and done.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you've probably had the experience as a student where you had a teacher or a professor who was infamous for teaching a class the same way over many years.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, when I was a student in college, I remember taking a Bible history course where the professor, I don't think, had changed his notes for probably, you know, 25 or 30 years, literally.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like back in the night, this is back in the early 90s.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, his notes looked like they were yellowed then.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I think they were printed off of like a super old dot matrix printer from the 80s or something.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what they were, but they were really old.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, Bible history doesn't change, you know, it's the same as it was.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's been for a long, long time.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: But the way that you teach it needs to change and be adjusted depending on, you know, your teaching style and the students and all that stuff.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not really cool to like teach the same, the exact same course 30 years in a row, I don't think.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the thing it's easy to make fun of that approach, and it's easy for me to sort of be critical of that until you're actually a professor who is faced with this huge task of redoing a whole course.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I've redone every course that I've taught, you know, at least once, if not multiple times.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I've done that many, many times, and I can sympathize with the impulse to leave a course alone and do it the same old way year after year after year or decade after decade, even though that ultimately ultimately doesn't really serve you or your students very well.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: I can still relate to that.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: I can relate to the idea of not changing a course and just leaving it alone and not putting the work in.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when you when you don't really have people forcing you to change courses, it's easy just to leave it alone for just one more year, and that one more year turns into five years or 10 years or 20 years.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I can tell you for sure that as a professor, this is kind of like um, this is like the bottom line, this is where the rubber meets the road.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Are we willing to put in the time and effort to create a better experience for our students and for our readers?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Are we willing, as teachers or as writers, to not just listen to feedback and evaluation, but actually put it into practice?
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I can tell you for sure that as a professor, I had a lot more fun whenever I listened to feedback and I did the work to change a course and make it better.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: I was more invested in it, and students were more invested in it as well.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: And they had more fun.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: It was a blast most of the time.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, in my last few years of teaching as a professor, I completely changed my teaching style.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: I transitioned to what's called more of a flipped classroom approach, where I did very little lecturing and talking, and we had a lot more learning activities, presentations, group work, case studies, uh, and things like that.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: And the interesting thing is that as I did that more and more in my classes, I noticed something interesting happening.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it was this the students were more involved, and the less that I lectured and the less that I talked up front, the more students seemed to have fun and they seemed to learn more and be more engaged.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Huh?
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Who would have ever thought that?
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and I'm saying that kind of sarcastically because, you know, that shouldn't really come as a surprise to us.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because whenever you have a teacher that just yammers on for an hour and 15 minutes, who really enjoys that?
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: But what students really do enjoy is getting engaged, being challenged, and having a variety of learning activities and all those kinds of things.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there are some important lessons here, not just for teachers, but for all of us who are writing and communicating and trying to impact lives with our words and our ideas.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope this little trip down memory lane uh and my professor career has been enlightening for you, or at the very least, you can just uh sit back and make fun of me because I'm kind of a teaching geek and I'm sort of a nerd.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm a very uncool former professor and current ghostwriter.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: So coolness is not something I do very well, but I do my best.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope that uh you've learned something from this episode, and I hope that I've challenged you a little bit to evaluate your own work more often, but also maintain some emotional distance from it.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's really, really important.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we've got to constantly be assessing, evaluating, and figuring out if what we're doing is the best that we can possibly do.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you've been listening to this show for any length of time, you know that one of the four practices of a great writer is creativity.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: And in order to stay creative, you've got to have great input.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where writing prompts come in.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: A writing prompt is a sentence or two that helps you break through creative blocks, brainstorm new ideas, and get back into a state of flow.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Writing prompts are an awesome creative tool for journaling, storytelling, creative writing, stress relief, social media posts, and so much more.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: But the great news is that you don't have to create these yourself.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: We've put together an amazing package of 365 daily writing prompts.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: So every day for the next year, you can have a shot of inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: You can check it out at dailyriderlife.comslash writing prompts.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, and I'll see you tomorrow.