My dad’s favorite time of year is when the black turtle necks and jeans come out. Sounds weird, yeah? Well, that’s what happens every time there is a new Apple announcement. It’s like Christmas day for him. He gets very excited for it every September, so it’s only fitting that his favorite quote comes from Steve Jobs, the Apple legend:
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
~ Steve Jobs
(Stanford Commencement Speech, 2005)
Before I left for college, my dad wrote me a notecard with this exact quote on it. I pinned it on my bulletin board as a reminder for when things got unclear and confusing. Freshman year of college has thrown many curve balls, and the path has been full of twists and turns. However, like Steve Jobs said, I can look back and connect the dots to see how I ended up here, at Santa Clara, finishing up freshman year of college.
The notecard, ready to be packed up with other mementos from freshman year
After thinking about this quote a little more, I have found that it can apply to my writing too. As my high school senior year rhetoric teacher taught me, every writer has a Shitty First Draft (check out the article, it’s worth a read if you’re into writing). Basically, it doesn’t matter what you write as long as you write something, you can go back and edit later.
Whenever I begin writing, I scratch out all these half baked ideas that don’t really connect. Then I go back and flesh out transitions to show how I connected the dots. In my college English class, Critical Thinking and Writing, my professor was a huge fan of reverse outlining. Reverse outlining is going back to a draft and writing out the main ideas of each paragraph, like you would with an outline, but it happens after the fact.
Similarly to Steve Jobs’ quote, it is easier to connect the dots when writing after the fact. Sometimes you just have to get the ideas out there before they start to make sense on paper. Oftentimes I start writing a paper with one thesis in mind, but then my evidence supports another thesis. This is where editing and revising come in handy since that’s where you smooth out the bumps. If a paper seems disjointed at first, I promise you it will work out in the end.