Ultimate Writer’s Guide -- SECTION One -- Writing

Prewriting and writing overlap. Preparing a paper isn’t a mechanical, linear process in which each operation is wrapped up before the next one is begun. Instead, all the vital activities continue as the project moves from one stage to another. Some authors pre-write well into the stage of putting sentences on paper.

Even so, writing proper brings in a whole new dimension of creative activity. You have to juggle and weigh varying (and sometimes conflicting) demands. You must do justice to your material arid at the same time reach your audience, not Just say what you mean but say it so that it will interest, inform, and influence others.

Writing and Rewriting

Find the way into your paper that suits you best. Will you begin by making a detailed plan for your paper, or will you let the plan develop as you write? Some professionals like to build the organizational framework before they have much to put into it. They start with a few phrases or sentences, push them into the pattern of an outline, and keep working until they have a series of statements rep resenting the main points they want to make in the order they want to make them. Only then do they start writing consecutive sentences. Others like to coax the structure out of the material. Whatever procedure you follow, leave your mind open to the new possibilities for developing ideas and the new ways of arranging them that the actual process of composing may suggest.

Use an outline or not, as you see fit, but above all get started. Students aren’t the only ones to inflict the self- punishment of putting off the job. Commenting on the habits of professionals, Malcolm Cowley has said, “Apparently the hardest problem for almost any writer, what ever his medium, is getting to work in the morning (or in the afternoon, if he is a late riser. . . or even at night).” Instead of thinking up reasons and excuses for not getting on with the job, plunge in, and keep going. Don’t waste time trying to dream up the perfect opening. Chances are that when you’ve finished the paper, you’ll have a much better notion of what will make a good first paragraph.

Once you’re started, stick with it long enough to write several pages—if possible, a complete draft. Writing done in one sitting is likely to have better continuity, more consistency, more life than writing that’s done in bits and pieces. Though some professional writers like a bare-bones first draft, most find it a good practice to make their first draft a full one. If you’re in doubt about some of your material, include it. When you’ve finished, you’ll be in a better position to decide whether or not a particular passage is relevant. Make your paragraphs full-bodied, too, with plenty of details. In revising, it’s easier to reduce an out size paragraph than to fatten up an undernourished one.

Unless you’re the most careful and deliberate kind of writer, your first draft will be rough and uneven. Some sentences will be rambling, clumsy, perhaps unintelligible. Even if the paragraphs are more or less related to your purpose, they may show little relation to each other. But writing the first draft should have clarified your thinking, given you some notion of the shape the paper ought to take, and shown you what needs to be done to produce a strong, unified essay. Possibly you need hard evidence to support your generalizations. Possibly you should build what’s now a minor point into a major one. Certainly you should give attention to linking paragraphs to show the connection of ideas, revising sentences to make the thought come clear, finding words and images that will sharpen and freshen your meaning. One of the main objectives of this text is to help you rework early drafts.

As you revise and rewrite, keep your mind open to new ideas. If the process of setting down your thoughts has made you realize that some of them contradict others or that some of them are plain foolish, it should also have generated sounder, more consistent ones. And keep your mind open to new ways of expressing your ideas. The biggest obstacle to improvement in writing is the notion that once a sentence is written, it’s finished, fixed, frozen. Don’t guard your first phrasing of an idea as if it’s sacred. Take the attitude that anything you write can be improved — or thrown away.

A Word About Style

When we write a first draft, most of us are so intent on getting our meaning straight that we pay little attention to matters of style. In revising, we have to work over our sentences carefully to make them say what we want them to say in the way we want to say it. So a good part of the process of writing consists of revising not for meaning and not for correctness but for style.

The basic rule for finding the right style is simple to state: Your style should be appropriate to the rhetorical situation. The informality appropriate in a newsy letter to a younger brother or sister is inappropriate in a letter applying for a scholarship grant. A term paper on the origins of mercantiism should be more formal than a review of a rock concert for the campus newspaper. But most college work neither permits total relaxation nor requires rigid formality. Stylistically, it belongs to that broad middle area represented by what we see regularly in current books and magazines.

The interaction of writer, subject, purpose, and audience should influence both choice of words and syntax— the way words, phrases, and clauses are shaped into sentences. Later SECTIONs will deal in some detail with these matters of style, as well as with paragraphs and paragraph sequences. Here we’ll merely sketch styles that can be called informal, formal, and general and examine some of their more obvious traits.

I. Informal

Once you’re off the campus this place is no big deal. Pretty horrible, actually. I guess you could say that the U is honcho here like Giant Electric is there, but the difference is that here the kids are just passing through and paying their dues. So nobody really gives much of a damn about University City except to get out of it. And that’s the way it looks.

II. Formal

Westend, a city of medium size in the northeastern corner of the state, differs from University City in a number of significant respects. Although each city is dominated by a single institution— the one industrial, the other educational — the, two societies are quite unlike. The great majority of the residents of Westend are permanent: they hold steady jobs at Giant Electric Corporation; they own their own homes; and they look forward to eventual retirement in Westend or its environs. By contrast, the great majority of the residents of University City are temporary: they hold part-time jobs, if any; they rent their living quarters, whether dormitory rooms, apartments, or houses; and they de part as soon as they have received their degrees. These marked differences in the life-styles and attitudes of the populations are reflected in both the physical environment and the ambience of each city.

Ill. General

Westend, the city I grew up in, is a stable sort of a place com pared to University City. Most of the people work in the Giant Electric plant. They start young, and they stick with it till they qualify for their pensions. Unlike University students, who keep their suitcases under their beds, Westenders put down roots. Residential neighborhoods in Westend give an impression of neatness and self-respect, while here off-campus housing is likely to be rundown and dirty.

The first passage might appear in a letter from a student to a hometown friend. Because both know Westend well, the writer can tell the reader a lot about University City by simply suggesting the comparison; there’s no need to say what Westenders do instead of “pass through.” The style is casual, with some of the flavor of easy talk. The word choice and phrasing — “actually,” “really,” “honcho,” “no big deal,” “pretty horrible,” “paying their dues,” “like Giant Electric is,” “giving much of a damn”—contribute to a dominant impression of informality. So does the syntax, particularly the fragmentary second sentence and the loose-jointed second last sentence, which won’t stand up to logical analysis. The writer hasn’t gone to any special effort. The reader will catch the writer’s tone of voice and get the drift of what’s said, and that’s enough.

In contrast, the second passage gives the impression that the writer has done a good deal of preliminary planning and then worked over the sentences carefully. The style is about as formal as undergraduate writing ever should be—suitable, perhaps, for a term paper in one of the social sciences. Word choice and phrasing—”eventual,” “environs,” “depart,” “ambience,” “a number of significant respects,” “dominated by a single institution,” “the one industrial, the other educational” — are characteristic of written rather than spoken English. The arrangement of words in the sentence — especially the placing of modifiers and the use of parallel structures — and even the punctuation marks all help point up logical relationships. The distance between writer and reader is much greater than in the informal passage. Although the audience of the second would probably know as much about University City as the audience of the first would know about Westend, the writer of the formal passage has taken no shortcuts. The contrast is balanced throughout.

In the third passage neither word choice nor phrasing nor sentence structure calls attention to itself. If we ex amine the vocabulary, we find it more precise than in the first passage (“stable,” “residential neighborhoods,” “neatness and self-respect”), less bookish than in the second (“sort of a place,” “there’s,” “stick with it”). Similarly, the sentences are more carefully constructed than in the letter home, less obviously arranged than in the term paper. (As a metaphor for transience, keeping the suitcase under the bed might be said to counterbalance the well- worn putting down roots for permanence, but the reader gets no impression that the pairing was planned.) It’s a kind of straightforward, readable style that we call general, a kind you’ll find most useful in the writing you do both in and out of college.

In identifying styles as informal, formal, or general, we go by dominant impressions. In fact, general styles aren’t sharply separate from the other two types. When writing in a general style, you can borrow the contractions of informal—you’ll, she’s, can’t, and so on—and when you need them, you can take words from the scholarly vocabulary of formal. Thus a style can lean to either formal or informal while remaining predominantly general. As a college student you’ll have few occasions to write in an informal style, except in your diary or journal and in your personal correspondence. In term papers, research reports, and critical essays, you’ll probably be expected to write toward the formal end of your range. In most of your writing a general style will be appropriate.

In choosing a style for college work, students are most likely to err in the direction of formality and produce a stilted, stuffy prose that has no particular relationship to subject or audience or writer. But a general style can be poorly handled, too. The many options it offers are of no advantage if you don’t know what they are or how to choose among them. Guiding you toward making the right choices is one major purpose of this book. The most important thing to keep in mind is that the stylistic choices you make should be appropriate to the rhetorical situation, which is created by the interaction of your purpose in writing, your subject, your audience, and yourself.

For further discussion of informal, formal, and general English, see SECTION Nine.

• For Writing

In a letter to a close friend who doesn’t attend your college, describe a current campus fad. Then write an account of the same fad for a national magazine whose readers are mainly college graduates in their thirties, forties, and fifties. For each paper, consider what role you want to play. Are you writing as a participant in the fad or as an observer of it? Are you defending it, attacking it, or simply reporting it? The two papers should probably differ somewhat in content and should certainly differ in style.

Revising and Editing

Even with the most thorough prewriting, a paper should go through several drafts. Good writing is rewritten writing. Rework your papers — and the emphasis is on work — until you’re satisfied that the content, organization, and style represent the best you can do with the topic in the time you have and until you’ve said what you want to say to your audience in the way you want to say it.

In the final stage of composition, get outside your paper. Look at it from the perspective of a critical reader. Try to be objective about your work. That usually calls for letting a day or two pass before writing the last draft and doing the final revision.

Taking a fresh look at what you’ve written may persuade you to make substantial changes in content. A new idea may hit you. For the first time you may see that dropping paragraph 5 and merging paragraphs 4 and 6 will make the organization tighter and more economical. But if you’ve given enough thought to composing and if you’ve gone through enough drafts to produce a version that satisfies you, most of the job of revising will consist of reworking sentences. Slash unnecessary phrases, the ones you wrote just to get your thinking started or just to fill up space. Pare and prune. Try to pack more meaning into fewer words.

As you give your paper this last revision, read it aloud once or twice. Your ear will catch some weaknesses that your eye has missed. A shapeless sentence will betray itself by making you stumble over it. You’ll hear clichés and flabby phrases that will make you wince. Even errors in spelling and punctuation sometimes call attention to themselves if you’re listening hard. Keep your dictionary open. Check anything that raises doubt in your mind.

Finally, type a clean draft, following the manuscript form your instructor prescribes. Before submitting the paper, give it a careful proofreading to get rid of typing errors.

A Checklist

Before you’ve established your own habits of composing and developed skill in sizing up the requirements of an assignment, you may find it helpful to have a list of steps to follow in producing a paper. Any division of the writing process into steps is bound to be somewhat artificial and arbitrary, but for most college writing you’re likely to go through the stages summarized here. Depending on the method of composing that turns out to be best for you, prewriting may merge into writing as early as the first step or as late as the fifth.

1. Focusing on a subject, locating a topic in the subject, and phrasing a tentative statement of purpose or a thesis statement.

2. Gathering material—from memory or reflection, or from reading or study— sifting it, and evaluating it.

3. Choosing ways of developing the material (and in the process generating material).

4. Organizing the material, using an outline or some other method to map out the structure of the paper.

5. Writing drafts of the paper, rewriting until the thought comes clear within a sound structure, in a style that fits the rhetorical situation. (During this stage be prepared to reconsider all the decisions you’ve made up to this point.)

6. Revising and editing the paper—deleting, adding, re wording to make the meaning clearer and the style smoother, correcting errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

7. Preparing and proofreading the manuscript — following prescribed form and correcting all copying errors.

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