WRITE BUILD TEACH
Write. Build. Teach.
A blog about academic writing, teaching, and building with LEGO. Sometimes all at once.
I may use terms from the online LEGO community that may be unfamiliar to readers. There are a bunch of LEGO glossaries available on the Internet, and while none is comprehensive or universal, The Brothers Brick has a pretty good one. |
LEGO Is All about Revison4/28/2021 At the start of every semester, when we're doing class introductions, I ask my first-year writing students to write me a metaphor or simile for writing, or for themselves as writers. To help them understand the task, I share one of my own. This semester, I told them "writing is like building with LEGO: if something isn't working, you can always take it apart and try something else."
I've been thinking about that simile a lot as I work on my current MOC, which is a redesign of a "Steampunk Headquarters" modular-style building that I first built more than a year ago. Unfortunately, I assumed incorrectly that I had already photographed the original build--I usually do--before I took it apart. But the same principle can be illustrated with some of my other creations such as my Adventure Park and Intergalactic Girl's Vic Viper. Building your own LEGO creations is always a process of design and revision. It takes a lot of experimentation to figure out how to get the look and play features you want. I get inspiration both from seeing what other LEGO fans have created and from building official LEGO sets (in fact, one of the things I look for when considering whether or not to buy a set is whether the set appears to use some interesting building techniques. I also follow a couple of blogs that focus on showing people building techniques, and I've recently joined a group dedicated to custom Doctor Who-themed minifigs and MOCs. But ultimately, I learn the most from practice: come up with an idea, try it out, play with it, discover problems or new possibilities with the build, take it apart partially or fully, and rebuild it. Sometimes I just add stuff to an existing build when I get new parts, but usually even that requires at least partial disassembly. For me, the big difference between designing my own LEGO creations and writing is that when I write, I am usually writing for an audience and I typically get feedback from other people on my drafts, which I use to revise them before I submit the "final" versions (as with LEGO, no writing project is ever really finished, it's just let go). But with LEGO, I'm usually just building for myself. I do still like to show people my creations, and I enjoy getting their feedback, but so far it's been what we writing scholars call "summative" feedback, not revision-focused feedback. That's part of the reason I finally joined a LEGO community. I wanted to learn more and improve my skills, and one great way of doing that is to get formative feedback on works-in-progress. Becca Robinson, Ph.D.ArchivesCategories
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