Paradigm Online Writing Assistant - Paradigm Online Writing Assistant

Start Writing

There is no single best way to begin a writing project. What's best is what gets you going and builds momentum for the journey ahead. You may want to start right in on a draft or do some pre-planning.

Often, simply Choosing a Subject can be a challenge. You could start Freewriting to locate your subject and generate ideas. Or you might prefer to first gather information from Outside Sources, or to brainstorm using The Journalists' Questions.

Whether you're writing an informal essay, a technical report, or the next great American novel, the suggestions in Discovering What to Write will help you get going.

Write Strong Sentences

Effective sentences are vital to your writing. They are fundamental carriers and shapers of meaning—the pulse of style. If you want to work on your sentences, try the following Paradigm sections: Basic Sentence Concepts, Expanding the Basic Pattern, Six Problem Areas, Designing Effective Sentences.

For help with punctuation, try Basic Punctuation.

Arranging and Ordering

Unlike pyramid charts and cluster maps, which can show complex organizational relationships in a single glance, your writing itself is sequential. Readers don't encounter your ideas all at once but one after another.

The Editing Process

Producing a clean, error-free final draft isn't easy. Even the most carefully edited professional publications contain occasional typos. Most readers understand this and aren't bothered by such infrequent problems. Yet when errors occur often, they undermine the writer's authority and disrupt communication.

Creating Emphasis

If writing is like making a movie, emphasis could be compared to a photographer's zoom lens, moving in for a close-up one moment and back for a wide-angle shot the next. Emphasis allows you to create similar special effects by magnifying, reducing, or even eliminating certain details. By controlling emphasis, you can focus your readers' attention on what is most important.

Following a Metaphor

A metaphor makes a comparison, and in doing so shapes our perception. If we say, "Time is a river," we're noting a certain similarity between the two. Yet we know they aren't identical. We may mean that time is fluid, has currents and eddies, empties into some vast ocean, but not that it's composed of water. If we say, "Time is a stone," we may mean it's silent, still, indifferent, but not that it's a mineral.

Occasions for Exploratory Essays

The exact nature of an exploratory essay can't be known in advance. It emerges gradually from decisions and discoveries made along the way. Individual writers go in different directions, depending on their interests and their specific writing contexts.

Occasions for Argumentative Essays

Argumentation is everywhere—in congress and courtrooms, in corporate board rooms, at garden club meetings, and in millions of essays, reports, theses, and dissertations written at colleges and universities throughout the world.

Revising your Thesis

One major purpose of the thesis is to predict what will follow. It does this for both writer and reader. It provides the writer with purpose and direction throughout the composing process. For the reader it creates expectations about the form and content of what's to come, and the reader's satisfaction with the final essay will depend largely upon whether these expectations have been satisfied.