5 Failure is Not an Option

Allison D. Carr’s essay, “Failure is Not an Option,” comes from the book Bad Ideas About Writing. In Carr’s essay, she draws on both personal experiences of failure and research about failure to suggest that it’s an important part of the writing process. Carr argues that instead of avoiding failure we need to change our orientation toward failure, which is not an easy thing to do.

Read Allison D. Carr’s “Failure is Not an Option.”

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Keywords from this chapter in Bad Ideas about Writing

basic writers, failure, growth mindset, productive failure, struggle, writing process

Author Bio from Bad Ideas about Writing

Allison Carr is an assistant professor of rhetoric and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Coe College. Beyond researching the intersection of failure and emotion for her doctoral dissertation, Allison considers herself a failure savant, leading her students by example toward riskier, frightening, and sometimes downright stupid undertakings. She tweets about food, politics, writing, and baseball through the handle @hors_doeuvre.