| HOME | Project Management Data Warehousing / Mining Software Testing | Technical Writing |
|
“Writing a column is easy,” Red Smith has said. “I just sit down at the typewriter, open a vein, and bleed it out, drop by drop.” The work habits of writers vary. Some can’t write at all until they know just what they want to say. Others have to write in order to find an idea. Some make elaborate plans before they begin to write. Others work out the structure as they go along. Some write a first draft at top speed, with out paying any special attention to sentence structure, word choice, or punctuation. Others proceed slowly and carefully, trying to perfect each sentence before going on to the next. There is no one way to write. What works for one writer doesn’t necessarily work for another. So if one route turns out to be a dead end for you, there are others to travel, and at least one of them will take you where you want to go. Try out different approaches, and settle on the methods of composing that seem to work best for you most of the time. AU the evidence suggests that finding your own way to handle writing projects will increase both your confidence and your competence. And you’ll still have plenty of opportunity for improvising, because no two writing projects are exactly alike. Looked at from the outside, writing is the act of joining words into sentences on paper. To anyone who’s ever tried to write, that’s a misleading definition. Certainly a large part of composing takes place in the mind. But if writing isn’t just exercising the fingers, neither is it necessarily the act of finding words to express definite, fully formed ideas. For some writers, it’s — they “think the whole thing out” before they put words on paper. For others, the physical act of writing stimulates their thinking and gives them ideas. Like E. M. Forster, they ask, “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” (Another writer, Joan Didion, has said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”) Whatever the action, whether external or internal or both, this initial stage of composing may be called prewriting. Without sustained and inventive prewriting, a good paper can only e a lucky accident. Prewriting is discovering what you think and feel about your subject; it’s finding the perspective from which you’ll write about it. It includes whatever goes on before you make a purposeful effort to produce a first draft. Depending on your subject and your habits of work, prewriting may be a period of thinking that ranges from idle musing to hard concentration. Or it may include talking, reading, taking notes, making more or less systematic outlines. Or it may mean scribbling away in an attempt to get at a hazy notion that could turn out to be the core of what you write. Some of us think on paper. Whether your hands are busy or still, prewriting is the process of discovering your ideas — how you view your subject, what meaning it has for you, what you want to say about it. From this it follows that a central requirement of prewriting is, in the words of Gordon Rohman and Albert Wiecke, an “absolute willingness to think one’s own thoughts, feel one’s own feelings.” Only by becoming involved with the subject will you make it your own. Making the subject your own doesn’t mean that all your writing will be personal. It means that all your writing will be motivated by a kind of personal concern that we’ll call the writer’s commitment. It’s a commitment—intellectual or emotional or both—that’s developed during the prewriting stage, an awareness of how you as an individual relate both to your subject and to your prospective readers. Writing that lacks such commitment is very likely to be dull stuff, expressing nothing but trite ideas and conventional attitudes. At times, both in college and later on, you’ll have to do kinds of writing that make personal commitment difficult. But with enough effort in the pre writing stage, you can almost always find your way into the subject you’re to write about. And the more you get into any subject, the more likely you are to get caught up in it. At the very least, you can always be personally concerned with the quality of what you produce, making sure that it represents your best effort. Writing that grows out of personal concern sounds as though the writer believes what he says. Whether the style is rough or smooth, what comes through is the voice of a living human being. Certainly personal concern need not and should not express itself in ego trips—turning an ac count of a local housing problem, say, into a display of your own sympathy and sensitivity. In a research paper personal concern may require nothing more — but nothing less—than your determination to give a faithful and coherent account of facts scholars have discovered about your subject. In this sense, you can be just as committed to writing a solid, well-documented research paper as to expressing yourself in an uninhibited autobiography. Your Resources In your prewriting you have a unique resource to draw on—your memory. If it’s less efficient than an electronic memory bank, it has the advantage of being yours alone. No one else can program it; no one else can tap it. Besides providing the substance of autobiographical papers, your personal experiences can provide the basis for an opinion, give authority to an explanation, add conviction to an argument. While memory won’t provide a printout at the push of a button, it can be coaxed. When it offers only blurred impressions, keep working on it. Hunt up snapshots, souvenirs, news items. Get in touch with relatives or old friends who can help. The fog may clear. Often you’ll find your memory coming through under pressure. You can teach yourself to be a better observer, too. For the most part, we see only what we want to see and what we’ve been brought up to see; but with conscious effort all of us can expand the circle of our awareness. By ob serving with an open mind as well as open eyes, we can literally see more. Train yourself to see beyond the surface of things. Instead of settling for a general impression, look for parts and the ways they fit together. Single out the specifics that will make your writing concrete and individual. Close, deliberate observation turns up good material. Ideas for papers come from listening, reading, and studying—from what you hear in conversations with your friends; from what you read in newspapers, magazines, and books, listen to on the radio, and watch on television; from what you hear in lectures and class discussions and from what you study in course assignments. Ideas also come from talking and writing — from what you say your self and what you put down on paper. And ideas spark ideas. In the course of converting a vague notion into words, you may find the words themselves sparking a train of thought that leads to a conclusion you’d never considered. Reading lots of good prose can do more for your writing than provide content. It won’t guarantee that you’ll be come an expert writer any more than regularly visiting art exhibits will make you an expert painter. But wide reading will probably do more than anything else to help you improve your own use of language. No matter how heavy the reading assignments for your courses, try to read a variety of current magazines and books, both fiction and nonfiction. Paying attention to the ways professional writers organize and express their ideas can help you considerably in presenting your own. But most of all read for enjoyment, not just for the good it may do you. While you’re enjoying yourself, you’ll be absorbing the rhythms of the written language. Material for short papers will come chiefly from your experiences, past and current, and from your thinking about topics that are making news. Longer, more comprehensive papers will call for the kind of specialized, factual information your courses and the library can supply. Some times information from a course can be combined with personal experience: perhaps you can illustrate (or challenge) a sociological theory about city or suburban or rural life from your personal knowledge. In other cases, what you’ve learned in a course equips you to deal with topics outside your experience: a physics course may help you make sense of a proposal for further space exploration; a course in economics may help you understand the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve Board. Lack of expert knowledge of a subject shouldn’t make you shun it. Though you’ve never designed a spacecraft or controlled the money supply, you can have strong convictions about the relative importance of the investigation of distant planets and the development of new energy sources on earth, and you can be personally concerned about an increase in tuition. As long as you know enough about a subject to be able to support your opinions with facts, you’re qualified to write about it. Your basic qualifications for writing on a wide range of topics are, first, your ability to collect data—facts—and, second, your ability to think about this information. Of all your resources, the most important is your power to reason and reflect. Use your papers as testing grounds for the ideas you’re incubating, ideas you’ve formed in response to what you’ve read and heard. Your mind, which sets you apart from everyone else, gives your writing its individuality. Until it begins to work on material, the data remain data and nothing more. Whether you’re drawing on personal experience, observation, discussion, or reading, you need to keep thinking. Think through your material, sifting it, sorting it, evaluating it. When you’re recalling personal experience, you’re the only one who can separate what really happened from what you wish had happened. When you’re dealing with what you’ve read or what you’ve been told, it’s up to you to decide what information is most reliable and which sources are most trustworthy. In the end, you must decide what you believe, and why. Writing the truth as you know it or as you see it (without ever for getting that you may be wrong) is not only the right thing to do in the moral sense; it’s also likely to produce the direct, forceful style that reflects conviction. • For Writing 1. Take any activity that interests you—singing, surfing, cooking, camping, walking, whatever—and keep turning the subject over in your mind until you know how you feel about it and what you want to say about it. There’s no best way to do this, but you might try the method of comparison. See how many resemblances, even accidental and partial ones, occur to you when you think of the activity in terms of another that seems somehow like it. What new perspectives do you gain if you think of surfing as flying, of cooking as composing poems, of walking as attending a religious service? Such thinking may give you a controlling idea (“A good singing group is like a top basketball team”) that will help you say what you feel about your subject. Or try treating the activity as unique. Ask yourself what qualities it has that make it—at least for you—different from everything else. You may find this approach just as effective in opening up the subject. (“Bike riding doesn’t just get you there; it lets you get yourself there, and have a great time doing it.”) Now write a paper saying in one or two pages what the activity you’ve chosen means to you. For your own information, keep a record of how you went about thinking through the material and writing the paper. 2. For several days in a row, spend fifteen or twenty minutes looking at and writing about the same thing—a building, a tree, a cat. Observe it and write about it at different times of day. Each time you look at it try to see it afresh, and each time you write about it try to record a sharp image of what you see at that time. After a week or so review the five or six passages you’ve written. If they all sound much the same, you weren’t looking hard enough, or you didn’t work hard enough to find the words that would convey exactly what you saw. Settling on a Topic Assigned topics that don’t awaken any immediate interest call for special effort in the prewriting stage. Special effort of a different kind is called for by an assignment that’s wide open—a “free choice”—or by one that invites you to stake out a topic for yourself from a very broad area like sports or politics. For a free choice, don’t spend too much time deciding what to write about. You may have to mull over several possibilities, but don’t prolong the process until indecision becomes paralysis. You can keep it from reaching that stage if you recognize the simple truth that you’re a person of many experiences, interests, and talents and that there are probably a dozen topics you can write on with as much authority as anyone else in the classroom, including the instructor. Without wasting time waiting for the ideal topic to suggest itself, you should be able to find a subject that’s not only a good one for a paper but the right one for you. The subject you settle on should be close enough to your own experience for you to feel comfortable with it. Or it should be something you’ve read about and thought about enough so that you can write about it with some confidence. You’re apt to flounder if you launch into some thing like “The Outlook for the Year 2000.” But though your subject should be one you’re capable of handling, it shouldn’t be one you know is trivial. The more it stirs your imagination and stretches your mind, the more likely it will be to interest your audience. Often you’ll arrive at a good topic by building up and out from a particular incident—something that’s amused or stirred you, given you pleasure or caused you pain. If you keep a journal, you’ll find that entries in it can be excellent starters for topics, reminding you not just of things you’ve done and seen but of the impression they made on you and the way you felt about them. When you’re faced with a broad, general subject like education, you have to find ways of making it manageable. Perhaps the best way is to cut in on the subject where you have some personal experience with it. Last summer you tutored some teen agers? Then don’t write about education, or high-school education, or the problem of dropouts, or teaching disadvantaged children. Write about tutoring your tenth- graders. If you want to generalize about reaching unmotivated tenth-graders, let the generalizations develop out of your summer work. Defining Your Purpose Once you’ve moved in on your topic and become fully engaged with it, you’ll find it helpful to frame a tentative statement of your purpose — what you want to explain or explore or demonstrate or describe. True, your purpose may change as you gather more material or even when you’re well along in your first draft. But to give your thinking some direction, to have some criterion to help you sort out the relevant from the irrelevant and spot the leads worth following up, you need to have some notion of what you’re setting out to do. Though a few of the papers you write may be wholly autobiographical, in most of what you write in college you’ll be asked to clarify, interpret, explore, support, or challenge. That is, most of the papers will be explanations or arguments. Many of them will be based on course readings, but for some you’ll be able to draw on your own experience. And whenever you can, you should. What you write is likely to be more alive and more convincing if it includes references to what you know firsthand. Sometimes the same experience will provide material for different kinds of essays. Your part in a show put on by the senior class in your high school could be written up as a straight autobiographical narrative. Handled differently, the experience could be used as an explanation of the process of presenting an original musical. And you could draw on the same experience for evidence if you wanted to argue that school administrators should leave the activities of student organizations in the hands of the members. Exposition and Persuasion. Traditionally, a distinction has been made between explanatory (or expository) writing and argumentative (or persuasive) writing. How do they differ? Clearly not in the source of the material. Either exposition or argument can draw on a personal experience; either can be based on reading and research. And they don’t differ in subject. Hundreds of explanatory articles have been written about wildlife conservation, and so have hundreds of persuasive articles. The only sound basis for differentiating between the two kinds of papers is the use to which the material is put. And use is determined by purpose. In an explanatory paper your purpose is to inform your readers, to clarify the subject for them. In a persuasive paper your purpose is to influence your readers to think or act in a certain way. Having one of these purposes doesn’t mean you can’t also have the other. Informing may be the first step toward influencing. But in a good paper one purpose is usually the more important, and that’s the purpose you should spell out for yourself. Statement of Purpose and Thesis Statement. Spell it out either in a statement of purpose or in a thesis statement. Both indicate what you intend to accomplish. Both help keep you on target. If your purpose is to record, describe, or explain (an expository paper), you’ll find the statement of purpose more useful: This paper will give an account of the expenses an entering student has to face during the first two weeks of the term. Here is a description of the way a typical issue of the Daily Collegian is put together. I want to explain how I developed my ideas about women’s rights. My intention in this paper is to present both the advantages and the disadvantages of having the local economy dominated by a single corporation; I will use Westend and the Giant Electric Corporation as my example. Statements of purpose like these are for your own use, not for inclusion in the papers you write. One paper based on the first statement of purpose in the preceding list began this way: “During the first two weeks of the semester I was shedding money the way a tree sheds leaves in November.” If your purpose is to support an idea or advance a proposition (an argumentative paper), you can use the same form: “My purpose in this paper is to show that entering students are being overcharged by practically every institution in University City, on campus and off.” Or you can use the more direct thesis statement, or thesis, worded as it might appear in the final paper: Entering students are being overcharged by practically every institution in University City, on campus and off. Our newspaper should concentrate on this college and keep out of politics. The feminist movement on campus needs new leadership. Westend, where I come from, is a much more pleasant place to live than University City. Once you’ve phrased your statement, you’re ready to set about discovering specific things to say. Depending on what you’re writing about, this may or may not involve reading and research to collect facts and assemble evidence. It should mean settling on ways of carrying out your intention. It will certainly mean digging into your own experience for relevant details and images, ideas and opinions. All the while your mind has to be active. It has to make something of the material you’re assembling, something that’s the product of your thinking and bears the mark of your individuality. When you’re reading and taking notes, keep asking yourself what functions the notes can serve. When you’re figuring out how to present and develop material, ask yourself what your readers will need in the way of illustration and definition. Don’t just think about your topic. Think through it; make it yours. A Reminder. What we’re outlining here is a straightforward progression from planning to performing. But not everyone writes that way, or writes well that way. You may be one of those people who discover their purpose or their thesis only after they’ve begun to write. You may not find out whether you have a thesis until then. If that’s the case, don’t worry about it. Keep writing until you know where you’re going, until you find out what your paper’s going to be. Then compose your statement, or pick it out of the sentences you’ve already set down. If you’ve written a statement of purpose or a thesis statement in advance, don’t be afraid to change it or even abandon it. Thinking through the topic may lead you to change your mind about just what you want to accomplish. Writing the first draft may make you question your thesis. In either case, don’t hesitate to back up and take a new route. The essential thing is to believe in what you end up writing. You can’t expect your readers to accept what you have to say if you’re not fully convinced by it yourself. -- For Writing 1. Choose three of the general subjects listed below. After turning them over in your mind, narrow each subject to two -topics, one for a paper of 400 to 700 words, one for a paper of 800 to 1200 words. Consult with your instructor, and write on the one that you both agree is best for you. Either before, during, or after you’ve written your paper (depending on your habits of composition), phrase a statement of purpose or a thesis statement that makes clear your intention. Specify the audience you’re addressing.
2. Professional writers often begin with nothing in mind but a phrase, an image, just the hint of an idea. See if you can develop a paper from such a small beginning. Start with a word, a line from a song, a feeling, the memory of a place or an incident, and expand it into a subject for a paper of 300 to 500 words. You’ll want to work from your own experience, not anyone else’s; but here are starting points that two students used: The memory of a visit to the refrigeration room of a wholesale- retail meat market was developed into an argument for vegetarianism. The phrase “April green” triggered a paper on the colors of the months in a Midwestern state. Building Content Even after you know pretty clearly what you want to do in your paper, you may find yourself complaining that you’re short of ideas (“I’ve got nothing to write about”) or that you can’t express what you mean (“I know what I want to say, but I don’t know how to say it”). In fact, you’re never totally bankrupt of material. No matter what the subject, you can always come up with a few ideas about it. But sometimes you may have trouble settling on an approach to the subject, relating your ideas to each other so that your paper makes good sense, fleshing out the topic so that readers get something worth reading and worth thinking about. (“Fleshing out” doesn’t mean padding. It means putting meat on the bones—developing ideas, not just adding words.) This section will make some suggestions about how you can generate content as you think and write your way through a topic. Suppose you’ve been given the broad assignment of writing about the place you come from—the city neighborhood, the suburb, the small town, the farm or ranch. After turning the subject over for a while, you decide that all you can say about Westend, your city, is that it’s a pleasant place (or that it’s peaceful, quiet, dull; or noisy, exciting, terrifying; or ugly or beautiful or ordinary). That gives you a general idea of what point you want to make—not a very precise one but something to work with. What you need to do next is find out what you have to say on the subject. How do you go about that? If we omit all the sudden twists and turns of thought, the false starts and dead ends that characterize the pre writing stage, the main thread of your thinking—in your mind or on paper—might go like this: “I like Westend. It was a good place to grow up in. It’s pleasant. Why? Well, it’s a pretty place—lots of trees, some good parks and play grounds. Except when the shifts change at Giant Electric, there’s not much heavy traffic since the bypass was built. People get along well together. Certainly the kids do. There’s work for just about everybody. Nobody goes hungry. . . .“ You’re collecting particulars that support your thesis. You’re also developing content. Or perhaps your musing reminds you of some incidents that show how pleasant life in Westend can be—stories to tell by way of illustration. Or you think of the activities that make up the daily round of your friends and neighbors—a typical workday, a typical weekend. Again, you’re generating substance. Another possibility: “Let’s see. How can I make my point? Compare Westend with the unpleasant places you read about in the papers? Compare it with this place. Peace and quiet there, noise and hassle here. Tick off the differences, one after another.” Or maybe, to make clear that Westend isn’t one of those all-of-a-kind places, you could classify the residents by ethnic background, income, education, and so on. Or by discussing the positive things Westend has to offer in the way of job opportunities, education, recreation, and entertainment, you could convince a reader that it’s an attractive city. At this head-scratching or scribbling stage, you may find that while you’re generating some content, it isn’t going to stretch very far. So you plug away: “All right, I can nail down the fact that Westend is a nice place to live, but then what? How about explaining why it’s the kind of place it is? Is it because of the location? Because of all the different kinds of jobs at Giant Electric? The kinds of people those jobs attract?” Perhaps thinking about why Westend is pleasant will lead you to come up with a new thesis: “Although the job opportunities at Giant Electric make Westend fairly prosperous, the city might be better off if it didn’t depend so much on one employer.” Could you make a good case for that statement? What you know about Westend might serve as a spring board for a paper defining a one-industry city. The aim of the definition could be simple explanation, with Westend serving as a typical example of a city dominated by a single industry. Or the aim could be to persuade the reader that life in a small industrial city is better (or worse) than life in a big city or a suburb or a small town. By the time you’ve thought through your subject—and, in the process, built content for your paper— you will probably have refined, modified, narrowed, or expanded your original generalization (“Westend is a pleasant place”) into a proposition that indicates with some precision what your paper will do. Mulling over approaches in the prewriting stage will have pointed you in the direction of a specific, manageable central idea. And it may have led you to change your original thesis. Instead of setting out to convince your audience that Westend is a pleasant city, you may decide to settle on a thesis like “Growing up in the security of Westend is poor preparation for get ting along in University City, with its tensions, pressures, and competitiveness.” Serious prewriting effort may have led you to the discovery that your initial generalization doesn’t stand up, that when you examine it closely, West- end isn’t such a pleasant place after all. Prewriting may have that effect because it involves being honest with yourself, deciding what you really believe about your subject. It also involves selecting the most promising approaches to your subject—comparing, classifying, dividing, and so on. And it does more than lay the groundwork for a successful paper. In considering how you’ll approach your subject, you don’t think of comparing in the abstract; you think of comparing Westend with University City. Thus prewriting generates content; it makes you aware of the specific things you want to say. • For Writing Write three beginnings for a paper on the community where you grew up. Each beginning should be main generalization about the community. Then, in a paper of about 1000 words, complete the beginning that interests you most. Address your paper to a college friend you’d like to take along on your next trip home. top of page Home Similar Articles |