WRITING PROCESS: TOPIC SELECTION INTRODUCTION TO WRITING PROCESS
Why is it necessary to evaluate the process of writing?
Differing Purposes of High School and College
College may look and feel similar to high school, and, for the most part, you already know how to perform your student role within this setting. However, there are some fundamental differences. The most obvious ones are that high school is mandatory (to a certain point), freely available, and a legal right. They have to offer you the opportunity, regardless of your grades. College, on the other hand, is optional, costly, and performance-based. Most institutions will dismiss you if your grades don’t meet a certain minimum. But college is different in more subtle ways as well, including ways in which you’re expected to behave as an independent thinker and learner.
Students drive their own learning
The assumption behind high-school instruction is that the teacher is the engine of learning. Consequently, a lot of time is spent in direct face-to-face instruction. Homework is for further practice to reinforce material from that day. Teachers will often tell students what each night’s homework assignment is, follow up on missing work, and closely track students’ progress. The assumption behind college instruction, in contrast, is that students are the engine of learning, and that most of the significant learning happens outside of class while students are working through a dense reading or other challenging intellectual task on their own. Most college classes meet only 1-3 times a week for a total of about 3 hours. Consequently, college instructors think of class meetings as an opportunity to prepare you for the heavy-lifting that you’ll be doing on your own. Sometimes that involves direct instruction (how to solve a particular kind of problem or analyze a particular kind of text). More often, though, professors want to provide you with material not contained in the reading or facilitate active learning experiences based on what you read. The assumption is that all students have the skill and self motivation to carefully read all the assigned texts. Professors lay out a path for learning—much like how personal trainers develop exercise routines—but it is up to students (and athletes) to do the difficult work themselves.
The Writing Process
This amount of work devoted to mastering a writing project can seem daunting, at first. Break it into smaller tasks, following the stages of the Writing Process, makes it a lot more manageable, and even enjoyable. The
stages in the writing process includes
: Prewriting, Drafting, proofreading, revision, and editing.
Prewriting Stage( includes freewriting, clustering, brainstorming, listening, questioning, dialoguing)
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CHOOSING AND DEVELOPING TOPICS
The following video demonstrates the process of selecting and refining a research process. (Notice that this video also makes use of a metaphor to describe this process!) Watch this video online:
· This video was produced for elementary school teachers, which means that its target audience doesn’t include you, a college writer. However, it still offers valuable insight into the relationship between prewriting and learning styles, and how to harness your own learning style to use the most effective prewriting strategy for your personal needs. Watch this video online:
Techniques and strategies to Prewriting
• using free mental associations that might eventually lead to written notes or outlines • creating a personal inventory of interests and fascinations, likes and dislikes • conducting online or print catalog searches using keywords and questions • using the inductive or deductive reasoning process to identify a manageable topic • reading a text that addresses a similar topic; perhaps reading the table of contents, index, and chapter headings and subheadings to gain insight on the topic • creating a uniform set of questions to be answered about a topic (e.g. the “five Ws and an H” model: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?) • writing handwritten notes—organized or disorganized—on a note card, on paper, or in electronic form • writing a preliminary outline—formal or informal—about the intended topic and subtopics • creating a graphic organization of ideas (e.g. Venn diagram or circle clusters) • writing a draft of the thesis or hypothesis with an outline of key supporting details • creating a very rough draft of the opening paragraph that includes a topical overview 9
Drafting( begin writing on the topic)
Thesis Statement Basics
The following video offers a writing instructor’s perspective about how fundamental a thesis statement is to organizing an effective persuasive, researched essay. While he talks about many aspects of a thesis, it particularly stresses the flexibility you’re allowed while writing, revising, and revisiting a thesis many times as you build an essay. Watch this video online:
INTRODUCTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS
A key piece of advice many writers either do not ever get or don’t believe is that it’s not necessary to write introductions first or to write conclusions last. Just because the introduction appears first and the conclusion appears last doesn’t mean they have to be written that way. Here’s a really tired metaphor to help explain: just because you walk into a building through the door doesn’t mean the door was built first. The foundation went in first, even though you rarely if ever see that part. And lots of imperfections in the foundation and the walls were covered up before you even moved in, so you can’t see those either unless you look closely. Introductions Even though a nearly infinite number of topics and arrangements is possible in English prose, introductions generally follow one of several patterns. If you’re writing a children’s story, you’d probably start with “once upon a time” or something similar. If you’re writing a research article in biomechanical engineering, you’d probably start with a statement about how previous research has examined the problem of loading soldiers with daypacks on various surfaces, including sand, concrete, and railroad ballast. These examples are poles apart, but their introductions share very similar purposes: they orient their imagined readers to the topic, time, and place. In working toward the overall goal of orienting readers, introductions may • Provide background about a topic. • Locate readers in a specific time and/or place. • Start with a compelling quotation or statistic—something concrete. • Include an ethical appeal, with which you (explicitly or implicitly) show that you’ve done your homework and are credible. • Articulate a main claim/thesis. • Lay out the stakes for the piece of writing—that is, why the reader should bother reading on. The following video addresses how to do several of these things, starting with the very first sentence of your introduction. Watch this video online:
Conclusions
Conclusions usually • Summarize the argument (especially in longer pieces of writing) • “Bookend” a story that started in the introduction • Include an emotional appeal, with which you (explicitly or implicitly) connect the “logic” of the argument to a more passionate reason intended to sway the reader • Issue a call to action Ideally, a conclusion will work in tandem with an introduction, having some kind of “call back” element to remind your reader of the powerful opening you provided.
Additional advice for conclusions is found in the following video. Watch this video online:
Just as the line between “organizing” and “drafting” can be blurry, so to can the line between “first draft,” “second draft,” “final draft.” There’s often no hard stop between multiple versions of an essay, but rather a continual rolling improvement process. That’s why the term working draft is much more useful than numbering a specific draft. It gives the sense that it’s always in process, which is true.
The following video demonstrates moving an essay project from outline, to first draft, to a more polished draft. Watch this video online:
A Three-Step Revision Process The following video recommends writing 3 additional drafts (yes, after your first and working drafts are already done!) to fully revise an essay. The final stage recommended here conforms to the Proofreading stage of the process, so it’s a way of completing multiple steps at the same time, as noted above. Watch this video online:
