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.
Planning for Paragraphs
A paragraph is a visual cue for readers. The indentation at the beginning, like the capital letter at the start of a sentence, signals your reader that a new thought unit is about to begin. Just as sentences gather words and phrases into units of meaning, these sentences are gathered into paragraphs. The paragraphs, in turn, may be gathered into major subdivisions.
Read more ...Grammar for Writing
It's helpful to think of grammar and mechanics as matters of convention or mutual agreement among language users. Such agreement is necessary for language to work. To communicate with even the simplest words, for example, we must agree on their meaning. Conventions of grammar come partly from tradition and partly from a need to be clear and accurate. And like other conventions, rules of grammar change continually.
Read more ...Global and Local Perspectives
Revision means "re-seeing." Strong revisers develop a "critical zoom lens" that allows them to shift perspective from broad overview to minute detail, and to see how these levels of composition relate. To revise well, then, you must become a perceptive and imaginative reader of your own work, a reader who can anticipate another reader's response and see new ways the writing might evolve.
Read more ...Creative Rambling
As writers, we're often advised to "stick to the topic" and "get to the point." This is usually good advice, but not always. Sometimes it leads to writing that's shallow and one-dimensional, as though the writer had prematurely closed down the process of inquiry, just to produce something neat and tidy with no madwoman in the attic.
Read more ...Outside Sources
Unlike the other discovery techniques, which mostly call on your internal powers of observation and imagination, this one emphasizes investigation and research. However vast your store of information and however well you can express your ideas, you'll often need to extend your knowledge by drawing on the experience and expertise of others.
Read more ...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.
Read more ...Develop Your Paragraphs
Your topic sentences indicate the major support areas for your thesis, and the guide sentences show how you can develop each paragraph. Still, your paper is far from complete. While you've opened up your main idea to expose its parts, you have yet to get down to giving the specifics, the precise details that will help your reader feel the full weight of your thought. You must show the foundation of specific evidence that your general ideas are built upon. The following suggestions for paragraph development will help you coax forth details that will make your writing solid and substantial.
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