Melissa Trezza
Advanced Expository Writing
ENG31023
Just Write
Many non-writers often mistakenly believe that those who do write have it “easy”. They sit down at their computers or a piece of paper and the words just flow out of them, effortlessly. Sadly, anyone who has ever written anything knows this could not be further from the truth. Effective writing is a process, which involves several stages. Those stages are: Discovering, Drafting, Revising, Editing, and Proofreading. Although these stages are not necessarily completely separated from each other, they are vital in producing an effective paper.
Oftentimes, when we write, we do so because we have been told to do so – we have been given an assignment, whether at work or school. It is important to fully understand the purpose and focus of the assignment given. One way to do this is to highlight the key words and terms. For instance, if you are asked to inform, explain, discuss, or analyze, your paper is to be expository in nature. You will need to explain a topic and give examples in doing so. If you are asked to evaluate, persuade, or argue, your paper will be argumentative. That is, you will be “arguing” one side or the other in order to persuade the audience to your point of view. Once you have a clear understanding of exactly what your assignment is, write down, in your own words, what you will be writing about and how you plan to do so. This is known as a “design statement”. Now that you know what you are doing, you can move forward!
Since you have determined exactly what your purpose and focus are, you can move on to the next stage – Discovering. In this stage, you must figure out what your topic will be. One way to come up with a topic is to keep a writing journal. This is by no means a personal diary. A writing journal is a place to write down ideas as they come to you and jot down your thoughts on things (articles, books, etc.) you have read or heard about. Once you have your topic, you must develop it further. A good way to do this is to ask specific questions of yourself. For instance:
- Is the entire topic interesting, or is it more one aspect in particular?
- What will interest the audience most?
- What is my personal experience with the subject?
- What insights do I want to share with the reader?
- Do I have an opinion or insight that is more unusual than most other people’s?
- Will the audience understand my thoughts or beliefs on the subject?
After determining your topic, you can prepare for the Drafting stage.
Before you move on to the next “official” stage, Drafting, you must prepare for it by planning. Do you have to know all of your thoughts and opinions before you put pen to paper? No. Do you need to know exactly how you will begin and end your piece? Absolutely not. However, you should have some idea of how you will go about writing your essay or you are likely to be staring at a blank piece of paper (or computer screen) for hours on end. To help focus your writing, there are two useful techniques you can use – clustering and tree diagrams. For clustering, write down an idea or topic in the middle of a page with a circle around it. Then, write down words or phrases associated with this main idea and connect them with it by drawing a line between them. Beyond that, you can shoot off even more ideas from those ideas. Tree diagrams are similar, however, they start with a broader subject and move to narrower and narrower ideas as they go. Once you have narrowed your topic a bit, the thesis must be developed. The thesis will tell your audience exactly what your focus and purpose is. Your thesis cannot be too broad, but it also should not get too mired down in the details either. Although your final thesis statement must be clear and concise, you can begin with a tentative thesis statement to get you going. As you research and write, you can define it further. Finally, you need to create a purpose/thesis outline to help arrange the order of the details you will write about. This will help you organize your thoughts, and, in turn, your paper.
At last, you can begin writing – the Drafting stage. Your goal here is not to produce a finished paper with all grammatical and spelling errors corrected and every word carefully selected and in place. Your goal here is to get writing and to get your specific thoughts and ideas down on paper. You must keep your outline, as well as your thesis in mind throughout. Continually ask yourself if what you are writing relates to and supports your thesis statement. Be sure you are capturing the reader’s attention and transitioning them smoothly from section to section. Alert your readers when you are changing shifts and be sure to give them good, solid, detailed proof (examples) to back up your thesis. When your first draft is done comes the hard part – revision!
Finally, come the Revising, Proofreading, and Editing stages, which typically intermingle into one big conglomerate stage. Read your paper to yourself, silently and/or aloud. Sometimes reading it aloud can help you determine if your writing flows and “sounds good”. Ask yourself if the paper makes sense. Is it organized well? Does the introduction capture the reader’s attention? Is the thesis clear and is it in the right spot in the paper? Are the examples detailed enough and do they support your thesis? Another good way to proofread is to have someone else read it with the preceding questions in mind. Fresh eyes can help you gain a better perspective. After revising your paper at least once (often more than once), make one final check of the grammar, spelling, sentence fluency, and word choice – all of which are critical to a good paper.
Although I do not always follow all of the recommendations given in this chapter, I generally agree with all of them. It is certainly necessary to fully understand the assignment being asked of you. I have never analyzed any assignment so thoroughly, but it could not hurt to do so. Sometimes when you read something you have an idea of what you think it is saying, but when you read it again more carefully, you see that your original analyses was a little off. “A little off” can be a “big problem” when you do not understand what you are supposed to be writing! For me, the one of the biggest hurdles I face is deciding what to write about in the first place. I appreciate the author’s idea of keeping a writing journal, but I wish he would have spent a little more time here. He really only gave one suggestion on figuring out what your topic should be. It was a good idea, but there are certainly more ways of discovering a topic. Another area where I tend to struggle is narrowing my thesis statement. But here, the author’s advice is spot on – you do not have to have your exact thesis statement fully developed when drafting. As long as you have some idea of your thesis statement (a tentative thesis statement), you can still begin writing. As you write, you can develop your thesis and narrow it down. He doles out more great advice when it comes to Revising, Proofreading, and Editing. You must read it as an author (of course), but, more importantly, as a reader. Of course, you are writing for yourself, but in order to write successfully, the reader must understand and appreciate it as well.
Obviously, writing is more than just sitting down and doing so. It is truly a process. Anyone can write, but to write well, you must ensure that all of the stages are at least touched upon in some way. If you have not been going through these stages prior, following them from here on out is sure to improve your future writing.
