"The Importance of Writing Badly"

Bruce Ballenger was one of my writing professors at Boise State University. I read this article twice: first as a student, and then a few years later as a teaching assistant. Both times, it was liberating. As a student, it encouraged me to silence my inner critic and to stop trying to have everything figured out before writing my first draft. Writing could be an act of exploration, and first drafts could be ugly. And then as an instructor, it reminded me to value the ideas of my students more than the correctness of their papers, especially in the early stages of a writing project.

For copyright reasons, I have removed the reprint of the article from this textbook, but the original version can be found at the The Christian Science Monitor website: http://www.csmonitor.com/1990/0328/ubad.html